Lift Up Your Hearts!

A friend of mine once lamented that at her church Mother's Day received more attention than Easter.  I'm sure most churches do better than that, but I'm equally sure that in many churches, at least in the United States, yesterday received more honor as Mother's Day than as Pentecost.  We celebrated both, making the Christian festival primary, but not disdaining the secular celebration.  I like the way our rector mitigates the other problem with Mother's Day celebrations, the pain they cause women suffering from infertility, by asking to stand first all great-grandmothers, then all grandmothers, then all mothers, then all daughters, till all the women of the congregation are standing, and all the men of the church pray for us.  Still, the main focus was Pentecost, and we even had a baptism to go with it.  We sang a lively and appropriate anthem by Pepper Choplin called Fill-a Me Up! for two services, though we sneaked out of the second service after the anthem to get in a few minutes of our Sunday school class.  Unfortunately, the anthem is sung after the sermon; good as the sermon was, I'd happily have skipped the second hearing to have attended more of the class, but the memory is still too strong of one occasion in which the normally long-winded preacher (in a different church) drastically and inexplicably cut short his sermon.  We didn't want to risk not returning in time.

Knowing many churches give short shrift to Pentecost, I asked Jonathan if they had done anything special for Pentecost in his church.  "No," he replied.  "Do you know what Pentecost is?"  "Yes, I do!  We saw a movie about it.  I remember the part about the paper clips...."  Hmmm.  That part of the coming of the Holy Spirit had apparently escaped me.  Later, Heather cleared up the mystery by remembering that they had seen a movie about the Holocaust.  Not quite the same thing, but you can see the confusion.  I still wonder about the paper clips, though.

On the way home from church we stopped by Lowe's and did our part to stimulate the economy—of the U.S. and, unfortunately, of China too.  Nothing against the Chinese people, but I'm not happy with their government, their cavalier attitude towards health and safety, their blatant disregard for patents and copyrights, and the fact that it's so difficult to find items that are made anywhere else but in China.

It wasn't completely an impulse purchase—I believe Porter had been ruminating on the idea for quite a while—but nearly so: Porter had to go home (fortunately only about 2.5 miles away) to exchange our smaller car for the one that could carry...A PORCH SWING! I love porch swings, and I remember many happy hours reading, napping, or just daydreaming on my grandfather's porch swing, which turned into our porch swing when he moved in with us.  Sadly, when it was my father's time to move to a place too small to accommodate the swing, it had deteriorated too much to make it worth moving 1000 miles south.  Nonetheless, that swing remained the gold standard for porch swings in my mind, and though we've looked at swings off and on over the years, I've never found one that really excited me.

Until yesterday.  That's why I was able to overlook the "Made in China" label, and the fact that Lowe's was rather disorganized and we had to wait quite a while before they actually found a swing we coudl take home.  Porter spent the afternoon assembling the swing (no small task—it might have been worth the $10 assembly fee, except that an installer wouldn't have done such a careful job), and there it is on our porch, looking very much like the picture, except without the sunshade, which we don't need.

Quite a Mother's Day present, huh?  It's as much like my grandfather's swing as makes no difference, perfect for naps, meditations, sitting side-by-side with my sweetheart in the evening, and reading aloud with grandchildren snuggling on either side.  What's more, it opens out into a bed; I foresee a "rite of passage" for the grandkids, marked by being old enough to sleep on Grandma and Dad-o's swing.  (Age is important because of the proximity of the pool.  No sleepwalkers need apply.)

Of course the very best Mother's Day presents were the cards and calls from our children and grandchildren!  No, scratch that.  The VERY best Mother's Day present is having such children and grandchildren as we do.

As my father would say, we were sloppin' up culture like a hawg yesterday.  (I believe the reference was to a L'il Abner comic strip, although it may have been Pogo.)  It all started when the Orlando Magic (local basketball team) advanced to the playoffs, thereby causing a parking problem for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra concert since the Bob Carr Auditorium and the O-rena (it keeps changing its name based on sponsorship, so since I can't keep track of it I generally call it by its original appellation) share parking facilities.

