Lift Up Your Hearts!

I am republishing my initial comments, made in December 2008, when I checked The History of the Ancient World out of the library then discovered I didn't have time to read it.  Now, nearly two years later, I have finally read the book, and my additional comments are added below.

The History of the Ancient World:  From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome, by Susan Wise Bauer (W. W. Norton, New York, 2007)

Despite having some initial negative reactions to Susan Wise Bauer, I've continued to find her work delightful and invaluable.  (See my reviews of The Well-Trained Mind, The Story of the World, and The Well-Educated Mind.)  I haven't read more than a small part of The History of the Ancient World, but borrowed it from the library in order to determine whether or not to buy it for myself.  I've so enjoyed—and learned from—listening to Jim Weiss read The Story of the World, which was written for elementary-age children, that I wondered if Bauer could bring as much delight into a history book for adults.

Time does not permit me to read through the book, much less review it properly, but let's just say I wish I didn't have to take it back to the library as soon as possible to remove temptation.  The History of the Ancient World is delightful to read.  Much of the delight, I think, comes from the philosophy of her approach, which she explains much better in the introduction than I have time to write, or even to copy, here.  Bauer is interested in people:  their lives, thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams, actions, and relationships.  She minimizes the general and the theoretical in favor of the personal, and includes the myths and stories of a culture as well as verifiable facts.  The stories that have come down with a people from before recorded time should inform our historical speculations as much as potsherds from an archeological dig.

This approach no doubt will anger many, some because she finds historical value in passages from the Bible, and others because she gives similar respect to the ancient stories of other cultures.  To me, it makes for great story-telling.  The History of the Ancient World has earned a place on my wish list, perhaps for the next time Borders offers me a 40% off coupon, and I certainly hope Susan Wise Bauer is working on a sequel.

UPDATE, 1 September 2010. Bauer was, indeed, working on a sequel, and managed to finish writing The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade  before I finished reading its predecessor.  I've already purchased it, and am looking forward to diving in.  But first, some thoughts on this one.

I enjoyed The Ancient World a good deal, though I expect to enjoy the Medieval book more because of the time period.  I find stories of kings and battles and political intrigue interesting up to a point, but ancient times take me to that point rather quickly, as often that's about all we know about them.  Bauer does a good job of trying to put flesh on the bare bones, but it's still pretty much "second verse, same as the first."  And third, and fourth, and nth.

I can't help feeling the same way about the Old Testament of the Bible at times, too.  One thing Bauer's book has done is to give me a much better feel for the context in which the Old Testament events took place, and the knowledge that as gruesome and cruel and bizarre as they sometimes are, it helps to know that the OT stories are nowhere near as gruesome and cruel and bizarre as stories from the rest of the ancient world.  There's a limit to how much improvement even God can make in human beings all at once, I guess.  Or, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, before you can judge where someone is, you have to know where he came from.

Speaking of the Bible, in parallel with Ancient World I've been reading the Chronological Guide to the Bible, as part of Thomas Nelson's review blogger program.  (So you'll see a review here when I'm done, but I've only just started the New Testament section.)  That was a brilliant move on my part, as the books dovetail and complement each other nicely.

But back to Bauer's book.  My head is swimming with dates and places and unpronounceable, highly forgettable names.  It will take a lot more learning before I can say I have a good picture in my head of the ancient world.  But I now have a good sketch, and that's better than any of my history teachers were able to give me.  I especially like Bauer's attempt to cover more of the world than just the Middle East and Mediterranean countries, though if I can't keep the Roman rulers straight there's no hope of remembering China's and India's.  Helpful parallel timelines attempt to provide mental links from one culture to another.

I'd give The History of the Ancient World an R rating for sex and violence, but anyone likely to be overly disturbed by reading what those ancient kings did to their enemies—and with their friends—probably won't be reading an 800-page history book.

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, by Robert Greenberg; a Teaching Company lecture

I've said it before:  For accessible, serious, high-quality, adult-level educational materials (DVD, CD, mp3 download) it's hard to beat The Teaching Company.  Robert Greenberg is one of my favorite lecturers, and this—so far—my favorite of his courses.  

Here are the titles of the 48 lectures, as you can buy the course today.  It is now onto its third edition; our version, which is so old we bought it on cassette tapes,^* differs in minor ways.

