Old Words with New Tunes

At chapel this year we are praying Matins (LSB pg 219) on Monday, Wednesday, Fridays, and using Service of Prayer and Preaching (LSB pg 260) on Tuesday, Thursdays. A couple of years ago, when Pastor began teaching us the canticles in Service of Prayer & Preaching, I liked 'em. We sang them for a few months. But when we stopped, I didn't miss them. It's nice to be singing/praying those Isaiah and Pauline passages again on a regular basis.

But you know what? I suspect that by the end of the year, I may have had my fill of them. (Not unlike how much I utterly adore garden tomatoes, but right now I'd rather see them go into the canning jars than into my mouth. Never thought I'd see the day that I didn't want to inhale tomatoes but would prefer to have a short break from them!) As much as I love these canticles, there's something about the Venite and the Benedictus and the Magnificat and the Te Deum (from TLH and now in LSB) that is transcendent. I can sing/pray those every day -- even multiple times a day -- and they grow more and more beautiful and precious.

And that's what got me to wondering. When I read about the new music being written for the church, good churchly music, I've wondered sometimes about the constant pursuit of new settings for hymns and liturgy. There's nothing wrong with the new things. Many of them are very good. Many of them become my new "fave" for a few months. But why the frequent desire for something new? Is it the difference between what's beautiful and what's exquisitely sublime? Do we eventually tire of the beautiful and well-written new church music, whereas the old (at least, the old that is still with us!!) never becomes tiresome?

Trip to California

Looking ahead to the day when Maggie will be grown-up and no longer covered by our health insurance, I have been looking into some options that other families use. If she were to apply for any government help for the disabled (or whatever the current PC term is), we have to show need and disability. Well, how do you do that when you've been homeschooling her in a safe environment? The government will want me to show them that she's failed at her schooling and needs special accommodations. Well, good grief, homeschooling IS the epitome of "special accommodations."

I have learned that we need to have some behavioral-developmental evaluations and at least one neuro-psych evaluation. They tell me that this is par-for-the-course for what the schools provide to special needs kids. But my kid isn't in school. Well, we need these evaluations, and they are mega-expensive. But .... ! There is a researcher at University of California who is studying VCFS and the way kids think. We've applied for Maggie to be a research guinea pig, and she's been accepted. The other vcfs families who've participated say that it's a fun experience.

So at the beginning of December, they will fly Maggie and me to Sacramento. For three nights, they'll put us up at the Kiwanis House (like a Ronald McDonald House) next to the hospital. Maggie will spend time with a psychiatrist and a behavioral evaluator. But mostly she'll be be playing video games and doing puzzles and things like that. They want to see which sections of her brain are busy while she's doing certain kinds of thinking tasks. Then they'll discuss the results with me and later send me the official reports.

Ahead of time, I have hours of evaluation forms to fill out. I've done quite a few already. I'm going to need to photocopy the long form which included all the history of Maggie's surgeries and hospitalizations and when she learned to walk and talk and dress herself; with all the work I put into gathering that information into one place, I want to keep a record of it myself. The only surprise to me on the forms was one aspect of Maggie's personality that I hadn't noticed until filling out the behavioral evaluation forms. I guess her obedience and cheerfulness and contentedness just kind of overshadowed that one aspect that I'd never before realized.

So Maggie is going to get her first plane ride. And I'm going to go west of the Rockies for the first time. It will be a short little girl-trip for us together. With lots of video games for Mag!

VCFS Pictures

A lot of people who google "vcfs pictures" or "vcfs photos" end up coming to my blog, and that post unfortunately has no photographs; it has only what I learned one day about the face-shape of kids with velo-cardio-facial syndrome. What if we help folks out a bit? Maggie and Katie have facebook pictures that may illustrate one example of what the "f" in VCFS looks like.

So we have here two sisters who look a lot like each other. Katie, the older one, does not have vcfs. Maggie does. In this picture, Katie is the one not sticking out her tongue.


