Book 15: Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer

I didn't do a weekly report last week, and we've mostly taken this week off (other than a little catch  up work, plus outside class stuff) because DH has been on vacation, so not much blog action lately...but I do need to catch up on book reviews. So. There's actually a WTM discussion going on right now about Frank Schaeffer and this book specifically....largely about what a bratty, ungrateful, ass of a son he is.  Here's what I posted there:

I finished Crazy for God earlier this week...I'm still not entirely sure what I think about it. I guess my impression was that Frank Schaeffer is kind of a jerk (a view of him that the book itself suggests that most people who know him share or have shared at some point). He's very hard on his parents and his tone is often bitter and sarcastic, but he's also hard on himself (and prints letters from his daughter in which she exhibits the same lack of tact and mercy about him that he shows towards his parents). In many places, he's also very sympathetic to his parents and seems to value his relationships with them.

The things he actually says (as opposed to the way he says them) are not, by and large, all that scathing. His parents had a sometimes rocky marriage and parented him largely through benign neglect. There's a lot of posturing for money and political power among some of the leaders in the religious right, and some people are in it more for that than out of sincere religious conviction. Honestly, I didn't feel like any of these things were hard to believe or shockers, especially. But I don't think I'd much care for the guy if I met him, either. 

...of course, a lot of the views on that thread are from people who know (the work of) and love Frank's father, Francis Schaeffer, and who are considerably more politically and religiously conservative than I am. As someone who came into the book with a pretty low opinion of the religious right, I'm sure I'm looking at it quite differently. I actually wouldn't have minded a little MORE gossip about how creepy Billy Graham is, to be honest. The book was a little more...impressionistic, maybe?...than I was expecting. More than half of it is taken up with memories of childhood; all told, the bashing of the religious right doesn't take up as much space as I expected, nor is it as concrete or, umm, chronological. Impressionistic. Episodic. Schaeffer is utterly uninterested (at least in this book) in issues of theology, which kind of disappointed me, I have to say. He thinks the Calvinism espoused by his parents is silly and deeply flawed (he later converts and becomes Orthodox), but he never really spells out why; he's more interested in the effect Calvinism has on the people who believe in it than in unraveling it intellectually. And there. There's my impressionistic review.

Book 14: The World is Bigger Now by Euna Lee

I read Laura Ling's book about her experiences as a captive in North Korea a few weeks ago, and, of course, I'm obsessed with North Korea, so giving Ling's co-worker Euna Lee's account a listen (as an audiobook) seemed like the thing to do. Lee is as fond of lengthy titles as her colleague is; the full title is The World is Bigger Now: An American Journalist's Release from Captivity in North Korea...A Remarkable Story of Faith, Family, and Forgiveness. Perhaps you'll recall that Ling's book left me feeling a little annoyed with all the trouble everyone in two countries had to go to to save Ling and Lee from their own stupidity. It is very hard to be annoyed with Lee, however, because she's so unbelievably guilt-stricken herself over ever decision she's ever made. She feels guilty for putting work ahead of her family. She feels guilty for having thought badly of North Koreans as a child growing up in South Korea. She feels guilty for going on the trip to make the documentary in the first place. She feels guilty because her North Korean interrogator successfully causes her to feel resentment toward Laura Ling. She feels guilty because she is angry with God during her captivity. Her guilt reaches particularly absurd levels at one point when she admits that she feels guilty for having put her North Korean interrogator through so much trouble...you know, having to interrogate her every day.

The actual experiences Ling and Lee go through are very similar (they're kept apart, but in the same building), but Ling's account reads like a trip report from a Carnival Cruise compared to Lee's. Ling just seems to have a personality better suited to months of mental and emotional stress and uncertainty, or perhaps she was just less willing to revisit the darker parts of her experience in her memoir. A couple of distinctions do stand out: Lee speaks Korean, so she can understand everything that's going on. On the other hand, she appears to have been given much less information about what was happening back in the US to secure her release than Ling. Ling was a somewhat active participant, communicating with her sister about what needed to happen (basically, Bill Clinton needed to come to North Korea; no one else was good enough) to get them released. Lee has nothing to do, on the other hand, but spiral downward into a mental breakdown and come close to a suicide attempt at one point. Lastly, Lee has a young daughter (4 at the time), which adds an extra level of pathos to her long, uncertain period of captivity.

Ultimately, I felt more sympathetic toward Lee than Ling after reading both accounts, but Lee's was often painful to listen to (and not in a good way).