1. Music as a Mirror
2. Sources—The Ancient World and the Early Church
3. The Middle Ages
4. Introduction to the Renaissance
5. The Renaissance Mass
6. The Madrigal
7. An Introduction to the Baroque Era
8. Style Features of Baroque-era Music
9. National Styles—Italy and Germany
10. Fugue
11. Baroque Opera, Part 1
12. Baroque Opera, Part 2
13. The Oratorio
14. The Lutheran Church Cantata
15. Passacaglia
16. Ritornello Form and the Baroque Concerto
17. The Enlightenment and an Introduction to the Classical Era
18. The Viennese Classical Style, Homophony, and the Cadence
19. Classical-era Form—Theme and Variations
20. Classical-era Form—Minuet and Trio: Baroque Antecedents
21. Classical-era Form—Minuet and Trio Form
22. Classical-era Form—Rondo Form
23. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 1
24. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 2
25. Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 3
26. The Symphony—Music for Every Person
27. The Solo Concerto
28. Classical-era Opera—The Rise of Opera Buffa
29. Classical-era Opera, Part 2—Mozart and the Operatic Ensemble
30. The French Revolution and an Introduction to Beethoven
31. Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67, Part 1
32. Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67, Part 2
33. Introduction to Romanticism
34. Formal Challenges and Solutions in Early Romantic Music
35. The Program Symphony—Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Part 1
36. The Program Symphony—Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Part 2
37. 19th-Century Italian Opera—Bel Canto Opera
38. 19th-Century Italian Opera—Giuseppe Verdi
39. 19th-Century German Opera—Nationalism and Experimentation
40. 19th-Century German Opera—Richard Wagner
41. The Concert Overture, Part 1
42. The Concert Overture, Part 2
43. Romantic-era Musical Nationalism
44. Russian Nationalism
45. An Introduction to Early 20th-Century Modernism
46. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Claude Debussy
47. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Igor Stravinsky
48. Early 20th-Century Modernism—Arnold Schönberg

Forty-eight lectures of 45 minutes each sounds long and intimidating, but even at that length this is a brief, introductory, whirlwind tour of music history—and it never drags.  I find it easy to listen to while driving, and well worth hearing more than once.

My recommendation for this course is as high as I can give, with one small caveat.  Greenberg gears his lectures to adults, specifically college students, and he has obviously learned how to keep the attention of the teenage boys in his classes:  his brief composer biographies sometimes include their sexual proclivities, and if there's musical reference he sees as orgasmic, he doesn't hesitate to mention it.  (He also describes musical stomach rumbles and heartbeats.)

As music history, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music has received the endorsement of our favorite graduate of the Eastman School of Music, so I know it's good.   

Gabriel Kron. Of all the amazing people who have intersected with my life, he is probably the safest to write about, since he died more than 40 years ago.  So I will; he deserves to be better known.

I knew him as my father's friend and mountain climbing partner; my father knew him from their days together at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.  Dad, a Tau Beta Pi engineer (like his father, two of his children, and a grandchild), was no intellectual slouch, but he never pretended to understand anything of Gabe's work. 

It didn't matter.  I myself joined the Kron Klimbing Klub at age seven, and was mighty annoyed when I later learned that some other organization had usurped the acronym, "KKK."

One firm rule of the Klub I remember distinctly:  No eating until you reach the top.

Unfortunately, I don't remember much about this brilliant and unusual man, other than that I enjoyed climbing with him. Here is one memory from Dad's own Remembrances Along the Way.

Beginning in August 1959 Linda went with me on nearly all my climbing trips, her first climb being Buck Mountain on Lake George. There were three trips in 1960 and 1961 up Hunter Mountain, a 4000+-foot peak in the Catskills.

We climbed as members of the Kron Klimbing Klub. Gabe Kron was a mathematician of considerable note who worked for General Electric and who liked to climb mountains that were close enough at hand that he could leave Schenectady at 8 o’clock, drive to the mountain, climb it, and return by 5:00 p.m. Hunter was one of his favorites but such things as inspiring views meant nothing to him. He would get to the top, get out his lunch, sit on a rock and eat lunch and read the New York Times. Then he would go down and home. Ted Dietze and his son Rick also went on these trips and Gabe was infinitely patient with the children.