Here we have four pictures of Maggie. The vcfs experts tell us that the "look" to vcfs includes almond-shaped eyes, an elongated face (often heart-shaped), a wide nose bridge, and small ears.




For comparison, here's her sister from when she wasn't too much older than Maggie is now. (Katie is the one on the right. The one on the left isn't blood-family, though we'd love to claim her.)

And now we need a picture of Katie that shows off her deeper-set eyes and the bridge of her nose. (I'm sure she's just thrilled about Mom's comment here!) But, hey, for the sake of comparison...



The top one of this pair is Maggie handing out bulletins at her sister's wedding. The bottom one is Katie at her goddaughter's baptism.



And finally, a couple of pictures with Katie's daughter. The top picture is Maggie (who has vcfs) and the bottom one is Katie (who does not).

I Love the Law

Pr Petersen has a wonderful post on the law, and how it should and shouldn't be preached, and what it does. Amen to what he says, especially the middle paragraph. I find that the usual type of "law" in sermons does me no good; it doesn't kill my sinful flesh; it bolsters my self-righteousness. What I love and what I need is the law that isn't fun for either the preacher to preach or for me to hear. But it's what is true and good.

Homeschoolers Who Don't Do Anything

We occasionally hear complaints about homeschoolers who are goofing off, playing outdoors. And it crossed my mind today that the neighbors are seeing Andrew outside on a scooter. They don't know that he's doing schoolwork, memorizing chunks of the Augsburg Confession, rehearsing what he's learned. They don't know that Maggie, when she's out taking a walk or shooting hoops, is not just getting her exercising, but may be conjugating Greek verbs in her mind or making sense of the chapter of the story we read. A kid who's mowing during the schoolday is not being put to menial use as a child-slave, but may actually be writing a story while he's shoving the lawnmower around the yard. Just because it appears that a kid is "doing nothing" does not at all mean there's no schoolwork percolating in his head.

Graphic Content

You gotta wonder what's up with our society when a cooking show is doing a segment on barbecuing, including roasting a pig on a spit, and the show starts off with a parental advisory warning:

This program contains graphic content.


I thought Gary was joking when he told me about the warning. But he wasn't.
So, Erin, why didn't you have a warning on your Labor Day blogposts?

Education as a Means of Grace?

At a conference I attended last month, the Lutheran speaker told us that a classical education will better prepare the heart to receive Christ (or to be open to the gospel, or something on that order). Maybe EC has the exact quote jotted down somewhere?

So when Kerry commented here the other day, pointing out the CiRCE site on classical education, I was surprised to see a related statement there:
The classical Christian teacher asks God to use his teaching, dispositions, and actions as an instrument in His hand to cultivate the students' souls toward holiness. In this sense, learning can be a means of grace.
Thing is, the CiRCE site looks very Reformed.


If it is true that holiness is promoted by classical education, then classical education must not be about teaching Latin, or about grammar, logic, and rhetoric, or about a particular core curriculum, or about critical thinking, or about rigorous academics. Surely we would not say those things (good though they may be) are tools of the Holy Spirit to create and sustain faith.

So which is it? Is it wrong to say that classical education inculcates holiness and/or helps draw a person to Christ? Or is it that classical education isn't really about the things we usually speak of when we discuss the topic?

Drying Soap

In spring we noticed that the bars of my home-made soap lasted so much longer than store-bought soap. But when I made another batch in May and began using it in August, the soap was dissolving quicker than it had been. Eventually we noticed that a fresh bar of soap would lather and smell soapy, but as it was used and we worked our way further toward the middle of the bar, the soap wouldn't bubble so well, and it smelled more piggy from the lard. Apparently it hadn't had time enough to get good and dry all the way through the bar, but just on the outside.

The theory now is to rotate the bars. I can use the outside of all the bars, and then let them sit and dry some more. That should solve part of the problem.

The bigger problem, though, is making the soap far enough ahead of time that it can sit for at least half a year, preferably a year, drying thoroughly. That takes discipline. And forethought. And making something a priority even though you won't benefit from it for a full year. Yikesy!