February 7-11, 2011: Week 24

The problem with waiting until Sunday to write the weekly report is that I no longer have any memory of what we did all week. Especially when the weekend has involved a head cold (for me, Dave, Ari, and Gus), a basketball tournament, (for Ari) and a math tournament (for Dave). But I have some pictures, so I will do my best to reconstruct. Looking through the pictures, it appears that mostly we played with the kitten all week:

But there must have been more. Let me think.

Ari: started reading The Hobbit and did a few dictation sentences from it. We're reading Fellowship of the Ring as a read aloud at bedtime, so I hope it is not too confusing. He seems to be handling it okay. He is annoyed with J.K. Rowling right now and how much she borrowed from LOTR. It is a little startling, I have to say. We're reading the endless Council of Elrond chapter right now in FOTR, and I'm finding it so tedious (one of Ari's Caesar's English words!) myself that I can't believe Ari and Milo aren't complaining about it. They are generally very quick to complain when they're not into a book, though (especially Ari), so I can only assume they're actually enjoying it.

Ari hasn't gotten around to Life of Fred for a couple of weeks now; it's all Singapore all the time. He's working on percents right now. He had another competition for Math Olympiad this week; word is the test are getting a bit tougher as the year goes on. There's one more in March, and then he's finished with that for the year.

He did two writing assignments: a summary about Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome, and a paragraph comparing and contrasting dwarves and hobbits. Oh, he also did a journal entry for Growing Up Heroic--he wrote a diary entry from the perspective of a kid in Ancient Greece.

I went ahead and ordered Killgallon's Sentence Composing for Elementary School, and he did the first two assignments from it. More on that after I've had a chance to see it action for awhile.

Wednesday was his last biology dissection class at LEO; he dissected a sheep's brain. I let him decide whether he wanted me to sign him up for the next session (on the human body) or not, thinking he definitely wouldn't want to do it, but he surprised me and said he did. I'm making him sign a paper saying it was his choice to take it, so I can pull it out and show him when he starts complaining about the homework.

Milo: did surprisingly well starting addition with renaming in Singapore. It takes him awhile, but he's not getting frustrated or complaining too much. I think at this rate he's going to finish up Singapore 2A when he's in 8th grade or so, but slow and steady wins the race, right? Really, I'm hoping to do math over the summer and get through at least some of 2B before the fall.

Still reading Chamber of Secrets for school. For free reading, he's still tearing through Magic Tree House, and he also read the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book.

He did another week in WWE2; this week's book was The Borrowers.

Gus: did some more Singapore 1a, and also, on his own time, for fun, made a sheet with different ways to make 10. He wrote down all the pairs of numbers, plus a couple ways to add 3 numbers together to get 10, but got stuck when he got to -1. I drew a number line to help him out, and then he added -1+11 and -2+12.

He finished reading both "Frog and Toad are Friends" (to me) and "Frog and Toad All Year" (to Dave). He's starting on Little Bear now at bedtime, and I need to think about what he should read to me for school. He's at the point where he's reading Frog and Toad, et. al. fluently with no help, so I'd like to save those for independent bedtime reading and have him read something a little more challenging for school.

History: we read the chapter on the beginning of Rome in SOTW, which means we really need to wrap up that Alexander the Greek book. But it will probably be another week or two.

Science! Our kits came on Monday, so we did two activities on Tuesday, one from each kit. The first one was pretty simple--mostly just feeling our chests and throats to check out the respiratory system. The second one was really cool, though--we made little poking/measuring devices out of (included!) hair pins, making one with the tips .5 cm apart, then all the way up to 3 cm at half cm intervals. Then we blindfolded someone and touched various body parts (back of hand, palm, finger, back of neck, arm, leg) with the different hairpins to see which body parts have the most nerve receptors (for the less sensitive body parts, you can only feel one of the hairpin points when they're close together).

Incidentally, the blindfold is one we already had. The nutshell kit did come with one, but it was made of plastic and tore as soon as we put it on, and wasn't comfortable. Disappointment! Other than that, though, I'm very pleased so far.

On Thursday, we did the section on the digestive system from Discovery Education Science (I did the elementary one with Milo and Gus; Ari worked on the middle school one on his own). Then we read from Open Me Up, again about the digestive system.