They were very enjoyable trips. Everyone who climbed with Gabe was a member of the Kron Klimbing Klub. One day we planned to climb Snowy Mountain. We left Schenectady with decent weather that turned to rain before we arrived in the town of Speculator. The children were not shod for wet weather so we bought them overshoes in Speculator. As we started to climb the weather turned cold and the rain turned to snow. The snow began to build up, the trail became slippery, and the climbing became very difficult because of the slipperiness. We turned around and headed back down well below the summit. Linda was so cold that all she wanted to do was to sit down and rest. Of course I would not allow that and I practically dragged her down the trail for several minutes until she warmed up and all was well for the rest of the way down.

The trip up Snowy Mountain I remember for three things:  (1) my new boots may have kept my feet dry, but they did nothing to stop them from getting very, very cold; (2) I was determined not to give up before Ricky Dietze did, as he was older, stronger, male, and thought he could beat me in everything; and (3) my chief fear in turning around before reaching the top lay in believing I would then not be entitled to lunch!

For much more about this remarkable person, read The Evolution of an Engineering Scientist, by Philip Langdon Alger (no relation, that I know of).  You must scroll down a bit to find the beginning.  I'll add some tempting excerpts below.

[T]he youngest child in a family of eight children, [Gabe] was born on July 23, 1901, in ... a town of about 10,000 people in a remote region of the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary. ... A boyhood friend described Gabe in elementary school as plump, always lively, always joyous, always having something to tell.  [P]eople who knew him well understood quite clearly that for him the environment of his home town was too confined and that a day would come when he would act to broaden his horizons."

Before he could escape, however, he needed to learn English.

"Being subjected during my life time to several inoculations with a new language, I gradually developed a technique of my own; that proved to be quite practical for acquiring a reading knowledge of a new language in a place which offered no contact with people speaking it. As young children we had been instructed in Hebrew ... In the Gymnasium we were taught Latin for eight years, German for six, and Greek for four years, each with the aid of the most elaborate grammar the human mind could devise. Under the guise of classical education the professors crammed our heads with an infinite variety of useless rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions, so that languages were the most lugubrious subjects taught...."

"Realizing that the manner in which languages were taught was one of the hundred possible ways that should not be employed, I started out to use just the opposite tactics. Instead of memorizing grammar, I memorized the German dictionary. Our school dictionary had about twenty thousand words in it, a hundred words on a page; so, I tore out a page a day and committed it to memory. Then the page was thrown away. When there was no dictionary left, I considered myself an expert in the language. I could sit down, open up a French or German book anywhere, and proceed. Slowly and painfully at first, but nevertheless I could make headway in understanding the text....."

"[Finding no suitable English dictionary available, what] I did was to borrow an English book, which happened to be H.G. Wells' The Food of the Gods, and beginning with the first page I wrote out a hundred words each day and committed them to memory. After eight or ten pages the text began to assume more human form, and past the first chapter the content even became enjoyable."

In 1921, Kron and his brother came to the United States, ending up at the University of Michigan, a school which met their criteria:  "an engineering school that would cost no more than $150 for tuition, located far enough inland to be away from the flood of immigrants."  Gabe graduated in three years despite working to support himself.  He wasn't a typical UM student.  In his words,

"As always happens when a free spirit is obliged to undergo a prescribed routine, I wanted to study everything except what the curriculum called for. How to find time to study what one wishes, and not what the teacher thinks best for one's own good, must be a perennial problem to many an anxious pupil. Finally, I hit on the idea of arranging my schedules so that by Friday noon the classes would be all over. Three full days then each week from Friday noon to Monday morning I was free to pursue my own private schedule of study without the interruptions of regular classwork. The rest of the week I considered as a sacrifice on the altar of mechanized education." 

After securing American citizenship in 1926, he rode a tanker from California to Tahiti.

He lived as a guest in the family of a native in Tahiti for some weeks, then sailed to the Fiji Islands. He walked through the back country, shared native hospitality, swam rivers, and admired the tropical forest. ... In all his travels, his custom was to spend the usual siesta hours under a tree, studying mathematics.

Then he took ship to Sydney, where his money ran out....  After working long enough to clear £35, be bought [another math book] and took to the road again ... On the way he spent many nights in the company of the "sundowners," the Australian tramps who lived without working, with the aid of free food tickets handed out in police stations to anyone who needed them.

