Selective ability to memorize

Dd7 has watched the movie Barney: Jungle Friends twice in the last few days. As far as I know, she never saw the movie before this week. Now she is singing songs from it that she memorized after just two viewings. WHY, oh, WHY, are we still struggling through addition drills together every morning? There needs to be a Barney (or Blue's Clues or Disney) movie with songs on all the basic addition facts! She'd have them learned in a jiffy with little effort and struggle.

I want to "liveblog", too!

One of the blogs I follow is Instapundit, a libertarian law professor in Tennessee who updates very often and links to many interesting things. (Some of them are so "interesting" that I no longer visit his site on Sundays. He is less restrained with his language and topics dealing with human intimacy than I like to see on a day I have been taught to dedicate to the Lord.) He frequently links to other bloggers who will be "liveblogging"--or even "drunkblogging"--debates, big political speeches, and so forth.

Now that I'm 37+ weeks pregnant, I'm really looking forward to the birth of this baby. To help me not be bored between contractions once labor gets underway, I think I will follow the trend and "liveblog" the labor and delivery process this go-around. Will anyone care? Probably not. But it gives me something to do when I'm not focusing on my breathing and relaxation.

I just realized that some might find my detailed description of birth to be offensive (ironic in light of what I said above about Instapundit). I'll try not to be TMI about it. ;) Seriously, though, I've had three natural childbirths in hospitals in three different countries now, so my birth story told as it happens might be helpful to other women who wish to see what non-medicalized birth looks like in a medical setting. Here's hoping I get my chance to liveblog soon!

[Update 3/25/2025: I think Instapundit's blog got used to discuss some pretty conspiracy-theory stuff, except some of the people on there were the actual conspirers, puppetmasters with access to some of the most advanced mind-related technology. I'm still haunted by a apocalyptic discussion in the comments where I mentioned that to make the numbers add up for the destructions described in the Book of Revelation, China and India would need to bomb each other with nuclear weapons...and all the other commenters were silent. No one responded directly to my comment. In retrospect, it was weird in a "what-were-they-planning" or "what-did-they-know" way.

And then yesterday, I found what might have been an encoded message saying that the Dalai Lama has been unconsciously directed by Sikhs. If you look at the history of Tibet, that actually makes a lot of sense.

Looking back at Instapundit, I think the inappropriate material on it was intentionally posted to drive people like me away. But I was usually morning sick or nursing a small child when reading it, and I was bored enough to stay reading it anyway.]

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part eleven)

Wow! This is a really long essay. But I'll keep plowing through since I've already done so much of it.

Let us amuse ourselves by imagining that such progressive retrogression is possible. Let us make a clean sweep of all educational authorities, and furnish ourselves with a nice little school of boys and girls whom we may experimentally equip for the intellectual conflict along lines chosen by ourselves. We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents; we will staff our school with teachers who are themselves perfectly familiar with the aims and methods of the Trivium; we will have our building and staff large enough to allow our classes to be small enough for adequate handling; and we will postulate a Board of Examiners willing and qualified to test the products we turn out. Thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus--a modern Trivium "with modifications" and we will see where we get to.

But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn; besides, one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will, therefore, "catch 'em young," requiring of our pupils only that they shall be able to read, write, and cipher.

My views about child psychology are, I admit, neither orthodox nor enlightened. Looking back upon myself (since I am the child I know best and the only child I can pretend to know from inside) I recognize three states of development. These, in a rough-and- ready fashion, I will call the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic--the latter coinciding, approximately, with the onset of puberty. The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things. The Pert age, which follows upon this (and, naturally, overlaps it to some extent), is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to "catch people out" (especially one's elders); and by the propounding of conundrums. Its nuisance-value is extremely high. It usually sets in about the Fourth Form. The Poetic age is popularly known as the "difficult" age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others. Now it seems to me that the layout of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular appropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-Parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic age.

To apply this to my children, they are all three (ages 2, 4, and 7) in the Poll Parrot stage, although I can already see seeds of the Pert age in dd7. I haven't caught any of them memorizing license plates or poetry, but they absolutely repeat and mimic movies they like. Dd7, while taking longer than I would have liked to memorize addition facts, is actually learning them and for the last two or three years has exhibited a very good ability to memorize facts about random animals. Dd4 has picked up many addition facts just from observing me work with dd7 and hearing addition fact songs in the car occasionally. Dd2 is frequently a copycat, as one might expect of someone trying to navigate a world that's still quite new to her.

