Lift Up Your Hearts!

Our choir anthem for Sunday, October 13, 2013:  When I Think of You (Michael W. Smith, arr. by Gary Rhodes, Word Music, 0 80689 28127 3). 

Since our Cherub Choir was featured, I was hoping to have a video of them to show here, but it hasn't appeared on Facebook yet, so instead you can hear it at JWPepper.com:  When I Think of You.  If you picture a bunch of African kids singing (and dancing), the music makes a lot more sense.

Sunday was also St. Francis Day, with the annual Blessing of the Animals.  This is when I get to brag that we go to a snake-handling church.  Dogs outnumbered every other pet by far, however.  Now picture an outdoor service, with animals everywhere, including two very excitable dogs in the choir, and a bunch of very excitable, very young Cherubs ... no wonder the priest said, as he greeted the newcomers, "It's not like this every Sunday."

Happy Birthday!

Congratulations to one of my most faithful readers, who turns 50 today.  Mind you, it's a bit of a stretch to remember back that far myself, but I'm pretty sure the 50's is a great decade.  (I'm not talking about the era of poodle skirts, Elvis, and air raid drills.)

It's times like this I am so happy to be neither Jewish, Muslim, nor Theonomist.  We had pulled pork for dinner the other night and it was so, so, so, so good!  We've been eating the leftovers ever since.  I can't believe it took me this long to discover that I could make this dish myself.  So easy!  My apologies to our kids for depriving them of delicious pulled pork throughout their childhoods.  What kind of a Southerner am I, anyway?

Pulled Pork Sandwiches

Ingredients

         pork roast that will fit in your crock pot (butt or shoulder; these shred better)
     1  onion, chopped
         barbecue-ish spices for rub
   1½  cups liquid, approximately (e.g. a bottle of hard cider, beer, water, juice)
         barbecue sauce (Jack Daniels No. 7 Original or your favorite)
         hamburger buns, lightly toasted

Directions

The day before  Rub roast well, all over, with lots of spices.  Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

The next morning  Place chopped onions in the bottom of a crock pot.  Add the roast and liquid.  Cook on low 8 - 10 hours or on high 4 - 5 hours.

Remove meat from pot.  Pour and reserve any excess liquid.  The meat may have shredded itself by now; if not, shred using two forks, and return to pot.  Add some barbecue sauce for flavor.  Some of the reserved liquid can be added back if the pork is too dry and you don’t want to add more sauce.

Serve on hamburger buns, with more barbecue sauce on the side if desired.

(Cobbled together and modified from several pulled pork recipes online.)

Last night the youth choir at our church gave a concert.  The theme was the history of Contemporary Christian Music, a genre rather low on my list of music that I can stomach appreciate.  But with increasing familiarity—and (I cannot say this too often) the fact that I'm now in a church where we sing it at a volume that does not cause me to think more about the pain in my ears than anything else—I'm beginning to like more than a few of these songs. Besides, these are our kids, and deserve support.  I'm continually amazed not only at how good their voices are, but at how many of them have the guts to stand up and sing solos.  Our music director is amazing—the more I see, the less I can buy his argument that he just has great kids to work with.

Be that as it may, I can't say I enjoyed the selection of songs, even though a number were familiar, some from a long way back.  A couple hit home, however.  Blessed Be Your Name always does.  And then there was Heaven Is in My Heart.  My immediate reaction was that I'd never heard of it.  Then again, it sounded so familiar.  Just not quite right.  Finally, it hit me:  Der Himmel Erfüllt Mein Herz.  I had sung it not much more than a month ago, but as far as I was concerned it was a German praise song.  I had no idea there was an English version.  My mind knows how interconnected the world now is; my heart does, too, since we have intimate connections across the ocean.  But my gut is having trouble catching up, apparently:  running unexpectedly into something from another part of my world always astonishes me.

It's funny how the language challenge adds a complexity that makes praise songs far more interesting, at least when you're singing them.

Once again I apologize for the lack of meat in recent posts.  I'm intensely involved in a couple of projects with deadlines, and when that happens, other things requiring sustained thought get put on hold.  It's not that I haven't had any opinions lately!

Our choir anthems for Sunday, September 29, 2013:  Holy, Holy, Holy (Robert Clatterbuck, Hope Publishing Company, C 5470).  No YouTube video, so the link takes you to the anthem on sheetmusicplus.

And I Choose You (Deboarh Governor, Beckenhorst Press, BP1789).  I only wish we could have had Janet playing the oboe part!

These two are what the choir did; there was also a wonderful soloist, but I don't have his music to enter.  What made this service special is that in addition to being regular Sunday worship, it was also a wedding of one of our choir members!

There are plusses and minuses for this not-so-common practice, but one difference I thought particularly wonderful was that despite all the usual pomp and circumstance for a wedding, it was crystal clear that this service was not "all about the bride."  Nor the couple.  It was a joyous sacrament taking place in the midst of God's people worshipping him as usual (almost).