Kron sailed from Townsville to Borneo, and thence to Manila, Hongkong, and Saigon. Here, he started out on foot to Angkor Vat, and walked on to Aranha, where he took a train for Bangkok, then joined a caravan that followed the ancient trade route to Cockrake in Burma. He walked to Rangoon, took a boat to Calcutta, walked on to Agra, where he admired the Taj Mahal. He crossed the Indian desert to Karachi by train, took a boat across the Persian Gulf and went on by train to Baghdad, stopping to see the ruins of Ur on the way. He spent $5 for a truck ride across the Arabian desert to Damascus, then set out on foot again to Gaza. He hastened on to Cairo by train, saw the Pyramids, sailed from Alexandria to Constantinople and went by train to Bucharest, arriving at midnight at the home of a friend, with just small change left in his pockets. After an all-night talk, the friend financed his ticket to Baja Mare, where his parents welcomed him. The neighbors wanted to know why he had come home from America with his toes sticking out of his shoes, while every one else came home rich. No one asked about his travels.

Eventually he ended up, as stated above, working for General Electric in Schenectady.

Kron was a puzzle to the company executives who were responsible for his assignments. They wanted to tell him what to do, and to put him in a place where his talents would yield immediate, commercially useful results, and to adjust his salary accordingly. This was difficult, because Kron's value was largely in the inspiration he gave to others and in distant objectives that seemed to business managers to be merely dreams. As they tried to make the best use of him, he was shifted hither and yon. ... Kron had to pursue his own ideas outside of office hours.

This was no real hardship, however, as the company did give Kron complete freedom to publish his ideas, and to maintain contacts with a wide circle of interested men, outside as well as inside the company. Some commercial men, who did not like the engineers to talk about new developments, said that it would do no harm for Kron to write, as no competitor would understand him anyway.

What a dinner guest he must have been!

...while I indulge in a bit of nostalgia.

We moved to Central Florida not long after Disney's EPCOT Center opened.  Our children were four and not-quite-two, so that first year we bought special Florida resident annual passes to the Disney World parks (all two of them).  This was a brilliant investment that enabled us to explore at our leisure and allow the kids to determine when it was time to go home.  We wanted to avoid the all too common scene of childish meltdown, caused by parents determined to squeeze every last minute out of their very expensive vacation.

(Very expensive?  Well, it was, though no one will believe that if I mention that I remember when the price of a one-day ticket went up to $17 for an adult.)

Actually, the girls usually held out better than I did, and we frequently stayed to enjoy the closing fireworks.  Their favorite park by far was EPCOT, perhaps because Disney characters and movies took up very little space in our lives, so the Magic Kingdom did not have the appeal it otherwise would have.  Had we not lived in Central Florida, I doubt we would ever have bothered with that all-American dream, a Disney vacation.  But living here has its perks, and between good deals for Florida residents and many opportunities to earn free tickets, Disney World, and especially EPCOT, played a significant role in shaping our children's memories.

So, for them, I present, Walt Dated World!  I found this site, dedicated to Disney World features that are no more, while searching for the original script for the Spaceship Earth ride.  The first ride that greets you as you walk into the park, it was once sponsored by AT&T, and Porter's AT&T ID card sent us to the front of the line, so we enjoyed it frequently, and watched it change over the years.  I think the best version was narrated by Walter Cronkite (1986-1994), but my personal favorite was the original, as I found its language less prosaic.

Where have we come from, where are we going?  The answers begin in our past.  In the dust from which we were formed, answers recorded on the walls of time.  So let us journey into that past, to seek those walls, to know ourselves and to probe the destiny of our Spaceship Earth.

On fine Phoenician ships, we take our scrolls to sea.

North, south, east, and west, all roads lead from Rome, a mighty network reaching across the land, welding far-flung garrisons into a growing empire.  Glorious Rome, until consumed by the flames of excess.  Imperial Rome, lost in the ashes of darkness!  [To this day I cannot smell lapsang souchong tea without recalling this part of the ride.]

In western abbeys, monks toil endlessly transcribing ancient wisdom into hand-penned books of revelation.

Behold, the majesty of the Sistine ceiling!

Poised on the threshold of infinity, we see our world as it truly is: small, silent, fragile, alive, a drifting island in the midnight sky.  It is our spaceship.  Our Spaceship Earth.

Stop by Walt Dated World and see what other treasures you can find.  I'll throw in a dash of childish delight!