Dorothy Sayers may not have been a recognized child psychology expert, but based on what I have seen with my children so far, I think she seems to adequately describe children as learners. I would only say that she underestimates the ability of children in the Poll Parrot stage to reason things out on their own. As an academic undertaking, I think expecting critical thinking from dd7 would be a lost cause because she still lacks the ability to quickly process complex causes and abstract concepts. However, she does like to think things over and come to her own, sometimes unexpected conclusions. At this point in her life, I choose not to formally exercise this developing reasoning ability for fear I'd unintentionally quash her independent use of it. Reasoning should be a lifelong practice that a child engages in for his/her own goals and not just for school assignments.

SOTW update

We finally finished Volume 1 of the Story of the World yesterday. While it was fun to study the ancient world, it's going to be GREAT to study the middle ages. What little girls don't want to learn about Grendel, dress up like princesses, and draw dragons as part of a study of heraldry? There's a renaissance festival each summer in a city near us, and I think we're finally going to go this year.

Manly, Positive Music

Dh and I bought bunk beds at IKEA tonight and have been busy all evening moving furniture in the girls' room so that it will sleep 3 (4 with the trundle bed pulled out). He asked me to play some good working music for him to listen to while assembling the furniture. Searches on the internet for "manly music" turned up a lot of heavy metal and songs with very objectionable lyrics. The playlist I finally put together on Grooveshark consists of the following songs. The furniture job is taking hours, so it's a good thing he likes the mix! If you're interested, it includes the following songs:

1) "Eye of the Tiger" by Journey

2) "A Man's Gotta Do" from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (warning - this is the only song on the list with a crude word)

3) "You're the Best Around" from The Karate Kid (the Ralph Macchio version, of course)

4) "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan

5) "We Do (The Stonecutter's Song)" from The Simpsons

6) "Trogdor" by Strong Bad

7) "The Final Countdown" by Europe

8) The Mission Impossible Theme

9) "Kung Fu Fighting"

10) "Macho Man" by Village People

11) "Big in Japan" by Alphaville

12) "Anton aus Tirol" by DJ Otzi

13) "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley

14) The A-Team theme

15) Knight Rider theme

16) Airwolf theme

17) Bonanza theme

18) Hawaii 5-0 theme

19) "I, Don Quixote" from Man of La Mancha

20) "Holding Out for a Hero"

Boxing day

What a relaxing day! Yesterday was a bit hectic, what with choir practice at church and then church. However, I really appreciated that with Christmas on Sunday this year, the focus was taken off opening presents and placed on more transcendent things.

I just read the book Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don't Have in Search of Happiness We Can't Buy, which says that although studies and statistics show holding materialistic values doesn't lead to being happy, materialism has increasingly become a much greater characteristic of our society, particularly in the recent crop of young adults. Materialism is a bit of a treadmill, one on which you never can feel like you have "enough", no matter how much money and/or stuff you accrue.

Both dh and I are fairly modest in our wants (living in developing countries can do that to you), and we have been united in focusing our family life on religious, relational, and educational goals. As recommended in Shiny Objects (written by a professor of marketing, ironically), we have avoided TV much of our marriage. We have been without a TV altogether for the past four years. This permits us to escape most of the advertising industry's incessant inculcation of materialism, a freedom that we gladly embrace over keeping up with the Kardashians's doings or idolizing wannabe pop stars. When we do occasionally see ads on Hulu or at a relative's home, we point out to our children that the ads are "just trying to get us to buy something" and are often stupid or dishonest. A positive result of avoiding TV marketing is the peace that we have experienced this Christmas. Yes, we gave our children gifts, but we probably didn't spend more than an average of $50 per child, counting stocking stuffers and candy. I did utilize a local thrift store heavily to save money on books and clothes and their grandparents sent gifts, but it was still a low-end haul by US standards. Yet they had a very happy Christmas. They were grateful for each gift and, most gratifying to us parents, they hardly fought with each other Christmas afternoon, indicating a minimal level of possessiveness about their gifts.

Now if I could just live up to today's name and box up some older playthings to give away in order to prevent toybox overflow, but low levels of materialism do not prevent little girls from developing emotional attachments to copious numbers of stuffed animals and homemade crafts. Grrr. At least they have loving hearts....

Dd7's newest project

She wants to have a website, so I just set up another blog for her on this account. If you want to learn weird but true facts about random animals, feel free to visit weirdbuttrueanimalfacts.blogspot.com.

