Late late late. Sorry, got caught up on the K-8 board. This week I finished Twain & Warner's The Gilded Age, a social satire of political corruption and speculation fever of the post-Civil War period. Next on our US History reading list: Frank Norris's The Octopus. Meanwhile I took a break for Melville's much-reviled AP English classic novella Billy Budd. Very different reading from high school! In my head it was being directed by John Waters. The homoeroticism is not nearly so beneath the surface as I'd remembered; I read passages out loud to dh and he was shushing me when one of the girls came near. He and I were clearly just blithely innocent in high school, for all our worldy knowledge gleaned from The Village People in the '70s. Now I'm following up with a Jean Genet chaser, Querelle of Brest, which is like Billy Budd if innocent, angelic Billy was a street-savvy homicidal (but still devastatingly handsome) demon of the docks. ETA: Adult content, btw, not that anyone is likely to accidentally put Genet in her Amazon cart.

Catholic Bibles use the Septuagint (Greek Bible used by Greek-speaking Jews at the time of the early Church), which has much more text in Daniel 3 preceding the verse 'Behold I see four men loose, and walking in the midst of the fire, and there is no hurt in them, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God,' including: The Catholic understanding, then, is that this angel is the fourth person in the furnace. @Patty Joanna, I didn't know that Orthodoxy positively teaches that the Angel of the Lord in this passage is the pre-incarnate Christ. I'm not aware of any positive Catholic teaching in that regard: as far as I know, we're free to understand the angel of Daniel in such a way, or not.

Agree with @kand. 3rd grade, especially in an emergency, doesn't need a separate science program. Mine just did general reading at that age, and science later. One did great on her science APs and loved science; another did great on her science APs and dislikes science. But at least they both learned science! Of the curricula you mention, the only one I've tried (twice -- I'm a slow learner) is BFSU. We used TOPS Science, which everyone enjoyed and retained, but all my science and engineering homeschooling friends swore by BFSU as the Best of the Best. Even with extensive prep and supplementary help, I could not understand the science well enough to teach it with BFSU, and we were all confused and frustrated. I'm not a dimwit, I think*, but I have no science background and it was just too difficult for me, even at lower levels. Never could make sense out of friction.... And it was back to TOPS, which seems to work well enough through primary and early secondary for my family. So fair warning: if you have a science background, BFSU is apparently the best; but if you don't, it may not be for you. *Someday there will be a thread on best poetry curricula and I will shine like a star.

Yeah that's what's killed off my leisure reading time. I just finished a loooong chapter on Teddy Roosevelt and the Panama Canal and now it's back to The Gilded Age.

I think that's true. Even active Catholics who are readers generally read devotional writings instead.

Did I just grow up around a lot of Baptists, Campbellites, and Pentecostals? They aren't reading for an hour in the sense of plowing through (though they're likely doing their Bible-in-a-year), they're reading it devotionally -- meditating, praying, discerning God's will for them. Lots of people in lots of cultures get in a daily hour total of prayer/meditation/devotional time; it's just in one culture it centers on reading.

I love noir and crime fiction and have dozens of them queued up for when I can get out from under the books I need to read for homeschooling -- so, about 2025, I think. *Snif* But I finished W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants for Middle Girl's high school English survey course. I didn't put this course together, didn't choose the books (though I loved the choices for the first 2/3 of the course), and have neither read nor heard of Sebald before this. It's a sort of pseudo-autobiographical-but-mostly-fictional collection of narratives, "documented" by photographs, purportedly exploring the lives of various German Jewish emigrants and their families. The first person narrator segues frequently and confusingly into first-person accounts of the people's lives, and it's all about the ephemeral nature and ultimate unreliability of memories, even memories "proved" by extrinsic evidence. It's very much like Nabokov for readers who need their symbolism unsubtle. (By the third appearance of a "butterfly catcher," I felt done.) In fact, Nabokov makes two appearances in the novel, in case we needed help with catching the "memories are unreliable" theme. In further fact, maybe just skip this and read some Nabokov. Now to finish Twain's and Whoever's The Gilded Age. Though somehow I have this overwhelming urge to re-read Melville's Billy Budd and Genet's Querelle of Brest.

+1000. I've been banging this drum for years. You don't have to look too far back to see that high school students and undergraduates used to be assigned more representative (and longer) works by the same writers. But now the standard novels have usually been replaced by novellas or even short stories, which are often less representative, as well as less accessible to young readers. Moby Dick --> Billy Budd David Copperfield --> A Christmas Carol The Portrait of a Lady --> The Turn of the Screw The Grapes of Wrath --> Of Mice and Men Lord Jim --> Heart of Darkness A Farewell to Arms --> The Old Man and the Sea The Brothers Karamazov --> Notes From the Underground A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man --> (selections from) Dubliners But it's not fake Russian, it's corrupted "nadsat" Russian. Russian terms have been introduced into colloquial English on the 1984-theory that changing the young people's language will influence their minds. But contrary to Orwell's theory, the Soviet propaganda fails for the same reason English cultural indoctrination fails, and Alex and his droogies win: they appropriate, corrupt, and pervert both the culturally worthwhile and the ersatz that the various political and social powers-that-be hope will conform the next generation to a preferred ideology.

Delicately put.

All right, if anybody wants to know why Billy Budd really shouldn't be taught in high school -- or, alternatively, if you want to read it as an adult -- re-read it now (it's shorter than you remember), and immediately read Jean Genet's Querelle of Brest. (Genet wrote Querelle shortly after someone gave him a copy of BB.) Genet picked out the underlying themes of BB very accurately, in my opinion.