Oh, and the reception was catered by our very own Chef Jessica.  We are fortunate to have her in charge of many of our church meals, and if I ever need a caterer here I know exactly where I'm going.  Not since Heather left Ascension in Pittsburgh—she served there under a deacon who was a professional chef—has church food been so amazing.  (I really, really like church potluck dinners.  But Chef Jessica serves the most amazing Middle Eastern food!)

Here's Vivienne's story.  Janet's here.  Joseph's here.  Stephan's here.

Voting closes in about an hour, I'm afraid, but it's worth a try.  You can vote for them all; probably multiple times, but I don't like ballot-box stuffing.

Correction:  Voting closes October 13; it was submitting the stories that had to be done by today.  But vote now anyway; you'll be surprised how soon a week will pass!

Yesterday I published Joseph's entry in the Seats for Switzerland contest; now it's Janet's turn.  Vivienne's will be up soon, I hope; we've been having some trouble with it.

Thank you for your votes in favor of getting the cousins together!

Seats for Switzerland is a contest run by Swiss Airlines for uniting separated loved ones.  To win, you must tell a convincing story and be chosen by a combination of voter participation and judges' decision.  You also have to be a resident of Switzerland, or you can bet we'd have written our own stories.  Instead, we're publicizing those of the people we want to be reunited with.  Here's is the link to Joseph's story, where you can cast your vote for him.  (It's easy; you only need to provide your name, an e-mail address, and agree to some non-threatening "terms and conditions.")

Y'all know I generally don't like the "vote for me in this contest" idea—but this is for our grandkids!

I'll publish links for the rest of the family when they're up, so you can vote for them, too.  :)  Thank you, thank you.

And all the extroverts out there will never understand why going to a party is a ministry and a sacrifice.  But I'm in the middle of two enjoyable projects with close deadlines, very much in "flow" right now with one of them.  Why would I want to leave the house?

I plan to enjoy myself, of course.  But oh, how my fingers are itching to work!

From the Department of I-Could-Have-Told-You-That:  The air is cleaner than it used to be.

From a University of Rochester study in Greenland:

A first-ever study of air trapped in the deep snowpack of Greenland shows that atmospheric levels of carbon monoxide (CO) in the 1950s were actually slightly higher than what we have today. This is a surprise because current computer models predict much higher CO concentrations over Greenland today than in 1950. Now it appears the opposite is in fact true.

Mind you, it's nice to have it scientifically established that atmospheric levels of at least one worrisome pollutant are lower than they were in the 1950's, even though anyone who breathed back in the 60's and 70's could tell you that we've made huge strides in cleaning up the air.  I'm not saying that levels of carbon dioxide are not important, but it's nice to have some documentation beyond my own memory that our efforts to control toxic emissions have born significant fruit.  And that computer models can be wrong.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Christopher Wilkins, conductor
Jon Kimura Parker, piano

Ron Nelson:  Savannah River Holiday
Mozart:  Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor
Richard Strauss: Ein Heldenleben

This is the first time in my memory that Maestro Wilkins hasn't opened the season with a big choral work—a neat device that brings in friends and relatives of the choristers as well as others who don't normally attend orchestral concerts.  Even so, there was a good house for this concert.

It was a good concert, too.  The Orlando Philharmonic has grown a good deal as an orchestra since its early days, and is a pleasure to listen to.  The only reason I'm disappointed is that the "big event" of the evening, the Strauss, left me unexcited.  Oh, it's exciting enough to have so many musicians on the stage—just one short of 100, according to Wilkins—but Ein Heldenleben isn't my favorite of Richard Strauss's works.

Jon Kimura Parker did wonderfully with the Mozart, however, and even granted us a short encore:  Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G major.

The Mozart may have been the best, but my favorite piece was Ron Nelson's Savannah River Holiday.  Nelson wrote the piece in 1953, while he was still an undergraduate at Eastman.  Well, that's what the program notes say; his biography says he received his bachelor's degree in 1952.  I'm still impressed.  Here's a quote from his webpage:  "In 1993, his Passacaglia (Homage on B-A-C-H) made history by winning the "triple crown" of major wind band composition prizes."  I include that because I'm pretty sure at least one of our children played that in band.  At least, I'm sure I've heard it performed live somewhere, and that's the most likely place.

Our choir anthem for Sunday, September 29, 2013:  I Thank You Lord (Joseph M. Martin, Hope Publishing Company, C 5614).  Yikes, it's been more than a week since a real post.

Our choir anthem for Sunday, September 22, 2013:  For the Lord Our God Reigns (Craig Smith, Davit T. Clydesdale; Word Music, 0 80689 25027 9)

Better Than School by Nancy Wallace (Larson Publications, 1983)

Child's Work:  Taking Children's Choices Seriously by Nancy Wallace (Holt Associates, 1990)

These stories of the education of Ishmael and Vita Wallace have been high on my list of favorite books since our own homeschooling days.  Recently I re-read them both, confirming my suspicions that the Wallaces—flying by the seat of their pants in an era when homeschooling was almost unheard of, and often illegal—discovered many of the principles now refined in Project-Based Homeschooling.