A sweet moment

I walked into the living room this evening to find dd7 playing with this place value learning tool. She showed me the large number she'd made and said, "Mommy, this is how many times God thinks of us." I love that girl.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part ten)

In this post, I ponder on these two paragraphs from "The Lost Tools of Learning":

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education--lip- service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

What, then, are we to do? We cannot go back to the Middle Ages. That is a cry to which we have become accustomed. We cannot go back--or can we? Distinguo. I should like every term in that proposition defined. Does "go back" mean a retrogression in time, or the revision of an error? The first is clearly impossible per se; the second is a thing which wise men do every day. "Cannot"-- does this mean that our behavior is determined irreversibly, or merely that such an action would be very difficult in view of the opposition it would provoke? Obviously the twentieth century is not and cannot be the fourteenth; but if "the Middle Ages" is, in this context, simply a picturesque phrase denoting a particular educational theory, there seems to be no a priori reason why we should not "go back" to it--with modifications--as we have already "gone back" with modifications, to, let us say, the idea of playing Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, and not in the "modernized" versions of Cibber and Garrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.

Is being progressive always good? I don't see how that can be the case. Its most common definition is merely "to move forward". But in what are we moving forward? Are the outcomes positive...or at least better than they were before we took a given step forward? If not, there's nothing wrong with moving backward to something that gave us better results while we think of other things to try. In moving backward, we can still take with us the insights we gained from experimenting with the new thing, so in a way progress and regression can happen simultaneously.

For example, most reject the harsh schoolteacher who drills the class in arithmetic facts and "switches" the "dunces" in the class. In the name of progress in the USA, we seem to have given up not only the harsh, humiliating treatment of students but also demonized group recitation of arithmetic facts. What if we "threw the baby out with the bath water" on that one? What if group recitation of arithmetic facts serves an important and useful purpose in helping young children memorize math facts to automaticity? (I have no idea if this is the case. I'm making up a hypothetical.)

I would wish for the educational establishment in the USA to be better at utilizing the pedagogical methods and curricula that give good outcomes and rejecting any seemingly "progressive" things that end up giving bad results. Unfortunately, they glaringly fail at this, if I can judge by the "fuzzy math" curricula that so many school districts (including mine) refuse to give up in the face of quite pathetic math outcomes for the students. I'm so grateful to be able to teach my children using my own choice of curricula and methods.

Homeschool Update

66 days, over a third into the official "school year". (Colorado requires 172 days, with an average of 4 hours of instruction per day.)

How's second grade going for dd7?

Math - Oh, the pain! She STILL doesn't have her addition facts down. We've done flashcards, online games, board games, memorization strategies, and addition fact recitation. The only thing I can think of next to try is timed minute drills targeted towards the exact facts she needs to master. Conceptually, math is fairly easy for her. She picked up borrowing (called "renaming" in her math worktext) just last week with very little trouble. She could do her math work in 1/5 of the time (or less) if she just had her addition facts known to automaticity.

Reading - She's a great little reader. :) I like our current reading textbook, Our Country from Open Court. Not only is it a good reader for her level, but we are also covering the history of the USA at a level that is appropriate for her. Because it is a 1973 edition, I do find that I occasionally have to explain a few things. For instance, although negro means black in Spanish, we no longer call a black person a "Negro" (this came up in the context of the Lewis and Clark expedition). We've also had to discuss why the book uses the word "Indians" for Native Americans. That's the price I pay for using free books from my mother's old school library.

History/Social Studies - I really appreciate having The Story of the World to use as a spine for history studies. We're up to Julius Caesar now, which is fortuitous as the Christmas season approaches. Tax issues around Jerusalem and King Herod's actions make more sense in the context of the Roman Empire. We also are learning American history as part of dd7's reading schoolwork. And, of course, we do fun things like attending a Martinstag lantern parade and a Diwali celebration last week.

Foreign Languages - She picks up a smattering of Spanish vocabulary from her part-time attendance at a charter school; I think it's just enough to reinforce what she has learned from Dora and Diego. German continues to go well because her father only speaks German to her and we assign her 3-4 German vocabulary worksheets each week.

Writing - We do a small amount of dictation some days, and on other days she does a Draw-and-Write from the Enchanted Learning website. She wrote our family newsletter yesterday. It was short but fairly well-done, given her age.

Music - We do a little each day, either singing a song, playing the recorder, or practicing the piano. I could ask more of her, but it doesn't seem worth fighting over. She's learning to read and enjoy music and play a little on two instruments, and that seems like enough for now. I guess I'm no "tiger mother".

Art - No formal curriculum is needed or used at home. She draws almost daily on her own as part of her playtime projects. She does receive some instruction from an art teacher at the charter school.

Physical Education - I drive her to school in time for recess, and she has PE instruction there some days. I find it amusing that recess is her favorite part of school.

Science - We read a science article daily and watch a lot of science videos. She loves science and absorbs information from science videos and library books like a sponge.

Socialization - Thanks to the part-time attendance at the charter school, she is getting some socialization, which has been mostly positive; the one time she was called a mean name, I was standing by her and able to smooth it over for her immediately. Family and church friends also help satisfy her need for interpersonal interaction. She's an introvert and thus relatively easy to satisfy in this respect.