No comment on particular books mentioned here (I'm sure Bill will be along soon to defend the honor of Moby Dick); just recalling my first day of freshman English seminar, and our actually-English English professor informing us that we wouldn't be reading any American literature in the year-long survey course, because there isn't any.

Yeats and Tennyson I'd expect, but I'm very impressed that you had to memorize Fergusson! When dh had a recurring job each spring term in Scotland, we used to visit the memorial to Fergusson when we went through Edinburgh. I'm also being careful to not accept compensation (just reimbursement for supplies, lunches, etc.), so pretty sure there's no way I can fall under unanticipated statutes or orders. Nothing to see here, just a friend staying over and doing a little math and violin.... A friend of Wee Girl's, from her chamber group. I anticipate some fun duets being assigned by their teachers!

So many! Last year was spent wallowing in the French Symbolists and English Decadents. Les Fleurs du Mal. In my callow youth, I couldn't get enough of A Shropshire Lad, and I still enjoy Housman. Stevie Smith. Robert Fergusson. Yeats and Tennyson, those old warhorses. Poor John Clare, whom nobody reads anymore.

Here you go.

I love Bunyan! Middle Girl recommends The Life and Death of Mr Badman, which she tells me is underrated. So many books....

That's really helpful and contextualizing -- thanks! I knew nothing about the Indian diaspora until I started homeschooling, and a mom-friend explained that she was Indian, but from Trinidad and Tobago. She was also one of the most English people I've ever met, in some ways more so than people I know who grew up in England. Kind of like the Boston Irish. Friends: I have to pull back from visiting TWTM for a while as I'm swamped with lesson planning and ordering (nothing like trying to get hold of extra hs'ing materials in late July) and figuring out the logistics of adding a child, starting this Monday. Where's the running-around-in-frenzied-circles emoticon gone anyway? But I did finish Nostromo at last. An oddly structured novel: hundreds of pages of character development and backstory that bounces back and forth between the present and the past, then a sudden leap past the climax and a hurried description of it from a minor character that leaves crucial questions unanswered, which are then resolved in a Conradian manner. I loved it. Conrad might have escaped The Fury, if not for Chinua Achebe's illiterate condemnation of Heart of Darkness. Wikipedia: To the guillotine! Back to required homeschool reading. Next up: Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age, and W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.

Welcome to Book a Week, @Dreamergal ! What a lovely life story. Do you have any opinions on V. S. Naipaul? Welcome back, @marbel !

We don't school year-round, but take a longer break in Nov-Dec when it's fit for human beings to go outside, and work hard over summer when it isn't. That said, there's one last "camp" (on-line) first week of August, then starting a more formal than usual academic year second week of August with child plus friend of child. Got to go organize....

Beautiful garden, @aggieamy! @Æthelthryth the Texan, besides the standbys of plumbago and lantana, we've had good luck with Mexican heather. And purple heart, which thrives on abuse. Of course nandina grows fine, but once you have it you'll never get rid of it.

Okay, I talked to Mom this morning, and told her it wouldn't show up on the 7th [ETA: I mean 8th] grade testing. Turns out even the 7th grade STAAR doesn't cover the Texas history. What clinched it was mentioning Ancient History; turns out her ISD hasn't yet done any world history, and she's been unimpressed. So we're good!

The curriculum requirements are from the Leeper case, of course, and are almost universally misunderstood by Texas homeschoolers. The two important points: 1. The 3-Rs-plus-Good-Citizenship language was not the Texas Supreme Court announcing what curriculum should be followed by homeschoolers. The Court found that, when the compulsory education law was enacted in 1915, it wasn't meant to outlaw homeschooling, but that homeschools were considered private schools. (Going by memory here; too lazy to look up Leeper for verbatim.) As part of that finding, the Court found that these were the statutory requirements for schools in Texas in 1915, and therefore remained the only requirements for private schools. On my reading, it was the Court inviting the Texas Legislature to revisit the statute and beef up the curriculum requirements, by pointing out how minimal they were. But the Lege of course did no such thing. So there we are. 2. Even those minimal requirements are meaningless, as the SC didn't provide for any agency to have oversight of homeschoolers. The TEA has grudgingly admitted that nobody has the authority to require homeschoolers to cough up their curriculum. The only exception to this (and it's a significant one) is Family Court judges, who can require homeschoolers to hand over their curriculum and any other thing that pleases the judge, in order to determine the best interests of the child. As far as I can tell, we homeschoolers don't even need to tell anyone who asks that we have a curriculum at all. (An attorney on this board helpfully christened this the "pound sand" interpretation of Leeper.) ETA: I'm not a lawyer and none of the above should be taken as legal advice.

Diligentia, Benignitas, Caritas ? Or Diligentia, Benignitate, Caritate ("With diligence, kindness, and love"). "Industria" seems fine, too.

It would indeed be tempting to cover Texas history this year with Friend of WG if we hadn't covered it last year, from the Narvaez Expedition to the "Drouth" of the 1950s. And if all the field trip destinations weren't now closed. And if I hadn't already planned and prepared this year's Ancient History, Mostly Rome curriculum. 🙂 Really I just need to reassure anxious Mom it's not actually required in any sense. The STAAR standards link should help; thanks Ælthryth!

John Henry Newman, 1868: tl, dr: Put away that novel. It's fluff, and it's rotting your brain.

Exactly. First it's Fluff; then it's Retro; then it's Vintage; then it's Literature.