In order to help alleviate the problem, the OPO delayed its concert by half an hour.  We figured that still wasn't going to be good enough, since one never knows how long a basketball game is going to last, so we decided to expand the evening.

We left for downtown at 4:30, and found our usual parking garage already filled to capacity.  On to Plan B, which involved parking some distance away but near the free downtown bus line.  We could have then taken the bus to our first event, dinner at the Napasorn Thai restaurant, but decided instead to enjoy a walk in the lovely weather.  Mmmmm, tom yum gai, beef with basil, and pad Thai. :)

Our next stop was an easy walk away, for an Orlando Cabaret Festival show at the Mad Cow Theatre.  This was our third year at their popular It Was a Very Good Year series (see last year and the year before, and our choice of year was made easy by the fact that 1951 was the one that made it possible for us to see it and still make the OPO concert afterwards.

Actually, 1951 had been my first choice this time, anyway, it being close enough to my birth year I thought it might be especially interesting.  It turned out to be my least favorite of our three years, not so much because I recognized fewer of the songs as because the singers often didn't take them seriously enough to make them sound authentic.  Well, okay, there's only so much you can do with I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat....  The songs from various musicals were the best, and the most convincing.

No lingering allowed after the show; it was time to run to the next event:  The Orlando Philharmonic and the Bach Festival Choir presenting Verdi's Requiem. We didn't run, exactly, but having just missed a bus we decided to walk the nine-tenths of a mile to the Bob Carr, moving as quickly as we could against a flood tide of basketball fans in various states of depression, elation, and/or inebriation.  Arriving on time to the concert was necessary because the Requiem was performed without intermission.  Not only is it rude (and often forbidden) to enter the hall after the performance has begun, but we had also consumed many large glasses of water with our fiery Thai food....

This was, as far as I remember, the first time I'd heard Verdi's Requiem, and though I go into OPO concerts predisposed to enjoy whatever they present, I must confess I found this oddly disagreeable.  The orchestra and chorus were splendid; it was an excellent performance.  But it felt less like a requiem mass and more like an opera without costumes.  Actually, supertitles would have helped, since it was too dark in the hall to read the words printed in the program.  One of the advantages of being in a liturgical church, however, is that I was familiar enough with the words to follow fairly well anyway.

Perhaps it wasn't that much of an advantage, because often the music did not seem to fit the words.  A mental shift, not without effort, did enable me to envision someone (not seraphim) singing the light, dancing Sanctus around the throne of God, but it was a far cry from my usual Isaiah 6 inspired image.  Verdi did the Dies Irae well, however, with Carl Rendek and the men of the chorus providing a relentless, driving energy to the terrible words.

One or two of you might understand when I say that the absolute highlight of the delightful evening was the few minutes we shared with our table-mates at the Cabaret.  Turns out they were from France, and though as always in such situations my very limited French vocabulary took rapid retreat, nonetheless we did manage to communicate some in French before reverting to English.  It's always a thrill to me when someone actually understands my French, and, gracious woman, she said my accent was very good....

This took much longer than I had expected...I guess Pentecost and Mother's Day will have to wait till tomorrow. But I did get the coolest Mother's Day present. 

The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)

I'm finally reading the book I first wrote about a month an a half ago.  This post is no more a proper book review than the earlier one, since I'm only through the introduction and 3/4 of Chapter One.  I can feel Mr. Keen's keenly disapproving I Told You So look: yet another example of amateurs doing things badly.  So be it.  I just experienced a perfect example of why I have a problem with some of his assertions, and want to share it with you, my minuscule but beloved audience.   Otherwise, distracted amateur that I am, I'd probably forget the illustration before finishing the book.