Book 13: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

There's a passage I have marked in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. I read the book in high school, and I can no longer remember what it's about, but the passage has always stuck with me, and when I went to look for it just now, the book opened immediately to the page where I had underlined it:

He would disapprove of Muriel's mother, too. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living, stopping off at delicatessens, seeing her analyst, consuming a novel every night, putting on her girdle, plotting for Muriel's health and prosperity. I love her. I find her unimaginably brave.

I kept thinking  of this passage as I read Let the Great World Spin. I was initially attracted to the novel for two reasons: I adore the title. And Dave I and watched, a few months ago, a documentary called Man on  Wire, about Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who strung a wire and walked between the World Trade Towers in 1974. Petit's walk is the frame story for Let the Great World Spin; the event that ties, sometimes very loosely, all the characters together. The story is told from the point of view of several different characters, and most of the action of the novel takes place on the day of or in the days immediately surrounding Petit's walk. There is Ciaran, recently arrived from Ireland and living with his brother, Corrigan, the monk who befriends prostitutes, Tillie, one of said prostitutes, Claire, the wife of Solomon, the judge in whose courtroom Petit ends up after his arrest. And on and on.

The "main current of poetry that flows through all things" is both literal and figurative here, and more democratic than in Salinger's story; no one escapes its touch; no one is forced to endure life without it. Fragments of poems are sprinkled through the novel. The title, McCann reveals in a note at the end, "comes from the Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem "Locksley Hall." That in turn was heavily influenced by the 'Mu'allaqat,' or the 'Suspended Poems,' seven long Arabic poems written in the sixth century." The prostitutes quote Rumi. Ciaran arrives in New York with a copy of "Howl" tucked into his bag. And aside from this literal current of poetry, uniting people through time and space, there are the constant attempts to find--or to assign--meaning to life, and, particularly, to life in a dark, chaotic time and place. Through painting, photography, filmmaking, technology, through, of course, the tightrope walk itself.

Is all this interconnectedness significant or coincidence? Is the meaning, the beauty we find in life real or imagined? And can it sustain us in the face of everything that goes wrong? These are the questions the book grapples with; after all "at a certain stage," muses one character, "every single thing can be a sign." Is that what's going on? Are the characters (and by extension the reader) grasping at straws, trying desperately to assign meaning to things that have none, in a world where nothing really makes sense? And, maybe McCann is also asking, does it really matter, ultimately, which it is? Let the Great World Spin is dark in places, certainly, and heartbreaking (another label request: "Warning: mothers with dead sons"), but it is never cynical and never hopeless. One character carries a photo of Petit on his wire: "It strikes her as an enduring moment, the man alone against scale, still capable of myth in the face of all other evidence."

January 31-February 4, 2011: Week 23

This week was a sharp contrast to last week, in that we had very few outside the house plans, so we were able to stay home most of the time and be alternately very productive and very lazy. The weather was awful for most of the week, so we also spent a lot of time inside and watched terrible things on the TV, like Home Alone 3. Well, I didn't watch Home Alone 3, but the kids did. Sometimes, when it's 38 and raining, you just have to let your kids eat popcorn and watch Home Alone 3. Also, you have to make a skillet cookie, so we did that after Home Alone 3 was over:

Ari is unwrapping butter while Gus makes a funny face. And the finished product:

This was all on Friday. We usually finish up school early on Friday and then go to park day with some friends. But said friends (two different families) were ALL going out of town to warm places, so no park day. We thought about going somewhere ourselves, but it seemed much cozier to stay home with Skillet Cookie (Skillet Cookie is like a friend at this point, so it's a proper noun). And THEN, Friday night,  my mom watched the kids while Dave and I went to the Waffle House and to see The King's Speech, so it was pretty much, like, the best Friday EVER.

So that's how the week ended. Now to back up.

We did a lot of history this week, but very little science, because we're waiting on a package from Delta Education--a couple of human body Science in a Nutshell kits. We did start reading from David Macaulay's The Way We Work, though, on Friday, in between bites of Skillet Cookie:

We read about cells and atoms (I'm not sure if you knew this, but people are MADE out of cells, which, in turn, are made out of atoms). Atoms, in case you've not heard, are very, very small. Macaulay includes a hard to follow if you are Gus analogy involving a tennis ball, a terrier, and Manhattan.

For history, we read the chapter (26, I think) on the ancient Americas in SOTW, but kept reading about Greece otherwise. It's all the same books as last week, so I'll post a picture of them instead of saying what they are again:

(and this is where the pictures dry up. But next week there will be science and, therefore, pictures!) Ari kept working on "Growing Up Heroic" which suggests he watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding and compare a modern Greek American family with ancient Greek families. It's been a long time since I watched MBFGW, and I'm trying to remember if it's something the kids would actually sit through or not.

