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Ella Frances Lynch thread #2


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Sure -- the author's name is Rev. S. M. (Stephen Mathias) Stephenson. He was from Hungary, and taught at the Pontifical Academy Josephinum in Ohio.

 

The anthology is called "Stylistic," and was published in 1939. It's a large hardcover book with a dark blue cover.

 

The grammar book has a really long title that I can't bring myself to type out right now, but it's (partially!) listed on Amazon, even though they don't have any copies at the moment.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Brevissima-integra-usum-loquendi-emendatissimis/dp/B00088ZKPO/

 

My copy of the grammar is kind of odd. It's spiral-bound and appears to have been typed by hand, but it also contains some loose sheets with the same material, in the same typeface as "Stylistic." I'm guessing those are proofs from a published edition. The bound pages were obviously used, and have a lot of underlining and notes from the previous owner (whose name I can't recall). That's part of the reason I've been putting off scanning it. If someone has access to a library copy, it might be an improvement. I just looked at Worldcat and they show 4 copies in typically random locations.

 

http://www.worldcat.org/title/brevissima-ac-integra-ad-usum-loquendi-grammatica-latina-omnium-regularum-additis-eclogis-emendatissimis-ex-scriptis-temporum-omnium-a-practical-latin-grammar-being-a-brief-yet-complete-exposition-of-the-rules-which-govern-the-latin-language-together-with-a-critical-anthology-covering-the-whole-field-of-latin-literature/oclc/13368871&referer=brief_results

 

Going by the title, though, this looks like the grammar and anthology combined. Ours are separate books. Curiouser and curiouser.

 

There's also a very brief description in Fr. Kobler's "Bibliography of Spoken Latin," which is available online.

 

https://eric.ed.gov/?q=kobler&id=ED013565

 

Google Books turns up a reference in the Classical Folia journal from the 1950s, but I can't access that one.

 

Both Fr. Kobler's bibliography and the Classical Folia article say that Fr. Stephenson's approach was similar to that of his fellow Hungarian, Arcadius Avellanus. I looked into Avellanus a while ago. All I can remember is that his materials were secular, he wrote a lot in Latin himself, and he still has a bit of a following today.

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Very interesting, thanks. I hate it when useful things are truly rare! I wish there was a process for requesting specific books to receive priority for scanning and uploading. Things I view on Google Books seem to favor a few major libraries, so while it's a godsend, it ultimately doesn't take you too far off the beaten path.

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  • 5 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Very sorry to hear about your father, ltlmrs. Will say a prayer for the repose of his soul.

 

Congratulations on your new bundle! Thanks for the links; I'll check them out.

 

I'm in full-on "elderly grand multipara" mode over here. No sign of major complications, but a heap of supposedly minor ones that are seriously limiting what I can do. Difficulty sleeping (and thus thinking), eating many things, lifting, bending, moving quickly, sitting, standing, etc. All very normal, apparently, LOL.

 

The best plan seemed to be to put the children in a bunch of afternoon classes for PE and the arts, and only require minimal schoolwork, along with their necessarily increased chore loads. It's working out okay, though driving while sleep-deprived is no fun (thank goodness all the classes are nearby). On the up side, the time seems to be going by very quickly. I hope to get us back on a strong language and literature path in the fall.

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  • 2 months later...

Aaaaagh!

 

Have been trying to come up with a system that works with our current situation (newborn through 8th grade), and it's not going well. I think I must have ended up with more children than functioning brain cells.

 

Math and Latin are supposed to be done independently for now. DH has taken over checking the older ones' math. IDK what's going on with their Latin... probably best not to think about right now!

 

I'm getting a sense that we might do best with some sort of block schedule where everyone is working on the same overall subject (for say 30 minutes), with individual recitations/tutoring tucked in there. Little folks could recite first, then go play a relevant game (or similar) at an adjacent table, possibly with older ones taking turns watching them. I need a very minimalist plan for this, especially stuff-wise, as I'm having to keep everyone in a fairly small space in order to keep tabs on them all.

 

Thoughts would be appreciated, and if you can point me to any old threads where I tried to figure this sort of thing out, that might help too. When stressed and sleep-deprived, I seem to specialize in reinventing the wheel, only more lopsided each time. ;-)

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Playdoh. That's all I got at the moment. But it's keeping the toddler and 4yo occupied long enough for lessons with the big kids - of course, I only have two big kids, so I'm not having to keep as many folks busy for as long as you, ElizaG, and the novelty is surely going to wear off any day now... Congrats on your new baby! How wonderful!

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  • 4 weeks later...