While I am reading The Cult of the Amateur, Porter is enjoying a G. A. Henty novel, In the Reign of Terror, and tonight he came upon a word with which he was unfamiliar:  louvetier.  Naturally, he asked me about it, since for years I have been the family's reference-book-of-choice.  If Mom doesn't know, she'll look it up and save the rest of us the trouble.  Well, I didn't know, so I went to my handy dictionary.  This is no pocket-sized or student edition, but a thick, heavy Webster's with its own dictionary stand—but it failed me.  On to the next room, and my online references.  BabelFish: No.  Answers.com: No.  Merriam-Webster:  No.  Encyclopedia Britannica, surely:  Not at all.  Yet the combination of Google and Wikipedia, very much maligned in that first chapter I had been reading when Porter's question interrupted me, gave me the answer in a matter of seconds.  I should have tried them first, but I was under the influence of the book.  A louvetier, for those of you who are panting to know, is a French wolfcatcher, master of the wolfhounds and responsible for organizing the wolf hunts.  Wikipedia may indeed be amateurish and prone to bias and error, but it answered the question swiftly and—confirmed by Porter from the context of the book—accurately.

More to come.  I can see there is more to appreciate about Keen's insights than I was expecting, as well as plenty with which to disagree.

Today's NEHGS eNews includes the following lovely passage written on July 4, 1632 by New England Puritan leader John Winthrop. (The website version the eNews link will take you to is currently a few issues behind, but will eventually catch up to the one to which I refer, which is Vol. 10, No. 19).

I have much difficulty to keep John Galloppe here by reason his wife will not come [to the New England colony]. I marvel at the woman’s weakness that she will live miserably with her children there, when she might live comfortably here with her husband. I pray persuade and further her coming by all means: if she will come let her have the remainder of his wages, if not, let it be bestowed to bring over his children, for so he desires: it would be above £40 loss for him to come for her.

Say what you want about the difficulties of family separation, and the desirability of reunion, and I will agree with you.  But I marvel at the arrogance, duplicity, bullying, and blackmail from a leader who was loved and respected by so many.  (Actually, it reminds me of a modern-day religous leader some of us know. Let the reader understand.  Perhaps more strong, innovative leaders than we'd like to believe are a curious admixture of high intelligence, charismatic personality, stubborn will, and arrogant self-righteousness.)

I won't pretend anything other than a highly selfish interest in my dismay at the decision by the Catholic Church to forbid digitization of their parish records.  I disagree with the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), but genealogists and other historians owe them a great debt for the records they have kept and assembled over the years, records which they make freely available to people of all faiths.

Anyone who has tried to find their European ancestors knows that the parish baptismal records are critically important, often the only record of someone's birth.  This is not an issue of privacy concerns, as the records of interest are for several hundred years dead.

The concern of the Catholics is with not wanting to facilitate the Mormon practice of posthumus, vicarious baptism for their ancestors—which for those of European descent means ancestors who were baptized by the Catholic Church.  I have a problem with that practice, too, but my own faith is strong enough to be assured it's a meaningless ritual, and finding that some of my ancestors have been vicariously baptized into the Morman faith bothers me no more than hearing that some voodoo practicioner had posthumusly hexed them.  They are in God's hands, far beyond the reach of either Mormon or witch doctor.

This action by the Catholic Church says to me that they grant the Mormon ritual more efficacy than I would hope they really believe.  Jewish leaders have chimed in as well, calling the practice arrogant and insulting.  Perhaps, but only in the sense that it's arrogant to believe that I'm right and you're wrong, of which Catholics and Jews are also guilty.  I would hope that the faith of both Jews and Catholics was robust enough to handle this.  If they are so certain that they are right and the Mormons wrong, they can afford to be patient with those who are erring.  If they doubt their own faith, that's all the more reason not to slam the door.

Someone on one of my Internet forums alerted me to Rush, Little Baby, a Boston Globe article of a few months back.  As articles critical of academically-oriented education for young children, it's a pretty good one, covering many perspectives and giving fair space to the opposing view.

It's still frustrating.

For all that it's a long trek through the article, I finished the trip feeling more as if I had been on an If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium tour of Europe: sound bites rather than substance.  And though I have criticisms myself of some of the ways preschool children are taught, they naysayers in this article are generally setting up straw men to knock down.