Exposure To Two Languages Carries Far-Reaching Benefits  From this article at ScienceDaily, you can follow links to many other articles on bilingualism and language learning, some of which I'll also include below.

People who can speak two languages are more adept at learning a new foreign language than their monolingual counterparts, according to research conducted at Northwestern University. And their bilingual advantage persists even when the new language they study is completely different from the languages they already know. ... And they believe the bilingual advantage is likely to generalize beyond word learning to other kinds of language learning, including learning new words in one's own language and a very basic ability to maintain verbal information. ... Previous research already indicates that individuals who have formally studied two or more languages as adults more easily acquire a new language than monolinguals. New research even indicates that the onset of Alzheimer's disease in bilinguals is, on average, delayed by four years compared to monolinguals. ... The Northwestern researchers chose to study bilinguals who learned a second language at an early age and in a non-classroom study to avoid suggestions that their subjects simply were exceptionally talented or motivated foreign language learners.

Bilingual Babies: The Roots of Bilingualism in Newborns  It's never too early.

Children who hear two languages regularly in utero can not only recognize both languages after birth, but can distinguish one from the other.

Babies Raised In Bilingual Homes Learn New Words Differently Than [sic] Infants Learning One Language

An important part of language development is the ability to pay attention to native speech sounds to guide word learning. For example, English learners expect that the nonsense words "bih" and "dih" refer to different concepts because "b" and "d" are different consonant categories in English.  ...  [B]ilingual infants failed to notice the minimal change in the object's name until 20 months of age, whereas monolingual infants noticed the change at 17 months. ... This later use of relevant language sounds (such as consonants) to direct word learning is due to the increased demands of learning two languages, the researchers suggest. Ignoring the consonant detail in a new word may be an adaptive tool used by bilingual infants in learning new words. Outside the laboratory, there is little cost to overlooking some of the consonant detail in new words, as there are few similar-sounding words in infants' early vocabularies. By paying less attention to the detailed sound information in the word, bilingual infants can devote more cognitive resources to making the links between words and objects. ... Extending this approach to word learning for a few months longer than monolinguals may help bilinguals "keep up" with their peers. Indeed, previous research has shown that bilinguals and monolinguals achieve language-learning milestones (such as speaking their first word) at similar ages and have vocabularies of similar sizes when words from both languages are taken into account.

Words Influence Infants' Cognition from First Months of Life

Northwestern University researchers have found that even before infants begin to speak, words play an important role in their cognition. For 3-month-old infants, words influence performance in a cognitive task in a way that goes beyond the influence of other kinds of sounds, including musical tones. ... Three-month-old infants were shown a series of pictures of fish that were paired with words or beeps. ... Then infants were shown a picture of a new fish and a dinosaur side-by-side as the researchers measured how long they looked at each picture. If the infants formed the category, they would look longer at one picture than the other.  The results, say the authors, were striking. The researchers found that although infants who heard in the word and tone groups saw exactly the same pictures for exactly the same amount of time, those who heard words formed the category fish; those who heard tones did not.

Use It Or Lose It? Study Suggests The Brain Can Remember A 'Forgotten' Language  Give your child the gift of multiple language exposure, even if you think he'll never use it.

Many of us learn a foreign language when we are young, but in some cases, exposure to that language is brief and we never get to hear or practice it subsequently. Our subjective impression is often that the neglected language completely fades away from our memory. But does “use it or lose it” apply to foreign languages? Although it may seem we have absolutely no memory of the neglected language, new research suggests this “forgotten” language may be more deeply engraved in our minds than we realize. ... [E]xposing young children to foreign languages, even if they do not continue to speak them, can have a lasting impact on speech perception. The authors conclude, “Even if the language is forgotten (or feels this way) after many years of disuse, leftover traces of the early exposure can manifest themselves as an improved ability to relearn the language.”

Bilingual Children More Likely To Stutter  The news isn't all good.

Children who are bilingual before the age of 5 are significantly more likely to stutter and to find it harder to lose their impediment, than children who speak only one language before this age, suggests new research.

There's much more at that site, which I found more addictive than YouTube.  For example, Russian Readers Learn To Read More Accurately And Faster.  Must...Stop...Now....

With all the fuss lately about illness caused by salmonella in eggs from factory farms with highly dubious practices, it was especially delightful to take a trip—farther than the grocery store, but closer than our church—to Lake Meadow Naturals farm.  They have a pick-your-own program on Saturday mornings, and we did just that, reaching under the hens to retrieve a dozen warm-from-the-hen eggs, at a price of $3.50.

