Assorted and Sundry
• If you’re making fallacy-packed statements like “I can ask them to open their mouths, turn on their brains, and share their ideas with the rest of the class” and “A student who is unwilling to stand up for herself and tell me that she does not understand the difference between an adverb and a verb is also less likely to stand up for herself if she is being harassed or pressured in other areas of her life,” then no, I don’t care how many books you’ve read about introverts, you really don’t understand them AT ALL.
(Smart, thoughtful commentary on the frustrating Atlantic post here and here.)
• The Dragon Box app turns algebra into a seriously absorbing game! Big thanks to Karen Edmisten for calling it to my attention. Everyone from the 6-year-old to the 44-year-old here is hooked.
• Beautiful.
“Everywhere I turn these days the message is to be anything but ordinary. Be Epic! Be badass. Be daring and wild. If it isn’t hurting, you aren’t living. Platitudes and the anti-platitudes. Add a filter to make the picture hipper and cooler because the way it really is isn’t hip or cool enough. Make it larger than life and maybe then we can be friends. Go big or go home.
“In last night’s late hour, I felt the value of ordinary. I didn’t want my sister back so she could do amazing, inspiring things with her life. I didn’t want her back so I could join her on epic, wild adventures. I wanted her back so she could love me. So I could love her.”
“Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing (1/22) — Susan Hill may be a dark, cutting novelist, telling stories full of nasty doings and the horrors that mankind can get up to — I’ve never read her novels, so it may be so. But, on the basis of this book, I highly doubt it. Hill spent a year reading only books that she already had in her (apparently large and wonderful, thoroughly English country) home, and wrote this book about the experience. There’s quite a bit about the books she loves, about writers now forgotten, about the Great Books, about the joys of re-reading, and various other booky topics. There’s also a few bits of autobiography, mostly concerned with Hill’s very early days in the literary world — her first novel was published in the early ’60s, when she was a 19-year-old college student, and I’m afraid she does talk about how nice all of those older literary gentlemen were to poor young her without seeming to realize why they were so nice — but she does stick to her topic most of the time. And she’s entertaining about it, if quite English in an old-fashioned sense: country, Anglican, serious, pull-up-your-socks kind of English. This is exactly the kind of book you’d expect from a sixtyish British female novelist writing about the books she likes to read, and, as long as that’s something you’re likely to enjoy, Howards End Is on the Landing is delightful.”
More links that caught my attention here.
Carly says:
Hmm, reflecting on introverts and education, and class participation. Reading the article and responses got me thinking about introverts needing to reflect and distill their thoughts before expressing them. As an introvert homeschooling an introvert, I wonder how to incorporate this need into our narration. It occurs to me that asking for narration immediately after a reading doesn’t allow for that process. She’s gotten better at simply telling back what we’ve read, but balks if I ask what was the most interesting thing in the reading, or anything else that requires much synthesis. Perhaps this partially explains why that is so difficult.
On February 9, 2013 at 8:28 am
Melanie B says:
Carly, that’s a great point. I know Isabella can frequently recount reading in great detail days afterward, but breaks down in tears if I ask even the simplest questions about the passage I’ve just read. However, my impression is that Charlotte Mason originally required narration immediately after reading. So now I’m curious about the pedagogical effectiveness of waiting vs immediacy. How long should one allow for synthesis? How long is feasible? Maybe I need to go back and re-read what Charlotte actually says? And maybe when Lissa gets around to writing that narration post, she can throw in her two cents. 😉
On February 9, 2013 at 11:58 am
Harmony says:
Oh, I hope Lissa or some of you other CMers will write some more thoughts on narration and the introvert! When I started reading about CM I thought how awful narration would have been for me as a child, but I wondered if it would have been good for me and grown me in a way I haven’t grown. I’d think it would have been torture for my mother though as much as for me. (I still feel like I’m being prosecuted when my mother-in-law insists on randomly asking me questions like “how do you feel about your church?” and “are you happy with your kitchen?”) It didn’t really occur to me that most/all introverts would be challenged by having to immediately produce thoughts and conclusions about something just read. I’ve got one extroverted child so far, but for future reference I’d love to hear how others have approached this with introverts.
On February 11, 2013 at 12:45 am