Hey, nobody asked for martyrdom.

I should finish up Ariosto today, and hope to get started on Fielding with you this evening. We'll see if I can catch up! Read slow!

Septuagesima Sunday By the traditional Catholic calendar, today is Septuagesima Sunday, or the seventieth Sunday before Easter, by the same liturgical arithmetic that makes next Sunday to be sixty days before Easter, and Lent to be forty days long if you squint slightly and hold your breath. :D In some masses, the Alleluia and Gloria disappear and liturgical violet appears. For all of us, this is a good time to firm up our plans for Lent. If one plans to follow the traditional fast, it's a good time to start cutting back - maybe this is the week to end sweets and snacks. Maybe that extra cost can go to the poor. Now is a good time to get to confession, before the lines get long. I keep intending to make a nightly examination of conscience, but instead fall into bed and go right to sleep - I think this is the week to get serious and set aside a firm time for it. What about all those lovely New Year's resolutions - what happened to that daily rosary, Violet? Septuagesima welcomes us back to our good intentions. Are we giving up the internet for Lent? Shall we start with a time limit now, or by cutting out certain sites? (Not this thread, of course! :) ) What's been coming out of our mouths, or off of our keyboards, recently - who needs to be apologized to? Time to warm up and do some stretches. Let's dust off the lamps and find the oil can.

You can't go wrong with the D'Aulaires. I'd pick up their Norse Myths too.

Yes, in fact James Baldwin himself wrote a children's version of Roland. http://www.mainlesson.com/displayauthor.php?author=baldwin

The best older (late elementary) children's versions for us of The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid, and most of the Greek myths are the timeless Alfred Church versions. All of Church's books are now available for free on Google Books and/or The Baldwin Project. The best younger children's (illustrated) versions we've found have been the old Golden Press editions: The Iliad and Odyssey, and the Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends (which includes Beowulf), both lavishly illustrated by the immortal Provensens. Fans also of Bryson's Gilgamesh. And Marshall's Beowulf, likewise free from the Baldwin Project.

Upper Crust, Austin, Texas.

With Middle Girl, I am using Wardhaugh's Understanding English Grammar. I read a section each week, think about how to teach the material at a late elementary level, and give the lesson the next day. I actually use an old A Beka grammar text just to mine the exercises - I don't teach the lessons from it. I do this because there aren't any materials for grade school level that teach English grammar from a linguistic understanding. ETA: Other aspects of English: Analysis and composition - Galore Park Junior English (thanks, Laura) and Scribner School Editions (right now working through the poetry book). I also occasionally mine Intermediate Language Lessons for writing assignment ideas. Vocabulary & spelling - Word Wealth Jr., which literally makes Middle Girl squeal with delight when I pull it out.

Do not avoid the dilemma by giving it as an ostensible Christmas gift to some hapless family member who has expressed no interest in it, then ask about it occasionally every year or so, then go ballistic when you suspect that they may have gotten rid of it (which you learned from grilling one of their children) and tell them you want it back if they don't want it because you put so much work into it. Even though it was really just in their attic because they hated it, had no room for it, but knew there would be h*ll to pay if they couldn't look you in the eye and say they still had it. Oh, sorry. What was the question?

Right, here is dmmetler's prize: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/may/05/vonnegut_lawyers_could/

You have to have some sort of prize for the first Vonnegut reference.

We do Latin because I see it as part of their cultural inheritance to which they are entitled. Related to that, it's the language we worship in, and the girls learn Latin prayers from an early age. So it was a no-brainer.

People around here drink out of them because we're self-conscious urban lefties who want to look like real Texans. Same reason you see Greenpeace stickers on pickup trucks. At least that's my theory.

You got in there just ahead of me. Though I'm not sure I hate the boarding school idea. Certain days.

Well, if that compelling interest is compelling enough, why not? You wouldn't even have to tell people where to live - just regulate development to ensure mixed-income housing. Then we'd need to outlaw private tutoring, even by parents. Except, apparently, religious studies, which you get to have because that way we can ban religious schools with a clear constitutional conscience. Further, I think if you have too much education (clearly acquired unjustly under the old system of education), you will need to equalize your time between your own children and the children of less educated parents. And if you buy a book for your child, you need to get a copy for every other child in the neighborhood. Isn't this fun? I could be a law school dean!

Prayers, and my best advice is to find a ministry at the parish you'll be in and get as involved as you can. St. Vincent de Paul, Altar Guild, even just pitching in to clean the church on Saturday mornings. It's harder to leave a community when you haven't yet gotten your feet under you in the new one.

But I gathered that Dean Chemerinsky would expect this to come via the courts, not the legislators. Employment Division v. Smith, which he cites as a keystone for his proposal, was hugely unpopular with politicians on both sides of the aisle - but it's still controlling law on the free exercise of religion.

Oh, you're certainly right, but my dudgeon needs exercising. Anyway, I'll bet Dean Chemerinsky's new improved American schools would have nothing near the Soviet level of math education.