Thanks, LC. The problem isn't so much that the little ones interrupt us during lessons, but more that I get so bogged down that I forget to hold those lessons in the first place. I wasn't anywhere near this muddled at this stage with previous newborns. But it does seem to be improving now that baby is sleeping for longer stretches. Probably just my age making me less resilient to physical stress (that was the story of the whole pregnancy, pretty much). On the up side, I have much more peace of mind than in the past. It's required a whole lot of babies and toddlers to get me to feeling experienced and nearly always confident, but whatever, I'll take it. :-)

 

After a few toddler incidents and much purloining of pencils, I've given up on keeping all of the necessities in sight, and dedicated a locking file drawer to hold my teaching supplies for our traditional style lessons. Now I just need to figure out what to put in it. I'm realizing that many of my current "essentials" really aren't, and would be better kept somewhere else.

 

BTW, did you ever get a planning and record-keeping system figured out?

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Oh, that problem, ElizaG! Yeah, I got nothing for you there. I've hit a similar issue, just four months late - somehow, weirdly, we cruised along really well for the first little bit after this baby was born (I can only assume that I didn't realize just how awful I was feeling during that pregnancy based on how energetic and wonderful I felt by contrast even in the immediate postpartum period), and now something - changing weather bringing the kids inside more? normal part of our bust-and-boom cycle despite the fact that I thought our previous routine was sustainably modest in its ambitions? just having more, older kids and anticipating the EFL black hole that lies beyond age 10? the entropy of the house reaching unacceptable levels on the cobweb meter? - has driven me to putting on a nature show for the kids and coming here. 

 

When I was discussing the State of our Household with my husband recently, he suggested keeping a time log, which I did for a few days. The good news is that I'm not actually as slothful as I might have guessed, and the bad news is there actually is no extra time to repurpose. Hence, the nature show, temporary escapist retreat to the internet, and frantic reserving of library books on home management (all previously read, of course) in the hopes of figuring how to work "smarter." Can I count it as some kind of progress that I'm not beating myself up about this too much because I know that it will pass?

 

I've been through a few iterations of planning and record keeping and I think the resolution is...don't do lessons that require more planning ahead than the night before. Just like EFL said. At least for the EFL-aged children, which is all I have still. (but have we linked this woman's blog here? I like some of her ideas and her DIY spirit. Also, I did make a big language arts scope and sequence spreadsheet a while back that I still might use in the future). Seriously, the thing that seems to be happening now is the abandoning of the last few extra-EFL things I was trying to squeeze in. 

 

One of which is any sort of organized approach to "content subjects." Because what happens is that I start to worry about getting through the fun little unit on the Age of Exploration or whatever that I planned and drop the observation lessons to do so, which is not actually what I want to be doing. I'm just going to read aloud and discuss books that seem interesting to me when I feel like it, try to get us out on a few field trips that seem worth the effort more often, provide "research journals" for the kids to document anything they want in (or not), and call it done. I'll revisit the issue when we hit the post-EFL years. I did buy a teacher planner this year which I set up kind of like Jennifer Mackintosh has here (I love color-coding, it turns out! and erasable pens!), and now, instead of planing things out ahead, I'm keeping notes of those type of content-y things as they happen. 

 

I am experimenting with formal Latin studies with the 9yo this year. Totally not necessary, but I'd had it in my head to start for real at 10 and if we mess around this year, I'm hoping to have a better sense of what to do when we start "for real" next year and feel less stressed about it. So, that's the one non-EFL thing I'd really like to hang on to this year. At first I was going to just use LLPSI. Then I decided to DIY it because doesn't that sound fun? And I wanted to incorporate at least some "real" Latin, somehow and reading Reggie Foster's book helped me visualize how this could happen. So I was patching stuff together with a copy of the Vulgate, Latin without Tears, LLSPI, and - wait for it - Montessori grammar materials.  :lol: And I think it was actually working pretty well, but obviously required a stupidly impossible amount of preparation from me. Still, a very worthwhile experiment that confirmed that I do want to keep working at this until I figure out something that works and preserves the element of real Latin, even if in very small amounts, from the beginning. Next, I might try having my son work through some canned program for grammar and then just read real Latin with me. If you do ever get around to scanning that Stephen Mathias Stephenson text, ElizaG, I would be VERY interested! I did a fairly cursory search for vintage interlinear Latin texts, which seem like they are going to be very helpful.

 

Because I decided to overdo the Latin, we went with Math Mammoth for the 9yo after all this year, which he is using pretty independently. The 6yo is having her turn learning Hiawatha. We are almost done, and the two littler ones have picked up a lot of it. I'm reading Evangeline aloud to all of them. Honestly, I'm not sure I'm ever going to get the hang of forcing poetry recitation with good elocution, etc. Husband has suggested organizing a poetry recitation event with friends to provide motivation. Maybe.

 

I've been pretty good about staying away from reading educational theory these days, but I have to report two lapses: The Crisis of Western Education by Christopher Dawson, which was really disappointing given some other works of his I have read and liked, and then Education at the Crossroads by Maritain, which, oh my goodness, the first half was quite good and was just what I think I was hoping Norms and Nobility was going to be, and the second half was a serious let down - a fairly standard argument for a Great Books-ish reform of collegiate education.