The case of William Sidis, for example, is a tired old chestnut, full of half-truths, and in any case there are plenty of reasons to account for his problems without blaming his precocity.

I've written before on the problems with the Baby Einstein study.

Phonics instruction is important, and those who never learn to sound out new words are at a distinct disadvantage as readers.  I've quarreled often enough with schools that teach reading by the infamous look-say method.  But the article's assertion that those who learn to read that way can't really read is ludicrous.  Poor as it may be, that's the way I learned to read, and I'm an excellent reader, having figured out (enough) phonics along the way.  More to the point, I'm sure the author doesn't really mean to imply that Chinese, Japanese, and other speakers of non-phonetic languages aren't really reading....

Studies purporting to show that children who are advanced when they enter school generally lose their advantage in a few years will remain unconvincing as long as most schools offer little or no opportunity for such children to continue to blossom, but instead encourage them to become bored and complacent.  I'm very tired of making that point, but apparently it needs to be made over and over again.  (Martin Luther, on being asked why he preached on justification by faith every week, responded "Because you forget it every week.")  

Most of all, I'm frustrated by the false dichotomy that is always being presented. Of course sitting on the floor with your child and building block structures together is a good thing, as are creating puppet shows, snuggling on the couch reading together, cooking dinner, and a host of other activities.  But why are these things always presented in opposition to showing your child pictures of art works, or butterflies, or words, or mathematical quantities, or introducing them in other ways to the lively world they will later "study" as academic subjects?  The people I know who do the latter also do the former, probably more than most.  I'm sure there are those who plop their kids down in front of "brain-boosting" DVDs or TV shows for hours on end and call it education, but that's no one I know, and even if it were, a few bad apples don't invalidate a practice.  I'll grant this:  IF one only has time to build block castles with a child, OR show the child pictures of art masterpieces, but not both, I'd take the blocks.  But that's a foolish premise, an impossible situation.  Whoever needs to make that choice?

If you have time, check out the Doman Inspired Parenting blog.  I have issues with some of Timothy's parents' choices for his upbringing—not that it's any of my business, but so you know I'm not holding them up as paragon parents.  Nonetheless they've done an absolutely amazing job.  A most intense program of the kind derided in the article, with plenty of activities of the kind promoted (check out their ExploraZone!), the parents also managing a job and a half plus grad school...no, these aren't the Incredibles, but they certainly show the foolishness of the above either/or dichotomy.

Parents should share God's wonderful world with their children in a variety of delightful ways.  All else is commentary.

While chatting with the dental hygienist yesterday, I learned about a science project that had been assigned to her fifth-grade son: Each student was assigned a "body system"—perhaps circulatory, digestive, respiratory, etc.; I didn't get the details—and told to make up a game using questions about that system.  At first glance that seems reasonable, perhaps even interesting. Games are not a particularly efficient way to learn facts, but they can be an enjoyable way of masking the repetition that is required to commit them to memory.  Certainly making up the questions is a good exercise.

However, the amount of time and effort required for this project was 'way out of proportion to the science knowledge gained, most being devoted to extraneous matters:  the game must have a well-made game board, with a detailed, typed instruction sheet, and a sturdy, well-decorated box.  Such a project might be a joy for some students but torture for their less-crafty classmates—and to what purpose?  Whatever one might think of the merits of training fifth graders in manual dexterity and design, it seems unfair to base a science grade on such work, and in any case one ought not to pretend that it is science that is being taught.

This assignment is yet one more example of how those who claim they don't have enough time to teach properly waste the students' time with busywork.  Craft projects instead of science, PowerPoint presentations instead of written reports, browsing the Internet for images instead of writing paragraphs, and tweaking fonts and backgrounds instead of improving sentence structure!  It's bad enough when a teacher allows a student to get away with such nonsense; to require it is ludicrous.

My theory is that the teacher in question is using her students as slave labor to create classroom materials for future years, so I encouraged the hygienist to make sure the project comes home after it has been graded. 