Ari did two writing assignments again this week--a summary about the Nazca people from SOTW and a compare/contrast paragraph about Sparta and Athens for Paragraph Town. Next week he's going to do the same assignment again, but this time comparing and contrasting two characters from A Wrinkle in Time.  Speaking of which, he finished A Wrinkle in Time this week. He did several sentences from Practice Town, read some stuff about meter in his poetry book (I'm not having him do any of the poetry writing assignments unless he wants to, so much trauma did it cause last year. I had a sneaking suspicion that he secretly likes writing poetry, though, and this was confirmed by my discovery of a notebook in his room, entitled, "Poetry Inspired by Literature" with a series of poems based on A Series of Unfortunate Events), and did two dictation sentences from A Wrinkle in Time, which I used as a springboard for some brief discussion about setting and character.

Milo had a good week in math! He's doing 2 and 3 digit addition and subtraction without renaming, and he likes it So.Much.Better than the mental addition and subtraction he was doing before. I think with his focus issues, he just has a very hard time holding everything in his head long enough to do something like 24 + 33 mentally. But he's finally quick enough with his facts up to 10 that doing it in columns is no problem. So it was nice to a have a week without despair in math. He's still reading Chamber of Secrets, and I'm not sure he'll ever finish. In other reading, he finished up the first Lemony Snicket book, read a few more Magic Treehouses, and read some of the Ask Me Anything book he got for Christmas. He did narration and dictation from Pilgrim's Progress in WWE this week; that John Bunyon isn't very subtle with the whole allegory thing, is he?

Gus loves his RFWP Aesop books. He also loves math, and tells me so whenever Milo says that he hates math. He's still working on 1A; I pretty much just turn him loose on it while Milo's doing math, and let him do as much or as little as  he wants. He took a break from Frog and Toad this week to read to me from his animal encylopedia:

 We learned that there's a fish that can swim faster than a cheetah can run, and that the octopus has a really big brain.

Next year stuff

I haven't been reading as voraciously this week because I've been madly planning the buying spree for next year and going as far as mapping out schedules. Thoughts:

*I was looking over the Duke TIP King Arthur samples and feeling kind of overwhelmed about how much writing it involves and, thus, how much time it will take. Then I realized that I can actually change our plans and not do it next year. This was a big relief. It's geared toward 6th grade and up gifted kids, so it would probably be something of a stretch for my not-as-reluctant-as-before-but-still-sometimes-stubborn-rising-5th-grade-writer. I had it in my head that we needed to do it next year because we're doing the middle ages then, but really the world won't end if we either wait a year and do it as a literature study or even--gasp--don't EVER do it.

*I am considering doing some Killgallon stuff for English with Ari next year and taking two years to cover MCT's Voyage level. Still mulling it over but 1. I think more time with the writing assignments, really nailing them, would be a good thing for him and 2. slowing down means we won't finish all the MCT language arts by 8th grade. That might be good. Still thinking.

*I realized last night that I'm attempting to come up with four separate reading lists for history next year: read alouds for everyone, books to read to Gus/books for Gus to read independently, Ari's books, Milo's books. There might be some overlap, but still. But I have a rough draft of Ari's reading list. Ari's list is science, literature, and history (mostly historical fiction) combined; he'll do all of this during his reading time, then read/outline from (probably) History: The Definitive Visual Guide, while Milo and Gus do supplemental history reading. If I stick with this, Milo will have an hour and fifteen minutes of assigned reading some days, between literature and history. But reading is his favorite subject by far, so I don't think he'll mind.

*The (tentative) list:
Adam of the Road
The Door in the Wall
The Second Mrs. Giocanda
Catherine, Called Birdy
The Trumpeter of Krakow
The Omnivore's Dilemma (young reader's)
Archimedes and the Door of Science
The Mysteries of Beethoven's Hair
The Wind in the Willows
Tom Sawyer
The Westing Game
Haroun and the Sea of Stories

I have a bunch of others I can add in if we get through all of these. I'm also waiting on the MCT literature studies to see if they'll fit in for next year. Also, I had been thinking of some Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, but they don't seem to be there, do they? Well, tentative. Input welcome, particularly as I haven't read most of these myself.