The year is going well. She is happy and learning a lot. Last week, she spontaneously said she was very glad I was her mother. I think she actually has an inkling of how lucky she is....

My updated theory on autism

If you read a couple of my older posts, you'll see that I think there is a link between autism and folic acid supplementation. I started paying attention to this issue because I have a family member who rather demonizes vaccinations. I, on the other hand, believe that the alleged vaccine-autism connection has been quite thoroughly debunked. In fact, a recent study of brains of normal and autistic people found that there were too many neurons (67% more) in the cerebral cortex of the brains of those with autism, neurons which are generated only prenatally and which typically are pruned prenatally and in early infancy through programmed cell death (see this study). Instead of still suspecting vaccines in autism, we should instead pay attention to the prenatal environment.

I'm open to being proved wrong on there being a connection between folic acid supplementation and autism, particularly in light of the 2011 finding by UC Davis that women who took prenatal vitamins were less likely to have autistic children. The researchers postulated that it was because of a protective effect of folic acid. I think they're guessing on that point. Folic acid affects methylation and seems implicated in epigenetic changes, which are connected to autism (see this recent study). Some other vitamin or combination of vitamins appears to me to be more likely as the cause of the protective effect of the prenatal vitamins. Vitamin D seems a very likely candidate, especially since "developmental vitamin D deficiency increase[s] cellular proliferation in the brain and reduce[s] the amount of apoptotic cell death that is normally associated with neuronal differentiation", per this paper.

I imagine this as a possible scenario--folic acid, given with the laudable goal of preventing neural tube defects, also contributes to autism by increasing the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, then vitamin D deficiency prevents the brain from adequately pruning the neurons to the proper number, resulting in an excess of these neurons, which prevents the brain from functioning in a neurotypical way. Please, any ideas on this? In the meantime, I'm 27 weeks pregnant, and it's nearly winter; I'm going out to buy vitamin D supplements this week.


!! Update!! : A recent study out of Norway, where they do not enrich the food supply with folate, indicates that taking folic acid just before and after conception markedly decreases the probability that the child will have autism. In light of it, I revise everything I've ever said on this issue to include a recommendation that women trying to conceive take folic acid supplements from 4 weeks pre-conception to 8-weeks post-conception. Here's the abstract for the Norway study on the JAMA website:

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT | METHODS | RESULTS | COMMENT | AUTHOR INFORMATION | REFERENCES

Importance  Prenatal folic acid supplements reduce the risk of neural tube defects in children, but it has not been determined whether they protect against other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Objective  To examine the association between maternal use of prenatal folic acid supplements and subsequent risk of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) (autistic disorder, Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder–not otherwise specified [PDD-NOS]) in children.

Design, Setting, and Patients  The study sample of 85 176 children was derived from the population-based, prospective Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). The children were born in 2002-2008; by the end of follow-up on March 31, 2012, the age range was 3.3 through 10.2 years (mean, 6.4 years). The exposure of primary interest was use of folic acid from 4 weeks before to 8 weeks after the start of pregnancy, defined as the first day of the last menstrual period before conception. Relative risks of ASDs were estimated by odds ratios (ORs) with 95% CIs in a logistic regression analysis. Analyses were adjusted for maternal education level, year of birth, and parity.

Main Outcome Measure  Specialist-confirmed diagnosis of ASDs.

Results  At the end of follow-up, 270 children in the study sample had been diagnosed with ASDs: 114 with autistic disorder, 56 with Asperger syndrome, and 100 with PDD-NOS. In children whose mothers took folic acid, 0.10% (64/61 042) had autistic disorder, compared with 0.21% (50/24 134) in those unexposed to folic acid. The adjusted OR for autistic disorder in children of folic acid users was 0.61 (95% CI, 0.41-0.90). No association was found with Asperger syndrome or PDD-NOS, but power was limited. Similar analyses for prenatal fish oil supplements showed no such association with autistic disorder, even though fish oil use was associated with the same maternal characteristics as folic acid use.

Conclusions and Relevance  Use of prenatal folic acid supplements around the time of conception was associated with a lower risk of autistic disorder in the MoBa cohort. Although these findings cannot establish causality, they do support prenatal folic acid supplementation.

ADDENDUM: I've recently discovered that around half the USA has a genetic mutation that makes it hard for them to actually use the folic acid that is put in white flour, breakfast cereal, and most multivitamins. To bypass the problem, it's better to ingest L-methylfolate, which is exactly the form that our bodies use. On average, it is better for increasing our blood folate status and doesn't mask B-12 deficiency. And get the word out so that food producers will start putting L-methylfolate in their products instead of plain folic acid.