Unlike many of that designation, these hens really are free-range:  they were ranging all over the yard when we arrived, along with several other types of fowl, including guinea hens, which are the pest control service, being voracious eaters of ticks and other nasty bugs.

I really liked the look of the place, and the friendliness, and hope to return many times for wonderful, fresh eggs.  I'm a little disappointed that the yolks are not the deep orange color of the eggs Heather gets from her farming friends, and of the eggs we ate at the bed and breakfast in the Ticino part of Switzerland.  But there's no doubt these chickens are healthy, free-range, and lovingly cared for, so I'll be happy with that.  Maybe when their less-common breeds are laying I'll notice more of a difference.

We also bought two duck eggs, which were good, but not sufficiently discernable from chicken eggs to encourage a wholesale switch, since we paid $1 each for them.  Maybe next time we'll try the guinea hen eggs.  :)

I'm attacking my dauntingly long backblog again, applying the delete key ruthlessly on articles that are merely interesting.  Whatever the inverse of to decimate is, that's what I've done, killing off nine of every 10, and putting Li'l Writer Guy to work on what remains.  Casting the Net—which I'm reviving after a layoff long enough to have taken a baby from conception to the time most obstetricians would insist on induction—will pick up the ones of heightened interest that aren't compelling enough to demand a full post.

The good news?  It's getting a lot easier to look good in school:  Be on time, dress neatly, look interested, interact with the professor, do the homework—and the professor will love you, if you don't shock him into a heart attack.

Blunting the American Edge  Kara Miller, who teaches at Babson College in Massachusetts, reports that, as a rule (there are always exceptions), her foreign students are far more knowledgeable, engaged, and ambitious than her American students.

Apology for homeschooling  No, not an "I'm sorry" apology, though there are some elements of adolescent shyness in this new homeschooling father's essay, but apology in the old sense of a defense.  Despite a slightly annoying "we're not that kind of homeschooler" attitude, it's an amusing presentation of "the best way to answer a curious stranger's questions" versus "the whole truth."

Mrs. GSP: Do you use a curriculum?
Me: Oh, sure! Absolutely.
Real answer: Give me a break! These kids are 5 years old. ... That said, you could argue that Leslie has developed a fairly demanding curriculum. But that word comes with certain expectations that don't fit here. It isn't written down, it doesn't run on a set schedule, and it isn't based on lesson plans, piles of worksheets or a fixed rotation from subject to subject....

Mrs. GSP: What do you do about socialization?
Me: Oh, we've got a nice support network. They have a circle of friends. They do lots of classes and activities. They go to birthday parties and stuff.
Real answer: My public answer is OK, as far as it goes. But hang on a minute, lady: What do you mean by "socialization"? ... Ordinary schools tend to socialize children by way of enclosed, age-homogeneous pods, while home schooling tends to socialize children through a wide range of interactions with older kids, younger kids and adults, as well as peers. ... Do we regret not exposing our kids to the intense cultural melting pot of New York's school system? Sometimes, sure. But we're also not exposing them to bullying, arbitrary systems of order and discipline, age-inappropriate standards of behavior, and the hegemony of corporatized kid culture. Desmond and Nini have never heard of "Transformers," and we're OK with that.

The follow-up article is better, a hilarious, yet serious look at the results of their homemade curriculum based on myths and other stories of the ancient world.

[The children] were playing on the floor with a random assemblage of building blocks, figurines and toy vehicles, like a zillion other 5-year-olds around the world. ... I made some wry dad comment: Hindu gods at a Greek temple, ha ha ha. Literally jumping up and down with excitement, Desmond set me straight: "We're playing ancient times, Daddy, when there was trade between Greece and India! They traded stuff, and they traded ideas!"  Now, I'm not vouching for the soundness of Desmond's scholarship. Ancient contact between Greek and Indian civilization is plausible, according to historians, but entirely hypothetical. Furthermore, if it did happen it almost certainly did not involve motor vehicles. See, the way elephant-headed Ganesh and blue-skinned Vishnu are incarnated in Nini and Desmond's game, they look an awful lot like little die-cast metal cars. ...