 

Hi, ltlmrs! We were just thinking of your lovely family when we travelled north for fall break recently. I've also contemplated that Learning Grammar through Writing book - I think my parents may have even had it in their homeschooling days, but I don't remember us actually using it.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just up to feed the baby. Was thinking about the way discouragement and boredom seem to go together, and push me toward either inaction or distraction. I’ve come to the realization that what I need most right now is perseverance. EFL uses that word a lot, but does she ever say how we can strengthen ours? I mean, we can obviously strengthen it just by practicing it, but that seems circular, since perseverance itself is the virtue that allows us to keep on exercising a particular virtue. LOL.

 

From the little I read earlier, St. Thomas considers perseverance to be a part of courage. This fits with the connection with discouragement.

 

As it happens, I’ve been thinking about fear in an EFL context for the last few months. Mainly just wondering if our anxiety-promoting modern environment is making it harder for us all to follow such deeply relational approaches to teaching and family life (due to the incompatibility of fear and love). So maybe this all fits together. Hmm.

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  • 1 month later...

:) Hi ltlmrs!  Happy new year!

 

Thanks for the update.  It sounds as if we're dealing with a lot of the same challenges as you are, though there's not much risk of my overdoing the younger children's lessons (due to a "fortunate lack of time," as Fr. Donnelly might say). 

 

There's a thread elsewhere on the boards about whether or not we've become better at homeschooling over the years.   This is relevant to our family, since on the surface, it seems to me that I'm doing a lot worse.   As I've been peeling away more and more of the spoon-feeding methods and mediocre media -- adults' as well as children's -- I wish I could say we're left with pure simplicity and quality of the EFL type, but that isn't really the case.  It's more of a mish-mosh, with some great bits and some dodgy ones, and not much apparent order. 

 

In that other thread, someone said that she evaluates her homeschooling by whether or not she'd be comfortable charging money to teach someone else's children the same way.   Put that way, I'm surely a miserable failure.  There isn't even anything to advertise, IYKWIM.   

 

Then there was another suggested line of thinking:  "Would I be willing to pay to have someone else teach my children the way I'm doing it?"  Looking at it that way, I realized that the answer was "yes," for the most part.  Given the options for outsourcing that really exist around here, it seems fairly likely that I'd choose to have the children spend their days in someone else's minimally structured but culturally enriched home environment, rather than in any given school.    In choosing a place, my criteria would have little to do with the other teacher-mother's ability to give lessons on particular subjects, or to use certain methods (even EFL-approved ones), and much to do with her personal qualities and the organization of the environment.  These latter areas are what I'm still mainly working on here, and while progress is slow, it helps to know that I'm focusing my energies in a logical place.

 

I haven't been reading much from EFL herself recently, but one of her articles led me to look up the meaning of "moral insanity."  I'm not sure if she even uses this specific term, but it turns up quite often in 19th century writings, and the concept seemed to be implicit in her advice.  A brief search revealed that present-day academics tend to find it confusing as I did.  So, down another rabbit hole I went, until it made sense.  This is the best article I've found, by the preacher Charles G. Finney:

 

[ETA:  Argh!  For some reason, I can't paste text.  Sorry.  It's a sermon on BibleHub.com, titled "Moral Insanity," and shouldn't be hard to find with a search.]

 

This all hit a bit close to home -- both in terms of my own failings, and in terms of the lack of fundamental Christian understanding in today's social thinking (even among many in the Church).  So I took a break, and read a few more Kathleen Norris e-books.  This seems to be working, once again.  :)

 

I especially liked "The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne," and would be interested in comparing KN's implicit homeschooling advice to EFL's.  Mrs. Burgoyne seems to be more of a hands-on and "fun mom," but now I'm wondering if perhaps I've been misreading EFL (as I've tended to do with Montessori).   Maybe EFL herself would have encouraged this sort of direction, if the mother had a bit of extra leisure, as Mrs. Burgoyne did -- and as we do today, with our mechanical servants.  Or maybe she wouldn't have.  My efforts do tend to bear more fruit when I add those sorts of things, in small measure, into the homeschool ecosystem. 

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Hi, ltlmrs and ElizaG! It's lovely to hear from you both and motivated me to do make a little report of things happening and pondered upon here.

 

I'm feeling a lot of peace at the moment about how things are going here, not because it's so great or anything, but perhaps because I think I've just finally, really and truly shed the idea that there's a perfect method out there to uncover and implement, something I've "known" for a long time, but my actions and mental state did not necessarily reflect. If education is the handing on of our culture to our children, it seems that it actually happens kind of automatically (although not mechanistically, as if replicating a cog), if you can keep certain influences and structures at bay. Children just are formed by whatever culture they grow up in, it doesn't take any special methods or techniques for that to happen. So that's the good news, and the bad news is...children just are formed by whatever culture they grow up in.  :laugh:

 

As a consequence of this, I'm spending a lot more time thinking about the specifics of our situation which doesn't lend itself as well to chatting about on the internet. Also five children seems to be my limit for finding much overlapping time and mental energy to string two coherent sentences together - I've had this post open on my screen for four days now. Eliza, how you keep up the pace of reading you seem to is a marvel to me - I try not to be jealous!