Notice that in the Norway study above, autism went down by half in the group that took folic acid. Maybe it would have gone away almost completely if they'd given all the mothers L-methylfolate, seeing as around half the women couldn't use folic acid very well.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part nine)

Critical thinking skills are lacking in students and graduates throughout the USA, according to many an article on education in the past few years. An article yesterday in the Sacramento Bee stated that the top skill gap employers are finding in job applicants is the area of critical thinking and problem solving.

"American businesses are facing a paradox — high unemployment and the inability to fill key jobs in their organizations," said Mark Schmit, vice president for research at SHRM. "Our research shows that gaps between unemployed American workers' skills and those required for open jobs in the United States are a major reason for this seemingly unlikely contradiction. It follows logically that if key jobs cannot be filled in organizations, then other less critical jobs requiring less skill cannot be created either because the organizations' growth potential is stunted. Thus, the cycle of low or no job growth continues."

....

HR professionals at organizations having difficulty recruiting also reported gaps in basic knowledge and skills in job applicants. The top four skills gaps were: critical thinking/problem-solving (with 54 percent of those respondents saying that job applicants typically lack that skill); professionalism/work ethic (44 percent); written communication (41 percent); and leadership (39 percent).

The most common gaps in basic knowledge skills were:

• Writing in English
• Mathematics
• Reading comprehension
• Speaking in English

Despite 13-17+ years of formal education, too many American job-seekers are not learning the material addressed in the dialectic stage of the trivium. Dorothy Sayers would be not be surprised, per this excerpt from her essay where she discusses how modern education largely dispenses with teaching dialectics:

It is, of course, quite true that bits and pieces of the mediaeval tradition still linger, or have been revived, in the ordinary school syllabus of today. Some knowledge of grammar is still required when learning a foreign language--perhaps I should say, "is again required," for during my own lifetime, we passed through a phase when the teaching of declensions and conjugations was considered rather reprehensible, and it was considered better to pick these things up as we went along. School debating societies flourish; essays are written; the necessity for "self- expression" is stressed, and perhaps even over-stressed. But these activities are cultivated more or less in detachment, as belonging to the special subjects in which they are pigeon-holed rather than as forming one coherent scheme of mental training to which all "subjects"stand in a subordinate relation. "Grammar" belongs especially to the "subject" of foreign languages, and essay-writing to the "subject" called "English"; while Dialectic has become almost entirely divorced from the rest of the curriculum, and is frequently practiced unsystematically and out of school hours as a separate exercise, only very loosely related to the main business of learning. Taken by and large, the great difference of emphasis between the two conceptions holds good: modern education concentrates on "teaching subjects," leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressing one's conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along' mediaeval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.

"Subjects" of some kind there must be, of course. One cannot learn the theory of grammar without learning an actual language, or learn to argue and orate without speaking about something in particular. The debating subjects of the Middle Ages were drawn largely from theology, or from the ethics and history of antiquity. Often, indeed, they became stereotyped, especially towards the end of the period, and the far-fetched and wire-drawn absurdities of Scholastic argument fretted Milton and provide food for merriment even to this day. Whether they were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivial then the usual subjects set nowadays for "essay writing" I should not like to say: we may ourselves grow a little weary of "A Day in My Holidays" and all the rest of it. But most of the merriment is misplaced, because the aim and object of the debating thesis has by now been lost sight of.

A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless rageb by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I hope, that it never was a "matter of faith"; it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing--say, the point of a needle--it is located there in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is "there," it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of different people's thoughts being concentrated upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper subject of the argument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and extension in space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be the nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been something else; the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not to use words like "there" in a loose and unscientific way, without specifying whether you mean "located there" or "occupying space there."

Scorn in plenty has been poured out upon the mediaeval passion for hair-splitting; but when we look at the shameless abuse made, in print and on the platform, of controversial expressions with shifting and ambiguous connotations, we may feel it in our hearts to wish that every reader and hearer had been so defensively armored by his education as to be able to cry: "Distinguo."

Oh, how I echo that wish that our young citizens could distinguish the logical fallacies that currently lead some of them to think that disorderly camping in public parks is the way to brighten their future. What they really need, and our public school institution has failed to give them, is solid education in critical thinking and communication skills so they can be hired for the "key jobs" requiring such skills.

I really like Sayers' phrase, "defensively armored by [one's] education". Education should teach us how to discern falsehood from truth and error from correctness. Otherwise, we're destined to be fooled like P. T. Barnum's proverbial "suckers".

Curiosity

Teachers want to inspire curiosity in their students. Homeschooling parents want to allow their children's curiosity to remain untrammeled by brick-and-mortar school practices. Is curiosity really all that important?

According to this study, curiosity is just as important as conscientiousness in predicting good academic performance. I don't doubt it, having been pestered by dd4 for weeks until I finally helped her build a crane out of spools, wood, and tape today; she got the idea from a book of science projects she likes to browse. She and dd7 have since discussed what simple machines are incorporated into the crane.