One of his many questionable assumptions is that the rich escape bad public schools by private or (snicker) homeschooling. In this city, homeschooling and most private schooling is middle class - the wealthy live in the part of town with the fabulous public schools, and send their kids there, where we proles couldn't possibly afford to live.

Very good! My grandmother had a lovely autoplayer, and those super-thick old records would fall with a satisfying smack. Once when I commented on her giant stereo, she told me that, as a girl, she used to marvel over the old cylinder recordings in her mother's storage closet. Now that's old school.

Here's the article: http://www.wcl.american.edu/journal/lawrev/52/chemerinskyessay.pdf It's a couple years old, but apparently Dean Chemerinsky recently gave a talk restating his proposal. It's hard to know even where to start with the wrongheadedness of all this, but I find myself thinking about Compelling Interest Inflation. ---------------------------------------- My proposal is simple, although unrealistic at this point in American history. First, every child must attend public school through high school. There will be no private schools, no parochial schools, and no home schooling. Second, metropolitan school districts will be created for every metropolitan area. In each metropolitan area, there will be equal funding among the schools, except where educational needs dictate otherwise, and efforts will be taken to ensure desegregation. Third, states will ensure equality of spending among metropolitan school districts within their borders. How could this happen? One possibility would be through the Supreme Court, though of course not with the current Court. The Supreme Court could find that the existing separate and unequal schools deny equal protection for their students, and order the creation of a unitary system as a remedy. Another way to achieve a truly unitary system is by legislative action. Congress could adopt a law to achieve these goals or state legislatures could do so within the states’ borders. I do not minimize the radical nature of this proposal, but this may be the only way that equal educational opportunity can be achieved. If wealthy parents must send their children to public schools, then they will ensure adequate funding of those schools. Currently, they have no incentive to care about funding in public schools as long as their children are in private or suburban schools. Moreover, as described above, desegregation can be meaningfully achieved only through metropolitan school systems, which include suburbs and cities, because white students could not flee to private schools. The most significant objection to this proposal is that it is unconstitutional under current law. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court held that parents have a fundamental right to send their children to parochial schools. The Court based this on the right of parents to control the upbringing of their children. This right, however, like other fundamental rights, is not absolute. I would argue that strict scrutiny is met and therefore interference with the parents’ right to control the upbringing of their children is justified. There is a compelling interest in achieving equality of educational opportunity and the means are necessary because no other alternative is likely to succeed. Parents desiring religious education for their children would claim a violation of their free exercise of religion. Of course, under the Supreme Court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith, such a neutral law of general applicability would not violate the free exercise clause. Also, as explained above, strict scrutiny would be met by the proposal. I do not minimize the interests of parents in providing religious instruction for their children. Parents, however, could still do this through after-school and weekend programs. This is not the same as education where religion permeates instruction, but it does provide a way in which parents can provide religious education for their children. Perhaps the Court would need to reconsider Wisconsin v. Yoder as well, to the extent that it is read as creating a right of parents to isolate their children from the influences of public education. In Yoder, the Court held that Amish parents had the right to exempt their fourteen- and fifteen-year-old children from compulsory school requirements so as to preserve the special Amish culture. Read broadly, parents could invoke Yoder to justify a right to home schooling if parents wanted to insulate their children from the influences of public education. Simply put, the courts should hold that the compelling need for equal schooling outweighs this parental right.

Sorry to have missed the first few weeks. My first book of the year, and apparently the only one I'll finish in January: 1. Balzac, Père Goriot. He went to dress, full of the most gloomy and depressing reflections. He saw society as an ocean of mire into which one only had to dip a toe to be buried in it up to the neck. 'The only crimes committed there are petty ones!' he said to himself. 'Vautrin was a bigger man than that.' He had seen the three major manifestations of society: Obedience, Struggle, and Revolt; Family, the World, and Vautrin, and he was afraid to choose. ----------------------- Currently reading volume 2 of Orlando Furioso. Even wilder than the first half, with a trip to the moon, to the terrestrial paradise, and to hell, which last is chiefly inhabited by women who have spurned the men who loved them - what greater crime? ETA: Jane in NC - I swear I'll get on board the Fielding train, if we can just stop having family crises around here.

Late Sixties here, and I recognized it. Alas our turntable finally died, but not before we transferred the vinyl we wanted to keep onto discs. Now nmoira will tell me why the lovely old opera recording I sold last year had side 8 on the back of side 1. :)

This may be way out there as a suggestion, but dh taught the girls fractions early on as slope. The portable graphing whiteboards sold by Rainbow Resource are useful for this. Somehow, seeing that (2,1), (4,2), (-4,-2), etc. were all on the same line made a lot of what they were learning in Key To Fractions make a lot of sense. We also followed the iron rule in our arithmetic work of writing (rewriting if necessary) all division problems as fractions, so that they internalized the fraction bar as meaning "divided by." YMMV.