Like many kids their age, Desmond and Nini had developed a fascination with the world of the Piston Cup and Radiator Springs [from the movie Cars]. They had an encyclopedic knowledge of the movie's characters and personal histories ... Well, I thought, if they can have this complex connection to Lightning McQueen, Doc Hudson, and Tow Mater, why not to Isis, Osiris, and Anubis? Or Zeus, Athena, and Aphrodite? At a time when they were so clearly eager to learn about the world around them, might it be possible to introduce them to its history in an age-appropriate and systematic way? ...

Right now, I have to go watch the story of how Ganesh got his elephant head (after losing his human one in an unfortunate misunderstanding), acted out by a couple of little kids with toy cars.

One thing I find attractive about Christianity is the balance it achieves between the physical and the spiritual:  when the heart of one's belief is that God became fully human while remaining fully God, it's hard to pretend that the spiritual and the physical are not both of supreme importance—and perhaps less separable than we would like them to be.  Psychologists are finding this truth in a surprising form.

Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.  What they have found is that, in fact, we do.

[S]ubjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee ... then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person—rating them as happier, more generous, more sociable, good-natured, and more caring—than the iced coffee group. ...[S]ubjects were given clipboards [of two different weights, and] were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies.... [T]he subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards...not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked. ... [S]ubjects who were asked to recall an unethical act, then given the choice between a pencil and an antiseptic wipe, were far more likely to choose the cleansing wipe than people who had been asked to recall an ethical act.

Ever wonder why British and American spellings are different if we theoretically speak the same language?  Color vs. colour, traveling vs. travelling, center vs. centre, aluminum vs. aluminium—are these inconsistencies merely some sadist's design to torment the multicultural child?^*  If so, Noah Webster was the man, but he thought he was making things easier.

We've been enjoying tremendously the Teaching Company lectures on the History of the English Language.   I can't recommend it enough:  we've learned many fascinating things about the evolution of our native tongue.  Recently the course touched on American lexicographer Noah Webster.

Dictionary-making has long been a battle between descriptivism and prescriptivism:  Should a dictionary merely reflect the language as it is, or should it be an authoritative recording of the language as it should be?  Noah Webster came down on the side of the prescriptivists, and he had definite ideas of how to clean up and simplify the language bequeathed unto us by those Brits we had so recently sent packing.

So he changed colour to color and centre to center, which he decreed made more sense.  Aluminum vs. aluminium is a more compicated story:  Sir Humphry Davy, who named the element, kept changing his mind, calling it first alumium, then aluminum, then aluminium.  Scientists preferred aluminium, but Noah Webster latched onto aluminum, and as the metal became common enough to enter popular discourse, to what did writers turn for authoritative spelling?  Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language.

I'm working on getting Li'l Writer Guy home from Switzerland, but in the meantime, enjoy this wonderful story of a three-year-old who saved her father's life by walking to a nearby fire station and asking for help.  Note both that young children can be much more competent than we generally expect these days, and that this competence did not arise in a vacuum, but had been nurtured by her parents.  It doesn't have to be, in the words of the reporter, "very un-three-year-old-like."

I can't embed the video, but you can find it on the right of the above-linked page, or here.  (H/T Free-Range Kids.)

The Caller ID number was local; in fact, it was from the town where our church is located, so I answered the phone, fully expecting a recorded message about upcoming parish events.

Instead, it was a live person.  Because she asked to speak with a family member who is currently nearly 5000 miles away, I asked if I could take a message.

"There ain't no message," the caller responded.  "I'll call back."

Well.  There ain't none of our friends who talk like that, so I figured this was a solicitation call of some sort and hung up.  (I'm tempted to tell the next caller that I'm voting in the upcoming election for anyone who does not call to solicit my vote.)  But I wonder.  Who would entrust his message to someone who talked like that to potential customers/voters?

Then again, I shouldn't be so hard on her.  She was probably a minimum-wage hireling, and I've seen worse from official business documents, major newspapers, and professional websites.  I know that language evolves, but "anything goes" cannot be the mark of a higher civilization.

New Year's Resolution #8—in which I detail my renewed attempts at organizing my life—notwithstanding, my dear friend, whose birthday it is today, knows well that it will be a long time before I am half as organized as she was 30 years ago, if not from birth.

Thus it will be a disappointment, perhaps, but no surprise, that my new scheme is not well enough in place for a real, physical birthday card to be arriving at her lovely home in today's mail.  There's hope for next year, but in the meantime, since she is a Faithful Reader and can be counted on to see this post, if not on the day, at least close to it, I offer this substitute:

Happy Birthday, my friend!