Carnival of Homeschooling is up!

And this time, I put something in it (the post below on music). You can find the Carnival of Homeschooling #303 at this link at Small World.

Music Education

My mother had a goal for each of her ten children to learn to play the piano and one other instrument--preferably a string instrument, for she was rather snobby about instruments and viewed band instruments as what one plays when the school doesn't have an orchestra. She was a bit like a Chinese tiger mother when it came to music, but at least she never threatened to burn our toys if we didn't play a piano piece correctly. As part of a sibling package deal, she got free violin lessons for me from a Suzuki teacher when I was in kindergarten, so music has been a part of my life for over thirty years now.

Because my life has been greatly enriched by music, I want my children to have the same chance to learn to love making music and develop appreciation for the effort involved in creating an excellent music performance. (I'd also like them to reserve standing ovations for truly excellent performances instead of every bloomin' performance they ever attend, but I'd be fighting a losing battle on that....)

Recently I have been worrying that my efforts to bring music into my children's lives have been insufficient. (Shocker! A homeschooling mother wondering if she's doing enough!) My shortcoming: I have yet to sign my children up (ages 1, 4, and 7) for any formal music lessons. I don't want to force dd7 to practice just yet; I have too many negative memories of my mom yelling at us to get us to practice. However, I will not pay for music lessons until dd7 is capable of practicing regularly and diligently mostly on her own. But time is passing, and her brain needs to get wired for music before she is too much older.

Dd7 has had some music instruction through her part-time institutional schooling. I started teaching her to play the piano last year, but progress was slow and she had little enthusiasm. Later I labeled notes on the piano and gave her cards with "mystery songs" to figure out; that was intriguing for a couple of days. I think I am having greater success now with a different instrument. Recently I rediscovered a recorder instruction book in the bookcase, and now dd7 is learning to play the recorder. I'm pleased to see how she is finally putting together what she's learned about melodies, note length, and music notation from various sources--I hope her interest in the recorder continues beyond mastering "Hot Cross Buns"!

I am hesitantly optimistic that we will make it through the entire recorder book. When we have done that, I will tackle piano lessons for her again. It should be much more fun for us both now that she is becoming better at reading music. Who knows? Maybe it will finally be worth signing her up with a professional teacher....And then what string instrument to start her on? (Actually, she can choose any instrument except the drums.)

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part eight)

More Sayers ideas from her essay. This is a long excerpt, but it sums up the trivium.

Let us now look at the mediaeval scheme of education--the syllabus of the Schools. It does not matter, for the moment, whether it was devised for small children or for older students, or how long people were supposed to take over it. What matters is the light it throws upon what the men of the Middle Ages supposed to be the object and the right order of the educative process.

The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium. The second part--the Quadrivium--consisted of "subjects," and need not for the moment concern us. The interesting thing for us is the composition of the Trivium, which preceded the Quadrivium and was the preliminary discipline for it. It consisted of three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order.
Now the first thing we notice is that two at any rate of these "subjects" are not what we should call "subjects" at all: they are only methods of dealing with subjects. Grammar, indeed, is a "subject" in the sense that it does mean definitely learning a language--at that period it meant learning Latin. But language itself is simply the medium in which thought is expressed. The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to "subjects" at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to order a meal in a foreign language, but the structure of a language, and hence of language itself--what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language; how to define his terms and make accurate statements; how to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument. Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and Disputation. Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language-- how to say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively.
At the end of his course, he was required to compose a thesis upon some theme set by his masters or chosen by himself, and afterwards to defend his thesis against the criticism of the faculty. By this time, he would have learned--or woe betide him-- not merely to write an essay on paper, but to speak audibly and intelligibly from a platform, and to use his wits quickly when heckled. There would also be questions, cogent and shrewd, from those who had already run the gauntlet of debate.

I love the idea of actually learning the basics of communication before being asked to communicate. It seems like we have a plethora of talk these days and a corresponding dearth of coherent usage of the English language. Of course, texting and tweeting are obvious examples of poor grammar and spelling. Yet even on news sites, one sees too many comments posted on newspaper articles by people who think profanity-laced, misspelled attacks are worth anyone's time. I don't think much of someone's opinion if they can't spell correctly, for that is an indication that he or she either received a poor education or is too arrogant or lazy to use a spell-checker before posting. I plan to teach my children to spell well and teach them as much information as practicable. Although Sayers doesn't seem concerned with pride, I also hope I succeed in teaching my children that they never know enough to be conceited about and satisfied with what they have learned; humility is such an important, though under-appreciated, virtue.