In other words, I should be making another batch. Or two. Or three. I haven't yet found a place to buy tallow and lard (other than where I used to buy it, which is now an 80-minute drive one-way). So I tried making soap from Crisco. I used one bar to see if my skin had an adverse reaction ... and so far, so good. I guess I'd better head to Aldi for some more shortening.

Touching the Ark

Remember in the story (in 2 Samuel 6) about David bringing the ark to Jerusalem? I always felt so bad for Uzzah that he was struck dead for trying to stop the ark from falling. After all, it was tipping off the cart; he wanted to prevent an accident.

In our story yesterday, Pastor pointed out that the ark wasn't even supposed to be on a cart. It was to be transported by its poles, carried by the priests. So if they'd taken God's word seriously about how to move the ark, the potential for an accident wouldn't have been there in the first place. How 'bout that?

Cinnamon Everywhere

Can a person have taste-bud hallucinations?

For the last year or so, I've been tasting cinnamon in Snickers. Never tasted it there before. Assumed they'd changed the recipe slightly.

Then I started tasting cinnamon in chocolate chip cookies. And I don't mean other people's choc-chip cookies, where somebody might've put a pinch in the dough. I mean my choc-chip cookies, that I baked, where I know there is no cinnamon.

And this morning I tasted cinnamon in the granola. The granola that I made. The granola that has no cinnamon.

At least I'm hallucinating cinnamon and not liver or kale.

Classical versus Progressive Education

Classical education seems to be a topic of interest to many people in the last decade or so. Try as I might, I cannot get a handle on what it is, though. Some say classical education is about the content of the curriculum. Some say it's about the methodology of teaching. Some say it's about teaching subjects such as Latin and logic and rhetoric. The one evaluation I heard consistently was that classical education is NOT progressive education.

Even this, though, I am beginning to wonder about. The self-proclaimed goals and methods of progressive educators seem to me to have a lot of similarities to the self-proclaimed goals and methods of classical educators.

Both camps say they value

• critical thinking and problem solving,
• de-emphasizing textbooks and instead using other resources,
• educating children who will grow up to be of service to the neighbor,
• life-long learning,
• seeing the interconnectedness of academic subjects, and
• evaluation methods that do not depend on standard testing procedures.

Even in some of the areas of greater difference, I still see similarities.

• Progressive educators greatly value learning by doing, hands-on projects, and experience. Most classical educators recognize that much book-learning is cemented in the mind by projects or experiments or experiences.
• Progressive educators value understanding over rote memory. Classical educators see great value in rote learning, but not for its own sake. Classical educators want children to use their rote learning to grow in understanding, to be able to reason with the information they have memorized.
• Some classical educators see great value in doing unit studies and learning-through-literature, connecting different academic subjects in the one project or one book. Progressive educators often present information in integrated ways such as unit studies.

There are differences. Progressive education puts more value on group work than does classical education. Progressive education will often set aside rote work altogether instead of ensuring that rote work is explained and understood and used later. Progressive education is more concerned with figuring out what skills and information will be necessary and practical in the future, and concentrates on imparting those, whereas classical education spends more time on reading the great books from ages past.

What's hard to take seriously is when each side accuses the other of the same things. Some say that we should all do classical education so that our children will learn to think critically; progressive educators accuse classical educators of failing to teach critical thinking. Progressive educators throw stones at classical educators for teaching separate academic subjects so that the children never learn the interconnectedness of it all; classical educators promote their view by insisting that children need to see how the subjects interrelate instead of studying many disjointed topics. Sometimes the two sides sound more alike than different. But there is a difference. What I can't figure out is just those differences are.

If the same thing is done in two classrooms, but done for different reasons, arising out of different philosophies, will one way be right and the other wrong? Will those philosophies show through in hard-to-pin-down ways?