You have been an organizational inspiration to me ever since you taught me that laziness is the best motivator.  (And yes, it is easier to have the spices in alphabetical order!)

Just as with #2 Rediscover Feasting, there's a lot more to this resolution than meets the eye.  But if I called this resolution "Get Organized," it would sound boring and not a few of my readers would laugh.

I'm not naturally an organized person, and I've made many attempts to "get my life together."  Some have been more successful than others, but none has stood the Stress Test:  Nearly any system can work when conditions are right, but the only one worth implementing is one that won't fall apart when the floodwaters of life start to rise.   In my case, "floodwaters" is loosely defined to include any disruption in my schedule, bad or good:  from hurricanes and illnesses to vacations and visitors.

That's why I'm so excited about Getting Things Done:  I saw how well Janet's implementation (and she's still tuning it) worked as she made the transition from teacher/graduate student to full-time, first-time mother, a definite stress test, and definitely successful.  I've only just begun to try to implement some of the GTD ideas in my life, and I'm not Janet, but there are promising signs.  If I can avoid any significant stress tests before I get it securely in place, I have great hope.

What does this have to do with enjoying spontaneity?  To paraphrase Winston Churchill:  Organization is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.  It's very difficult for me to relax (see Resolution #3) and enjoy spontaneous activities—or planned activities for that matter—when the thousand-and-one items on my personal to-do list are whispering, nagging, or screaming at me from my subconscious mind.  Whether or not other people would agree with me on the importance or urgency of the items on this list is not the point.

In order to hang out with friends or take a long, aimless walk and truly have nothing on your mind, you’ve got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait.  And you need to be able to do that in a few seconds, not days. (GTD)

GTD is not, first and foremost, about getting things done.  It's a consolidation loan for the disorganized:  all your activity debts—everything you must do, should do, or might want to do—are gathered into one system, with a plan for paying them off in small, easy, but consistent steps.  In the process, mental health improves, creativity is unleashed, and ... Things Get Done.  That's the theory:  we'll see if I will soon be able to say, as Janet did: 

[GTD] turned my life around from always feeling overwhelmed and behind to feeling like I knew where I stood and how to get where I wanted to go.  This freed my mind up to enjoy time relaxing with people rather than always worrying about the known and unknown things I had to do.

Then I will have a chance of being able to enjoy spontaneity.

Progress Report

#1  Read More Books  Now that's more like it!  I'm back on track with six books in July.  I was partly inspired by knowing I had only one month to enjoy Janet and Stephan's library, and partly because it's easy do what the people around you are doing, and Janet and Stephan are often to be found book-in-hand.  Even when they are also baby-in-hand.

#2  Rediscover Feasting  In the land of fabulous bread, cheese, and chocolate, how can you not feast?  The trick is in returning to "ordinary time" at home.  I'm still working on it.

#3  Learn to Relax  I bought a book on Alexander Technique from Janet's teacher, though I only read half of it this month—when I remembered that I would be taking it home with me, I switched my attention to books I would be leaving behind.  I've been trying to increase my awareness of my muscles and trying to learn to relax them.  I also hope to learn something from observing Stephan's way of reacting slowly and calmly to situations, instead of with my normal adrenaline surge....

#4  Like More Things  For progress on this resolution I highly recommend spending six weeks in a foreign country.  Make that living six weeks in a foreign country.  There's something about living daily life that transforms the new from strange to comfortable—or even delightful.

#5  Pay Attention  I keep forgetting about this one.  I got distracted during a critical turn on a walk in Bern and didn't realize what I had missed until I was required to retrace my steps on my own—but I eventually figured it out.  In other areas of life—such as my inveterate multi-tasking—I need to work harder even to think about this resolution, let alone make progress.

#6  Cast Away Fear  Solo travel, living in a foreign country, and childbirth provide good opportunities for practicing Philippians 4:6.  If my victories are baby steps, they are steps nonetheless, and I'm happy about them.

#7 Talk Less, Listen More Whether or not it was visible to those around me, I made some progress here.  It's easier when the conversation is in a foreign language.  :)

... When you're doing a crossword puzzle, the clue is "big name in chips," and you immediately think "Intel."

The answer was "Wise."