Mornings

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." - Benjamin Franklin

Some mornings it is very difficult to get going on schoolwork, getting dressed, etc. Because my husband doesn't have to be to work until around 8 a.m. and we live a few minutes from his workplace, the girls and my pregnant self don't get up until he heads off to work. We adults have been going to bed by 10:30 p.m. recently, so I think we are doing the "early to bed" part of Franklin's maxim, but somehow "early to rise" just isn't happening.

Generally, it's easy to feed myself and the children breakfast, but moving on to schoolwork is a struggle most days. The girls want to play with toys or read books, I want to check the news in the world, and the schoolwork doesn't usually get started until after 9 a.m. There is a bright side to our late starts - the girls seem to recover from colds fairly quickly, and we adults are less susceptible to getting them at all. I'm appreciative of the health, but I need to bestir myself earlier if I want to increase our family's wisdom and wealth. Perhaps 10:30 p.m. isn't early enough? (When did I get so old??)

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part seven)

Here's another short meditation on a segment of this influential essay by Dorothy Sayers.

Is not the great defect of our education today--a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned--that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play "The Harmonious Blacksmith" upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized "The Harmonious Blacksmith," he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle "The Last Rose of Summer." Why do I say, "as though"? In certain of the arts and crafts, we sometimes do precisely this--requiring a child to "express himself" in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economize labor and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to "give himself the feel of the tool."

The point of beginning with basic skills is one that I think people need to consider when looking at second (or third) language acquisition curricula. Because young children learn so well from immersion in a foreign language, many think that immersion will be sufficient and/or superior in teaching languages to older students and adults. But young children have shorter working memories, and when immersed in a foreign language, they actually break down what they hear into smaller chunks for themselves and learn those chunks. Older children and adults, with their increased working memories, are able to learn whole sentences and conversations, but that doesn't mean that is the best way for them to learn a language. I've learned a few languages as an adolescent and adult, and my experience was that it was more effective for me to memorize vocabulary and grammar rules and then practice using them to become competent in communicating in and reading/writing a new language, while language tapes of conversations were useful mostly just for learning pronunciation and idiomatic expressions.

Not as pertinent to the Sayers paragraph above, but something that I dislike in general is the heavy emphasis on giving students assignments where they are supposed to "express themselves". First, do we really want teachers grading a child on his/her expression of his/herself? I'd rather teachers evaluate academic and physical skills. Second, students are typically young, with limited knowledge of the world. I was quite frustrated in elementary school and beyond by creative writing assignments. I remember thinking sometime in 2nd-4th grade, "I don't know how to come up with something new. I'm just a kid! I don't know all the stuff that's been done before!" I had little to "express" when given a picture and a list of vocabulary words and told to produce a "creative" story based on the picture. Why didn't they instead say, "Write a story using these words and base it on the picture. We don't care if you're creative or as logical as Spock as long as you focus on writing as clearly and correctly as you can."? Creative expression, for those capable of it, should be its own reward, not an element of the assignment.

Welcome, Autumn

September draws to an end, and I welcome fall with open arms. What's not to love about colorful trees, pumpkins, and apple season? Oh, the colds we've already dealt with are less than lovely, but they are likely due to the start of school, not the weather.

Our science field trip today was to the OB/GYN office where my daughters were treated to an ultrasound examination of a 18.5 week (gestational age) fetus - mine! The technician seemed to enjoy their interest and was very nice about pointing things out to us and answering our questions. We also found out that we are going to have a fourth daughter in 2012!

In other homeschool news, dd7 still loves science, and dd4 has finished Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Part-time school at a nearby charter school continues to be a good social outlet for dd7.

"Extra"

Somehow dd6 has already decided that when "schoolwork" is over (according to her own reckoning), it is horribly unfair to expect her to do a German worksheet with her dad when he gets home from work. She's the one who didn't want to do German Saturday School this year. She needs formal instruction in reading and writing German from someone, and Vati is the most qualified for the job. Here's hoping she acted so resentful today because it was the first day and that she quickly gets used to the "extra" learning time.

Her life's work at this point in life is primarily learning. Her work doesn't stop just because it's not included in some arbitrary outside schedule imposed by the school district and/or mom. She has oodles of free time, so it's not as though we are imposing onerous burdens on her by asking her to learn a little more right before dinner. What is really ironic is that she reads science books to herself all the time without realizing that I enter it as "school time" for homeschooling records.

Expectations

I'm at 17 weeks of pregnancy, and the nausea is finally, truly going away. That means I had about 9 weeks of life-altering illness this time. A week ago this time, I was starting to sink into depression because the nausea hadn't gone away yet like it was "supposed to". Having expectations not met is more demoralizing than just suffering by itself.