The end month of Porter's recent gig was very stressful, with lots of pressure and 80+ hour work weeks.  My father often said that his favorite Bible quotation was "And it came to pass...."  This, too, has passed at last, and we have survived.  Many thanks to those of you who upheld Porter in your prayers.

If anyone wants a measure of how stressful the time was, I need only say that he has spent several days recently working on replacing a neighbor's roof, and some of you remember that two years ago—after replacing ours—he said he'd never, ever do that again. But this is how he chooses to relax these days, finding the physical work a delightful change.

So, onward!  Two days in Roanoke, then who knows?  It's always an adventure. 

Picture this:  During the upcoming Olympics, the second place finisher of a big race suddenly collapses and dies.  Nonetheless, the crowd still celebrates with the winner, and the medal ceremony takes place as if nothing had happened.  It's a tragedy, sure, but that's life, that's sport, and nothing should take away from the winner's glory.

That's not as far-fetched as it might seem.  We don't like to rain on anyone's parade.  No one seems anxious to boycott this year's Olympics, despite China's blatant and unrepentant violation of human rights and international law.  We don't want to hurt our athletes, and that's understandable.  Still, there was a time when celebrations were set aside in the face of tragedy, such as the wedding of my mother's cousin, for which, as the newspaper announcement put it, "nuptials were quiet owing to the late bereavement in the home."

Horses are not people, but the death of Eight Belles, the brave filly who finished second in today's running of the Kentucky Derby, then collapsed with two compound fractures of her front legs and had to be euthanized immediately, will put a damper on the post-race celebrations.  Or at least it should.

When I was in Pittsburgh, we bought some dried pineapple at Trader Joe's, and it was very, very good!  Thus when I saw the same at my local health food store, I snapped it up.  Did I say it was the same?  Not.  Even thought the label did not mention added sugar, this pineapple must have been sweetened, as is the dried pineapple I can buy at the grocery store.  Yuck.  I couldn't eat it, so I cooked it with some dried apricots to make a fruit topping for my breafast muesli.

Not to be defeated, however, I set about making my own dried pineapple out of canned pieces (rings work best) heated in a low-temperature oven.  Voila!  Wonderful!  Delicious!  The only trouble is that a can of pineapple shrinks to something so small—and so tasty—one could easily devour an entire batch in one sitting.  (One didn't, but it was a close thing.)

The acoustics in our house are such that the sound from the television is loudest in every room except the one in which the TV resides.  Perhaps that is not literally true, but to those trying to work or sleep while someone else watches television, it certainly seems that way.  Hence our joy when Porter's "thank you award" came from IBM:  a set of wireless headphones.

Fortunately, there was no need to understand in detail the instructions, which contained several gems.

This wireless headphone is worked based on optical-electricity transition.

Well, of course.  What else would it be worked based on?

Thanks to Tim at Random Observations for alerting me to this interesting commentary on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.  The book and the movie derived from it have formed our national image of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.  The trouble is, that's a false impression.  Like Amadeus and Braveheart, The Grapes of Wrath tells a good story based on historical events, but without letting the truth get in the way of the narrative.

Someone with a solid knowledge of the historical situation might be able to imbibe the story without harm, but the rest of us, unfortunately the majority, are learning history through these media, and learning it wrong.  We're left with a mish-mash of fact and fiction we may never sort out, and upon which we will unconsiously base our philosophical, political, social, and moral decisions.

Whoever said (I've seen various attributions), "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws," might just as well have been speaking about its popular books, television shows, and movies.  The only antidote besides a healthy (uncynical) skepticism is a solid grounding in history, preferably from several viewpoints.  Mea culpa; my own knowledge of history is abysmal, and I did not do much to help our children achieve more.  But if I were designing a home eduation program now, the tripod on which I would rest the entire academic program, beginning from the earliest stages, would be: language, mathematics/logic, and history.  Those who are strong in these three areas will not easily be duped.