What I can't take seriously is "Listen to my side because we value thus-and-such" while the opposing philosophy is saying the exact same thing. Surely there must be a way to get down to what the real differences are, and how they play out, and how the different aspects mesh or conflict with Christian doctrine. (The unfortunate thing is that when I ask these questions, the conversation usually resorts to name-calling, guilt by association, or knocking down straw men. This is not attractive amongst those who say they value teaching logic.)

Reading Progress

Four years ago, Maggie read, for the first time, a book that hadn't been read to her previously. It was a short and easy chapter-book, and it had a lot of white space, but I was thrilled. This week, her friend Mary loaned her a copy of Ella Enchanted, a "real" book, a grown-up book, and she read the whole book on her own in two and a half days. Isn't that fabulous?

A Visit from a Friend

On Monday, my friend S had a chance to come visit. We were seldom able to get together even when we lived relatively near each other. So it's a real treat when she is able to make a quick trip to the Milwaukee area.

One of the things I learned from her is what's killed my cucumbers and is in the process of killing my watermelon vines. Apparently there's a fungus among us this year. After what she mentioned, I've discovered that other people are having the same problem, and I'm lucky that it hasn't bothered my beans or tomatoes or herbs -- just my cukes, squash, and melons. We were wondering what-on-earth we were going to do with all those watermelons... Well, I guess this is a lesson in "Don't count your watermelons before they're hatched."

This reminds me (in an ADD way); I'm not killing grass for a garden expansion. Wonder when I'm going to get to that?

My friend can play organ and piano, and one of the things I appreciate so much when she visits is her request before leaving: "Let's sing a hymn or two together." Hooray! Yes! Let's! Why don't I do that with other friends? (Maybe because it's easier when somebody can play the piano for it?)

APT

Last Friday and this Friday we spent gorgeous days, outdoors in southwestern Wisconsin, watching Shakespeare. This week was The Winter's Tale and last week was The Comedy of Errors. This week's play was good, but we enjoyed Comedy much more.

The attendance was amazingly low. Oftentimes the theater is full; I usually order our homeschool group's tickets in early April so that I can ensure we have reservations for the dates we choose. This year, though, the theater was only between half and two-thirds full. Last week we attributed the low attendance to its being the first week of school in many school districts. But seeing low attendance again today, maybe it's the economy.

Donna (one of the moms who attends these plays with us) pointed out that Shakespeare wrote today's story with a 16-year interlude between acts, between the time the princess was abandoned as a baby and the time she grew up and had fallen in love with her father's best friend's son. So here we are in the story, with a 16-yr-old prepared to marry a prince a few years older than she. But APT changed it to be a 20-year gap in the story. Can't have 16-yr-olds getting married, I guess.

Learning a Language

I'm not talking about a normal foreign language, although I suppose the same lessons apply.

In the last week, I became familiar with the language of textual criticism. A friend is finishing up her doctoral dissertation on Job, and she needed a proofreader. When she introduced me to her 500-page dissertation, she was throwing around words like obelus and lemma and catena and asterisk (no, it's not what you think it is) and names like Symmachus and Aquila and Theodotion. So, I'm taking notes, writing down what she wants me to check, trying to figure out what ALL these numbers and punctuation marks mean. Oh, and then there's Greek and Hebrew and Latin and Syriac and Aramaic and German and a bunch of other languages in this book. The first day or so, I was just checking format: margins, vertical spacing, indentations, etc. I could handle that.

But then I got into the text and the evaluation of the critical apparatus. I never felt so stupid in my life. I didn't know what was going on. It all seemed so hard. I had to keep looking up information to make sure I was catching the typos and errors. It was pretty overwhelming. But I kept going, immersed in this project I told my friend I'd help with. And slowly it became easier. Slowly I learned which manuscript numbers were associated with which manuscript-groups and what the code-numbers were. Slowly I began to make sense out of all those symbols and jottings which aren't words. Slowly I began to recognize the players, the ones from the second century and the ones in the last couple of centuries. And slowly I began to speed up on the proofreading because I was no longer looking at something so foreign.