 

I'm still trying to figure out this recitation and elocution piece. I was going through old pictures recently and found a little video of our eldest at 2 or 3 reciting a little nursery rhyme with better expression than his current piece of poetry.  :glare: Some of this seems like it might be developmental - part of EFL's argument for all the epic poetry with little ones is precisely because they are not as interested in poetry as they get older - but I still want us to be working on good habits of oral expression, I'm just having a hard time imagining what this would look like, I guess. The two older children had been working on their own self-chosen poems separately, but if I'm going to need to be more hands-on, I'll probably revert back to working on one mom-chosen poem all together. 

 

Another thing I've been thinking a lot about lately are expectations about homeschooling "consistency." Consistent routines and rhythms seem like a good thing, to be sure, but there's the way a machine is consistent and then there's the way nature is consistent, and so what sort of consistency about which sort of things should we actually be aiming for in our home life? I tend to feel bad about about the ways in which it seems like we are inconsistent

(in terms of the kind of advice you often see to at least do math everyday or at least read aloud everyday or at least go outside every day), but perhaps that is misallocated guilt that would be better felt over other kinds of inconsistency.

 

Quick thought on discouragement and boredom (and I think I've shared before Auntie Leila on longanimity): St. Thomas said that one remedy for acedia is to spend time contemplating the good you are trying to achieve. I've found this works much better than my natural inclination to extravagantly accuse myself of sloth (which may be accurate, but surprisingly to me actually demotivates) and explains the motivating power of the properly timed Kathleen Norris novel (I really liked The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne too, by the way, when I read it last year - it would be interesting to look at it again to compare with EFL more intentionally). I've also used it to justify a lot of the abstract theorizing about education and family life I've done over the years on the argument that it's difficult to motivate oneself beyond boredom by a fuzzy, vaguely-grasped goal, although the mental energy for all that is pretty hard to come by these days, and as we've discussed, the abstract notions only take you so far and sometimes are an obstacle.

 

Instead I've been reading more biographies of various people I admire and paying close attention to the descriptions of their childhood and educations. Hugh Trevor-Roper apparently got started with Latin at six by his Scottish governess who "had a great love for the classics." And Christopher Lasch's mother had majored in Latin at the University of Nebraska (this biography also quotes a letter she wrote him after he had married and had children in which she gives him some very EFL-ish advice against boughten toys) - he won a state-wide Latin award in high school and was offered a scholarship to the University of Chicago on that basis, which he declined. I wonder if his grounding in Latin explains why, despite being very concerned about the state of American education, he seems to have been completely uninterested in Hutchins/Alder-style projects. And I picked up a copy of some collected works of Kathleen Norris with a little foreward by her in which she describes the literary culture of her family (also a bit of a mish-mash!): 

 

My own literary ancestors are those prolific, not-too-important writing folk upon whose works I battened through all the happy years of a country childhood. Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen were far above my head, but there were lesser lights, and I sat at their feet. Trollop, Charlotte M. Young of the big families and domestic joys and sorrows, Rosa Nouchette Carey of Queenie's Whim and Uncle Max, these were my daily food.

 

But these were not all. We who grew up in a small house in the heart of a redwood forest must have swept, I believe, through three hundred books a year. We ranged furiously from Macauley's England to Dotty Dimple's Cousin Prudy. We read Newman's Apologia and Mrs. Craven's Recit d'une Soeur. We raked books off the shelves by the dozen and hauled them along on picnics, to haylofts, up oak trees, to bath and to bed. The one terrifying possibility was to find oneself without a book. My father put Othello or The Tempest in his pocket when he took us off for a Sunday walk; and although my mother religiously burned Nick Carters wherever she found them [i tried to discover just what exactly a Nick Carter was, but quickly gave up after googling returned 5,000,000 Backstreet Boys-related results], she was invariably too late. Dinner-table talk was of books, and one sister, later to marry the poet William Rose Benét, save herself the trouble of making a poetry collection, as the rest of us did in blank books, by simply memorizing everything she liked, once and for all. 

 

It was natural then, in a day when there were no motorcars and no movies, that we six who were so early orphaned should gather around a lamp in the evenings, and that one of us should be the storyteller. For whole years of winter evenings this was my proud responsibility. If the tale grew too sophisticated for some small sleepy member of the group it was steered away, to the best of my ability, to simpler and more amusing regions. When some voice said, "Have a murder in it," or "What did they have for dinner?" or "Didn't she have any bridesmaid?" I strove to oblige.

 

Seems to have served her well enough in the end!

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:001_smile: Hello, Manora; glad you've found some things helpful. 