On rare occasions I have the opportunity to hear National Public Radio's Car Talk program, which I find amusing as well as informative, which is saying something since I have little interest in cars beyond their usefulnes in getting me from Point A to Point B.  (Okay, so I make an exception for a certain Ford GT, but that has more to do with the people involved than the car itself.)  The shows usually feature a "Puzzler," which since it involves cars often leaves me clueless.  But every once in a while (well, twice) there has been one that I have solved almost instantly, which of course makes me feel great.  Thus the inspiration to share them with you all.  The first was many years ago, and the second I heard today, so you can gather from that how good a Puzzler puzzler I am, or perhaps how often I hear the show.  For a hint, I can say that my ability to solve them both so quickly was due to personal experience with the situations involved.

Puzzler #1

Puzzler #2

Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices is a New York Times article about research at Ohio State University that may have profound implications for the teaching of mathematics to young children.  Unfortunately, just what those implications may be is completely obscure to me, as it is, I daresay, to the researchers.

I've written before (here, and here) about my belief that many children can learn abstract math concepts much earlier than is commonly supposed, and do not need to be limited to practical, real-world mathematics until they reach Piaget's magical age of abstract thinking.  So I suppose I should have been pleased to read about a study that purports to show that children actually learn mathematical concepts better through abstract symbols than they do through practical examples.  Not so; I'm also a fan of practical math, and believe both to be important.  In any case, it's hard to draw any conclusions one way or the other from this research—or at least from the Times report.

In the experiment, students were taught a mathematical concept either through abstract symbols or through concrete examples such as combining liquids in measuring cups.  They were then asked to apply that knowledge to figure out the rules of a game.  Those who had learned the concept abstractly did better at that application than those who had learned through the concrete examples, and also better than those who had been taught first the concrete examples and then the abstract ones.  Supposedly the real-world examples actually obscured the underlying math.

I'm going to break the post here, because some of you will want to look at the puzzle yourselves before reading about my experiences.  I strongly encourage you to read the article, but if you don't do that, at least follow the link and click on the link in the upper left under "Multimedia" that will show you the problems.  (It's a javascript pop-up, and I can't figure out how to insert it here without offending someone's copyright.)  Then click the "more" link after this paragraph to continue reading this post.I quarrel with the application of this research to any conclusion other than "We need to study this further."  For one thing, The laboratory rats in question were college students, whose brains might reasonably be expected to have already become capable of abstract thought.  It would be risky to apply anything learned from them directly to six-year-olds.  For another, the "concrete" examples appear—thought it's hard to tell for sure from the article—to be abstractions themselves.  Thinking about a measuring cup filled 1/3 full of liquid is more similar to thinking about a circle than it is to pouring liquid from an actual, physical cup.

Believing my own brain to be reasonably competent at both mathematics and abstract reasoning, I was shocked at how difficult I found the problem.  I couldn't get my mind around what they were trying to show.  What finally gave me the necessary clue was actually the measuring cup example, but thought about abstractly, as numbers.  Thinking about its physical properties was, indeed, distracting from the underlying mathematical concept, but the abstract symbols were no more helpful.  When I finally thought about the problem in terms of numbers alone, then answer was obvious, and to my mind much more easily explained abstractly—though I do still have a problem with the third example in the measuring cup system, so I may be missing something even though I got the correct answers.  I'll be very interested to hear what other people think.  Especially my reader from Oswego.  :)

I wouldn't change the way I taught anyone mathematics based on this study alone, but I would be very interested in hearing the results of a similar study done with other demographics: not only children of different ages, but also adults of various occupations and levels of education.

Okay, so it may not generate any cash income, but my status as a blogger has earned me a free, one-year subscription to the Encyclopedia Britannica online!  Many thanks to Groshlink for the alert.  I'm grateful for the existence of Wikipedia, the hare in the online encyclopedia race, because of its wide-ranging, rapid-response (if not necessarily dependable) fluidity, but the opportunity to be able to access, and link to, a steady, reliable tortoise like the Britannica is not to be missed.

The application site has been swamped, it is claimed, but my blog was approved for the free account in less than 24 hours.  Try it with your blog, before they change their minds!