When I first started dating my husband, he told me that he prefers to keep his expectations low in order to avoid disappointment later. Naturally, I applied his words to myself--like any self-centered young adult--and was rather offended by the implication that he was having low expectations of me. I've since come to understand the wisdom of his philosophy, although I still make efforts sometimes to help him feel greater feelings of anticipation about an upcoming event (e.g., vacation, family outing, reception for work, etc.) than he would on his own.

His "low expectations" are usually very realistic expectations based on his experience and knowledge. He still hopes for the best, but he doesn't have a mental picture of everything turning up roses all the time...and that's a good thing, for although I'm a good wife, I'm not a "10" in the figure category (thank you, four pregnancies and sedentary work), and I spent much of the past summer in a semi-invalid state complaining about nausea. Yet, he still loves me and thinks I'm great. I consider myself very blessed that my husband doesn't have expectations of me being a superwoman, for I could not measure up.

I used to think one of the things my parents did "right" was have "high" expectations for us academically. I've since come to realize that what I thought were high expectations then were actually very realistic expectations given the academic abilities of my parents (father is now a PhD/MD, mother is a PhD/JD) and the early education they gave us (they ran a private school based on traditional academics when I was in pre-school). When it came to genetics and environment, they bestowed a good hand on me, and they were just expecting me to play it properly.

Now my job is to learn all I can about the abilities and interests of the little ones I'm raising so that I can have appropriate expectations of them. Expectations that are too low are an insult and can lead to delays in their development; expectations that are too high set them up for failure and depression.

Things I Have a Hard Time Stomaching...

Ha, ha. You probably thought this was going to be another post about morning sickness. Well, while I could go on ad nauseum on that subject, I'm actually talking about the stock market. A little over a year ago, my husband and I were debating whether to close our Roth IRA accounts (taking some losses, but not as much as if we had done it a year or two earlier) and use the funds towards paying off our home mortgage. The more I read about the market and the economy, the more hesitant I was to keep the Roth IRA's. I saw things like inflation of the money supply with no rise (until recently) in the price of anything except for stocks, articles talking about how stocks were valued at amounts that didn't reflect actual company earnings (making it seem like the market was more casino than an investment marketplace), and multiple warnings to buy gold. Like most people, I have a greater aversion to loss than desire to make a potential profit. So, I talked my husband into closing the Roth IRA accounts a year ago. As I watch the stock market drop today (which does still affect our non-Roth retirement accounts), I'm pleased with our decision. As imperfect as our house is--and it seriously has its flaws--it's shelter and it's insured...which is more than I can say for the stock market. I honestly don't know how stock traders handle the stress of their jobs; I would never take it.

Checking in

Ah, morning sickness. So unpleasant, but it helped hearing the baby's heartbeat yesterday at the doctor's office. Just think, this little creature in me has only been forming for around 10 weeks (I'm 12 weeks along), and he or she already has a beating heart. That's enough to bring a smile to the face of this weary mom.

I had ambitions for this summer. We were going to spend so much time in parks, and I was going to get through the last half of Volume 1 of The Story of the World. Instead, we have only made it to parks about twice per week, and I've hardly touched history for the past six weeks. The only academics I've been consistent on throughout this stage of pregnancy is using a book of addition worksheets for dd6 (she does about 4 per week) and doing about 4 lessons per week out of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons with dd4. On the bright side, my fatigue and nausea have helped my girls become more independent: now dd6 can get her own breakfast and make her own PBJ sandwiches, and dd4 is trying to read library books to herself.

Still here

Morning sickness has hit. Tomorrow marks 9 completed weeks of pregnancy. I am frequently nauseated and throw up nearly every day. I don't have excess energy for non-essential things like blogging right now. However, I do have a tip that I can't believe is working for me right now: Banquet frozen entrees. I generally abhor "TV dinners", but my dad--a retired physician--recommended I try the Banquet frozen entrees. They're just the right size and mercifully soft and bland. Each entree provides me enough protein and carbohydrates to fuel me through a few hours but doesn't make me queasy or overfill my stomach. I told my husband that I'm eating "old people food"; seriously, the meat is so soft that I could chew it with just gums. Oh, well. I can swallow my pride and eat the mushy, starchy TV entree...the important thing is that I can swallow the food and keep it down!

Narration

Dd6 has begun narrating to her stuffed animals. She has two favorite lizard-like stuffed animals, and she is telling them all about SCUBA diving right now. She watched a video on SCUBA diving last night. She seems to be a little blocked when narrating to me, but when she's just having fun with her stuffed animals, she's a wonder at regurgitating details. I'm not going to interfere with this new development at all! Also, I'm glad she found patient objects of her lengthy, fact-filled discourses; human beings don't enjoy her retelling after a few minutes. She's very thorough.