 

LostCove, I've done very little reading in the last several months, though I did indulge in a bit over our Christmas break.  The last author to make it onto the pile was Nassim Nicholas Taleb.   I didn't get through much of his work before having to stop, but some of his ideas relate to what we're discussing here.  In particular, he'd agree with your thinking re consistency.   He thinks that living systems can be made more "antifragile" (= able to benefit from unexpected adversity) by including the extremes, rather than trying to chart a perfect middle course.  Sounds a lot like what Melissa Wiley calls "tidal homeschooling." This seems to be more or less the norm in large families that aren't sticking firmly to a specific curriculum.

 

What you say about children being formed by their culture also seems true, though sort of depressing.  There's no changing the outside culture in any big way, and it seems as if I spend so much energy trying to mediate between it and our family's culture, that I haven't got much left over to nurture the family itself.   I don't know if this is inevitable, or if I'm doing it all wrong.   My impression is that most families in our circles either just allow pretty much anything that's not obviously immoral, or else allow things that have some outside stamp of approval (e.g., Bethlehem Books, church-sponsored activities, anything on a curriculum list).  They also don't seem very concerned about age-appropriateness, so the olders and youngers have access to the same media and events.  Over here, though, I'm still trying to look at everything on a case-by-case basis, and make use of my understanding of traditional moral and literary standards -- even if the latter are still more often honored in the breach than in the observance. 

 

Nick Carter is actually a good illustration here.  It's a pulp fiction detective series that was popular with young people around the world circa 1900, but was criticized by the older generation as "sensational" and "brutalizing."   A brief search of Google Books reveals that academic papers have been written on its reception in Sweden, of all places.  (Yes, the US was known for exporting trashy pop culture even before Hollywood. :001_rolleyes:)  You can find some scans of the late 1800s ones online.   TBH, they don't seem substantially worse than some of the stuff that's recommended today as "real books," "wholesome family reading," and "heroic tales for boys."   Of course the writing isn't great, but it's marginally better than, say, some of the Redwall books -- which, in turn, are marginally better than some of the children's fiction series in our local Catholic bookshop.  So, yes, depressing all around.

 

And this isn't the worst of it.  Even if there's a lack of social support for older literary standards, at least we can get some idea of what they are.  For the unwritten aspects of homeschooling and family culture -- self-direction, schedules, speech, the dreaded slouching ;) -- it's still unclear to me what our standards should be.  I mean, EFL and other authors might say such-and-such, but is that just an ideal that we're supposed to approximate, or a norm that any family would be expected to match?   And, if the latter, does that mean we still can achieve it in our time, or should I aim somewhat lower, on account of there having been several intervening generations of muddle?

 

This is similar to the problem I had with Montessori, but at least there are some pretty authentic AMI schools to look at. 

 

Sorry, this is rather bleak.   I'm feeling torn between the desire to run a tighter ship (or at least get rid of several more boxes of "highly recommended" and perhaps even "beloved" books, with the excuse of making room for Christmas presents), and the definite need for some angst-free family relaxation and enjoyment.   Will probably end up getting out the video game system that's been stashed away for months.   Not great, but low-clutter, and better than a mommy meltdown.   :tongue_smilie:

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  • 2 weeks later...

:seeya:  We're still going, doing a bit better, and I didn't end up having to resort to video games after all. 

 

I just wanted to share that I've had a mental leap in thinking about the role of fiction in our homeschool.    And it even relates to some of what I learned in university. 

 

- The "novel" is a literary form that arose in an early modern/modern context, and is associated with individualism.  Most often, a novel is the story of a single protagonist who goes through some sort of new (novel) experience or adventure.  

 

- When we evaluate a piece of literature, we have to do so with attention to the structure of the literary form, rather than just saying "it has these good points" and "it has these bad points."  Form and content go together, and have to be looked at together.

 

So the question I'm asking is:  during the events of this novel, does the protagonist grow in such as way as to become more prepared for heaven?   (Even if they're not eligible, because they're, say, a mouse. ;))  If so, it goes back on the shelf.  If not, or if it's unclear to me, it goes in a box for later sorting. 

 

This simple test has revealed a great deal.   Most of our books are ones you'd find on selective homeschool book lists -- described as classics, full of wonder, wholesome, educational, etc. -- but nearly all of them flunk.   The ones most likely to qualify are either allegories, or books in the tradition of the Bildungsroman ("coming of age novel") that take place in a context of at least residual Christianity. 

 

Going by what I've looked at so far, the bulk of our children's fiction consists of secular coming-of-age or fantasy stories, fictionalized works of fact-teaching, and lightweight series in which the characters don't change much between books.    It's likely that we'll end up keeping some of those, but it seems important that they don't outnumber the books that are really formative.  