The last time I read about the Wallaces' struggles with onerous regulations and imperious school boards, I noted how blessedly out of date it was, for although there are still those in the United States who would make homeschooling illegal again if they could, for the most part homeschoolers here can rest in the knowledge that the right to direct the education of our own children is recognized in all fifty states.  This time, however, I read those parts of the books with renewed interest, since Switzerland, while much more advanced than the U.S. in some areas, is woefully behind us in this.  Some of the Wallaces' experiences and arguments may turn out to be relevant, or at least to give inspiration.

Don't you just hate it when you read an inspiring story from the past and have no idea what happened to the characters in subsequent years?  With Vita and Ishmael, at least, that question can be answered by visiting their Orpheo Duo website.

Here are a few, somewhat random, quotations.  You really need to read the books to get a good sense of the story, however.

Walking into the meeting knowing that we had a majority [of the school board] on our side was a lot better than not knowing what to expect, but I guess I really wanted more than that.  I wanted the whole board to admit that we were doing a terrific job with our kids and to be interested in our approach to education.  After all, there was a lot the public schools could have learned from us.  What disturbed me the most was that not only were two of the board members completely uninterested in what we were doing but they seemed to want the kids to go to school no matter what.  When I wrote about this to John Holt, he responded with some very insightful remarks that I'll never forget.  "One of the saddest things I've learned in my life," he said, "one of the things I least wanted to believe and resisted believing for as long as I could, was that people in chains don't want to get them off, but want to get them on everyone else.  'Where are your chains?' they want to know.  'How come you're not wearing chains?  Do you think you are too good to wear them?  What makes you think you're so special?'"  (BTS, 114-115)

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Project-Based Homeschooling:  Mentoring Self-Directed Learners by Lori Pickert (independently published at CreateSpace, 2012)

Janet's enthusiasm over Project-Based Homeschooling led me to be sure I read the book while I had access to it in Switzerland.  I had to get over some misconceptions, and I found the ideas intimidating, but I agree:  it's a must-read for homeschoolers, and in truth important for all parents.  Maybe for everybody.

The Misconception  Way back when, in our homeschooling days, a popular approach was called Unit Studies.  Here's an essay on unit studies as they relate to what's now called Classical Education; it give a pretty good idea of what they are about.  Basically, you pick a topic you hope your child will be interested in, and integrate the teaching of all subjects into a study of that topic.  At the time, I found the method too structured, too school-at-home, and too much work.  I assumed project-based homeschooling was a re-working of unit studies.

I was wrong.  There are similarities:  a child working on a project is integrating many disciplines and skills together.  But project-based homeschooling is an excellent example of why unschooling, well done, is absolutely not the "let the kid play video games all day" approach its detractors think it is. 

Projects of this sort are the child's idea and the child's responsibility.  That doesn't mean, however, that the parents are off the hook.  It seems to me that the work involved in observing and coaching a project is much harder than following a curriculum.  Which leads me to ...

The Intimidation  I love the ideas.  I really do.  But even as a do-it-yourself, lone wolf kind of homeschooler, this is out-of-my-comfort-zone thinking.  Probably because if Earth is my comfort zone, art projects are somewhere around Neptune, and so much of the examples here involve using art materials.  The author seems to think it natural to work through one's ideas by making a painting or modelling in clay.  I don't believe I've ever in my life even thought about doing that—and I've live a lot of years—so the idea of coaching a child to do so leaves me queasy.  Fortunately, Lori Pickert was kind enough to explain, in a comment on Janet's review, that "if drawing and painting make you nervous, there’s still building, writing, designing t-shirts and websites, putting on skits, making brochures and posters, etc. etc. etc.—it’s more about helping kids figure out a way to help others learn and along the way that reinforces what they know/don’t know and how you collaborate, share, etc."

Also, she's careful to give the neophyte a break:

Surprisingly often, people will champion self-directed learning for children but not allow those children's parents the same freedom and respect.  It's their way or the highway, and you had better start doing it the right way (their way) right away.  Your kids should learn at their own pace, follow their interests, and you should trust that they'll eventually learn everything they need to know.  You, on the other hand, should get with the program, right now, 100%, or else.  You don't need to have your own opinions or ideas; ours will suffice.  There's no time to experiment and see if these ideas work for you; take it on faith or you're part of the problem.

If your child deserves to learn at his own pace and have his own ideas, so do you.  Whatever you champion for your child, make sure you also give to yourself:  the right to follow your own path, work at your own pace, follow your own interests, make mistakes, and try again.  Whatever you want for your children, you are far more likely to help them achieve it if you live it yourself.

It's hard to do justice to the project-based homeschooling concept without taking a lot more time and effort than I'm willing to put forth at the moment—not to mention that I'd need the book, which presently is some 4500 miles away.  However, I do have some excerpts, which I copied down before relinquishing the book. (More)