Come to think of it, when Gary taught himself Latin, he had the same experience. He plunged into translating a book, and it went slowly and clumsily. But as he continued working, the translating came easier to him. It also seems to fit with the experience of Nathaniel Bowditch (whose story I greatly enjoy) as he taught himself languages.

Come to think of it, my friend Laura is doing this now, as she learns all the details and routines involved in her new outside-the-home job where she has to learn the language of investing.

I guess I really ought to install Rosetta Stone. I've been procrastinating for three weeks. We can't even pretend to immerse ourselves in German (for tiny little bits of each day) as long the computer program sits in the box instead of on the computer's hard drive...

Oh, yeah,...

Today's mail contained an envelope for Andrew. I told him there was a birthday card for him from Grandma and Grandpa. He didn't ask which set of grandparents. It took me a few seconds to figure out why he didn't ask.

Seems like there are a whole lot more memories swirling around in my brain, more things being "processed" from last June, now that we're to the time of year when there are memories of another loss too.

Beautiful Day

The weather in September has been more summery than the July or August weather this year. Today the kids played educational games while the moms were occupied at Bible class, then we brought Leah home with us. After Greek class, lunch, more Greek, and a little basketball, we all settled down to our books: I did some editing while the kids sat on the deck with math or history or whatever, enjoying a gorgeous day.

And herein lies the idyllic part of homeschooling.

Health Care

It's that time of year when I get to pondering the luxurious awesomeness of hot water flowing from my faucets.

I remember how much our backs were hurting by the end of the cold-&-quick shower month. We have so much pain relief (that usually goes unappreciated) just from hot showers.

I found fleas on the cat a week ago. I put the Frontline Plus on her. And I wondered a bit as to why we don't get fleas from the cats. For one thing, we usually discover what's going on before the fleas get bad. But if we didn't? Ah, but we take showers each day, and that would wash those little buggers down the drain. (For some reason, kitties don't want to immerse themselves in water daily...)

And think of all the germies that are washed down the drain when we shower daily, and when we wash our hands multiple times daily. Ooooooh -- running water is a lovely thing to have!

There are so many little things we have that preserve our health, things we don't even notice. Fruits and veggies for nutrition, instead of living on potatoes or cornbread. A D.O. or chiropractor who can straighten a back to alleviate pain. Aspirin to counteract inflammation after an injury. Glasses and hearing aids that keep us connected to the rest of the world when age begins to rob us of sight and sound. Enzymes and probiotics (in capsule form) to help counteract the effects of all the over-processing of the food we eat.

It used to be that 60-yr-olds were old. It's not that way so much anymore. I think a lot of it has to do with these little benefits that we take for granted.

Easy Raspberry Vinaigrette

I don't have raspberry vinegar, a basic ingredient to most raspberry vinaigrette dressings. But I have raspberry jam and blackberry jam.

Take a spoonful of jam, an equal amount of apple cider vinegar, maybe with a splash of balsamic vinegar. Add a pinch of salt. If you wish to add other spices, hunky-dory. But the jam, vinegar, and salt will do quite nicely. Stir (or shake) it well.

Use this dressing on a spinach salad, with some onion slices, and if you're lucky you can toss in a few raspberries, and yum yum yum....

The Tongue

Today's [three-year series] epistle is from James 3:
We all stumble in many things.
If anyone does not stumble in word,
he is a perfect man,
able also to bridle the whole body.
Then James goes on to talk about how animals can be tamed, but the tongue cannot. And how it is wrong for a mouth to spew forth cursing when it has been used to bless God. And how the evil tongue can defile the whole body.

Usually this passage is used to tell us how important it is to control our speech, to watch our language and choice of words, to not fly off the handle and say words that are unable to be taken back.

But today I'm wondering if maybe it has more to do with doctrine than it does profanity or angry outbursts.

Is the person who doesn't "stumble in word" the person who controls what he says or the person who confesses true doctrine?