 

Note that I'm not expecting the main character to be a shining model of virtue the whole way through.  This wouldn't be enough, and at the same time, it would perhaps be be too much.   If a child's main job is to grow, then surely modeling growth is the really important aspect.    Old-time Catholic writers, such as Father Finn, recognized this.  Their novels included some characters who were really saintly and admirable, but they were somewhat removed from the main action, and if they were children, they often died young.   This doesn't happen so inevitably in real life -- well, I hope it doesn't, anyway -- but the novel isn't synonymous with real life.  It's just a story written in a way that fits with the literary form.   Hagiography is a separate type of literature, and it's intended to be about real saints, not made-up ones.  

 

Hmm.  Perhaps this is why I'm a bit uncomfortable with some popular saint books that are presented as "amazing stories" and "once upon a time tales," and seem to de-emphasize the spiritual virtues.  I guess that subject has to be left for another day, though. 

 

I still can't post links, but there's a relevant NYT article from 2015 that's titled, "Can a Virtuous Character Be Interesting?"   One writer says "no;" another says "yes."  When you look closely, though, the "no" writer acknowledges that some of the most memorable moments in fiction are those in which a weak or bad character apparently grows in virtue, and performs a heroic act.    Meanwhile, the "yes" writer suggests that it's interesting to read about the challenges of maintaining virtue in the face of outside pressures.   These both seem to be grown-up versions of what I've described above, though I tend to think that even virtuous adults will need to keep growing, not just maintaining.   Which isn't to say that I'm going to apply the same criteria to adult fiction.  But it's interesting, and it has me thinking that perhaps the reason I like KN so much is that her heroines model the process of pursuing the good, not just a static picture of it, IYKWIM. 

 

Anyway, maybe this will help someone.  :001_smile:

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The Secret Garden

 

What Katy Did

 

The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak

 

are a few that come to mind.  I would just have these sorts of books available for leisure reading.  (Heaven forbid that someone turns my post into an "elementary literature curriculum" that instructs children to analyze the main characters' moral and spiritual development.  :tongue_smilie:)

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What do you think of formal grammar in an EFL context?

 

(sorry, that posted too soon - this computer is quite aggravating!)

 

She writes that "technical grammar" is a fine subject for "mind-training," but not suitable before age 10.  TBH, I'm thinking about limiting it for some of my children, even in middle and high school.   We might use a few books that have more of a linguistic approach to understanding language. 

 

If we were doing traditional Latin grammar, I'd feel as if we were better placed to minimize traditional English grammar, but we're still doing Artes Latinae, which is based on structural linguistics to start with.  

 

If you have a guess as to what either EFL or Maria Montessori might think of the linguistic methods, please share!

Edited by ElizaG
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Some related questions: 

 

How many "mind-training" subjects do we need, at the secondary level?   It's my understanding that algebra, natural sciences, and English grammar were all added to the curriculum for their perceived mental disciplinary value (not their practical value).  English grammar and science were emphasized for students who weren't taking Latin and Greek.  In other words, they generally weren't all taught at the same time. 

 

Given that college prep students have to do so much math and science these days, is it okay to just consider those to be the formal "mental discipline" subjects, and take more of a culturally focused or eclectic approach to language and literature studies?  Or is this going to mess our students up somehow?

 

In general, what were EFL's ideas about "mind-training," and how did she differ from others on this subject? 

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Well, now this is interesting.  I've happened upon a piece of circumstantial evidence for the compatibility of linguistic methods with EFL's thinking.

 

The previous EFL thread has a bit about Richard Mott Gummere (pronounced GUM-er-ee), a Quaker and classicist who served as the headmaster of William Penn Charter School, a Latin teacher at Haverford College, and the Dean of Admissions at Harvard.  He wrote a textbook (Junior Latin) that EFL recommended in her column, and he also sent his own children to her school.  

 

John Flagg Gummere also taught at Haverford, and was the headmaster of William Penn Charter School from 1941 to 1968.   The NYT published his obituary on January 28, 1988.  He was evidently a relative of Richard Mott Gummere, though perhaps not a close one.   The family has had many noted scholars.

 

In 1946, Waldo Sweet was hired to teach Latin at Penn Charter, and John F. Gummere introduced him to new ideas in linguistics.  Sweet originally "bristled" at Bloomfield's criticism of standard ways of language teaching, then got to work on seeing what could be done.  The first textbook he developed was specifically intended to cover the first year's work at Penn Charter.  This is described in "The Continued Development of the Structural Approach," 1969, at eric.ed.gov.  Really interesting stuff.  For instance, he didn't start out intending to use real Latin literature; the sententiae were just added in to fill up empty space at the ends of chapters.  They turned out to be so popular that he decided to base the course around these and other readings. 

 

Later, in the early 1970s, Penn Charter was a demonstration school for Artes Latinae (source: "New Approaches to the Teaching of Classics," eric.ed.gov).

 

Again, this is circumstantial, but it's bolstering my sense that AL is a respectable option, and the best choice for our family right now.  In fact, I'm going to try to make time to go through it myself, so that I can help my SN child in particular.   After a few years, maybe I'll be semi-competent.  Then I can teach the little ones "properly," using the Fr. Stephenson books, and the materials that LostCove is preparing in her copious spare time.   ;)

 

While I'm at it, maybe I should try to encourage my eldest to attend CUA, as that's starting to seem like the only way I'll get a chance to look at the Orbis Vivus.  :D

 

 

ETA:  While I'm feeling all right about the linguistic approach of AL's lessons, the format -- "programmed instruction" inspired by Skinner -- isn't EFL-friendly at all, and it's always bothered me.  But it's just for one part of our homeschool day.   Once it's done, my little pigeons can exit their boxes and do more normal things. 

Edited by ElizaG
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I was looking for Lenten advice on forming good habits, and came across some 1820s "how to homeschool" books by the English author Elizabeth Appleton.  As with similar US books from that era, they seem strangely more current than late Victorian ones.   What I've read so far is compatible with EFL, but much more detailed.   For instance, there are two full pages of advice about reading books to sensitive children, all of which I found sensible and helpful. 

 

The books are on archive.org, and you can find them by searching for "Appleton" and "Private Education" or "Early Education."  The first book deals mostly with the needs of older girls, and the second one mostly with younger children, though there's some overlap.  She's big on reading lists, which is unusual in older authors.  I don't want to get distracted hunting down her recommendations, but maybe I'll look for a few of the best-known ones to give to the children at Easter.  (Likely only dodgy-looking reprints available; will have to cover them with pretty fabric or something.  Could be a good craft project to do with eldest DD.   :001_smile: )

Edited by ElizaG
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Eliza, I don't have any deep insight into the grammar question, but EFL does say somewhere that the time to teach a child something is when they need it (or does she say ask for it? well, it's something along those lines) and not before. That suggests to me at least a much lighter, later grammar course than one often finds around these parts. I'm still not sure I understand what is meant when people talk about "mind-training" and "mental discipline" (I've been looking back at Barbara Rogoff for something recently, so I'm tempted to say it's merely the skill of reproducing apparently useless knowledge out of context), so I don't know how to assess how much of it we might want at which ages. 

 

In any case, now I'm tempted to hand my kids Artes Latinae and spend my new-found leisure mastering sourdough baking or reading Nassim Taleb.  :laugh: Actually, I really like that Junior Latin book, which Gummere and his co-author originally planned to title "Five Declensions for the Age of Ten" - the introductory material is worth reading.  

 

One other poorly articulated thought I've had rolling around in my head for a few weeks now, on this question of how tight of a ship to run. EFL does say somewhere (it must be in Educating the Child at Home, which I can't currently find my copy of, because I've looked through Bookless Lessons and didn't find it, but I'm sure I'm not making this up) that you shouldn't always be on top of your kids. That they need some freedom to even be a little naughty once in a while because true virtue is developed by resisting evil. And I thought of Kathleen Norris's mom burning up those Nick Carters. On the one hand, she upheld a certain standard, but on the other hand, she never blocked up the Nick Carters at their source. We live in a trickier era, I think, because it's harder to give our children an appropriate amount of freedom to test their developing powers of judgment - it seems that it's easier to allow either too much or too little freedom. But I've allowed some Redwalls on the shelf as the price of vetoing most of the other books at the library. It may not be ideal, but I'm finding that I need to conserve energy for the creative work of developing a positive family culture rather than using it up keeping every Nick Carter from sneaking in. 

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  • 2 months later...

Shoes, thanks for the book recommendation - I remember when it came out and all the horrified denunciations of Chua's allegedly authoritarian parenting, but I never did get around to looking at it myself. The point about enjoying things we are good at, but it often taking a fair bit practice to get to that point is such a good one - I think it applies to parenting, too!

The weather is currently gorgeous here, so I've been sending the kids out more and starting to think about next year. My eldest is turning 10 this summer, so we're finally slipping into the EFL black hole - I need to spend some time poking around our older discussions of this period and figure out what I'm going to do with him. He's pretty motivated around languages, including, weirdly and with no prompting from me, Greek, so I think we're going to forge ahead with a classics-heavy plan for him. Eek. I'm still pretty unsure of how to work in English and the content subjects for him, though. 

Oh, and I may have a new favorite Kathleen Norris novel - The World is Like That, about an office girl who narrowly misses a really bad course of action and then winds up the companion to a very spoiled young heiress. The ending is maybe not her strongest, but I really enjoyed most of it - some serious examples of tact, too! 

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Will look at the Amy Chua book as well.  I feel as if there are still some gaps in my understanding of this.  It’s even starting to seem that my practical and intuitive ability to raise children has become *greater* than my theoretical grasp of the subject. I realize that this is very normal and good, but it’s also unfamiliar and unsettling, LOL.  More seriously, it means that I’m not able to communicate about it very well to other parents, even if our circumstances are similar.

For instance, I recently gave someone a copy of “The Renegade Home.”  This person has taken EFL to be saying that, since our children’s faults mainly come from imitating us, we shouldn’t presume to correct them (especially the older ones), but rather just accept that it’s our fault and keep “working on ourselves.”  This interpretation seems to go against both Scripture and common sense, but I don’t know how to argue against it.  I suspect that this line of thinking is precisely how “permissive parenting” got its first toehold. 

Any thoughts?

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That is a fairly odd misreading of EFL. My hunch is that permissive parenting and other confusions must stem as much from ruptures in actual lived experience as new and bad ideas, although untangling that particular vicious cycle would be difficult. At this point, it seems like people have a very limited repertoire of parenting moves they can imagine, mostly relating to how one does or does not respond to individual acts of naughtiness, because they have only experienced a very limited repertoire of parenting moves (I know that as a younger mother, I had hesitations around correcting my child because I mostly had a fairly harsh picture of correction). Other aspects of teaching, training, and guiding are at best taken for granted and thus invisible to those who have the good fortune to have experienced them. For example, a couple of years ago I very excitedly told my friend that I had figured out an amazing technique for keeping my kids calm, quiet, and still when we have to wait somewhere: telling them a story! She looked at me like I had just arrived from Mars because doesn't every one know that? Of course, it turns out that her mom told her stories when they were waiting places when she was little and mine did not, nor had I ever seen another parent engage a child this way.

This most recent Kathleen Norris novel I read actually bears a little on this question. The spoiled adolescent heiress has been subject to periods of complete indulgence alternating with ultimately ineffectual management by a very strict "Victorian" governess (I thought of your comment, Eliza, that earlier writings often seem more relatable to you than things from Victorian times) - a cycle that seems to be mirrored in many families even today. The heroine, having just disentangled herself from a very bad situation of her own making, has to take an entirely different line of influence, trying to win the girl's affection while simultaneously drawing the line about somethings - no more lunchtime cocktails! - and introducing some new more wholesome activities and then gently trying to awaken an innate desire for self-improvement (by appealing directly to her vanity). Norris shows her thought process at a few crucial moments trying to decide what will be the most effective course of action - I found it very interesting and realistic. Progress is slow-moving with periods of regress and no satisfying resolution (for the young heiress - the heroine gets her man, of course), just the prospect of all her choices, for good or bad, continuing to play out with various consequences. Which seems like how life is. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On ‎4‎/‎30‎/‎2018 at 11:06 AM, LostCove said:

That is a fairly odd misreading of EFL.

I agree, but can't figure out how to explain it in any effective way.  I think I'll just take it as a sign that this person, for whatever reason, isn't really open to the advice.  Which is too bad, because this is one of a vanishingly small number of homeschoolers I've found IRL who are somewhat open to discussion of vintage educational writings.   Most just glaze over when they realize that this will involve reading the book and thinking it through for themselves. 

This is giving me a little insight into how EFL must have felt when she was rejected by the Catholics, and had to take her message to the Quakers.  

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On 5/12/2018 at 3:02 PM, Ordinary Shoes said:

In the Tiger Mother book, Chua wrote that she was often asked whether her pushing of her children was for her kids' benefit or for herself. She writes that this is a "very western question" because children are seen as an extension of the self to the Chinese (I have no idea if she's correct about Chinese thinking here). This was an interesting point to me because I often doubt myself by questioning whether my pushiness is for my daughter's sake or for me. ISTM that maybe that's the root of permissive parenting; that if your child is completely distinct from you that you don't have the right to dictate what that child does. 

Which made me think of the CM idea that children are born persons. I've never understood why people think that's such a profound idea. It seems obvious to me. IDK? I've never read much CM so I probably misunderstand her. 

Perhaps that idea is lurking beneath an assumption we should not presume to correct our children's faults? 

 

 

I think that is why people often feel that way, yes.

With regard to children being born persons, yes, it does I think come out of a view of the child as an extension of the family, or a possession.  But it's maybe more directly a response to the educational tabula rasa approach, where the idea is that you have to kind of create the child by filling them up with the right things.  And then, I think it's also a response to a kind of negative view of the soul, where you have to be very careful to form it properly because of the overwhelming propensity to evil.  It's a religious-spiritual insight about the relation of children to the Divine Life.

I always think of the kind of Classical Conversations approach as the modern antithesis of it.

it's closely related to the idea that it is the child's mind educates itself and is drawn to the good, to God, to knowledge, that it makes the connections and comes to it's own conclusions.  It's what allows the parent to trust in that process and step back and also why the teacher is not supposed to tell the child what conclusions to draw.  

It does in a way seem obvious, as our culture almost makes it extremely at times, as you note. By the same token though, we don't seem to really want to give children intellectual and moral autonomy - even a lot of supposedly liberal parents spend a lot of time making sure their kids come to the right conclusions.

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