Morning thoughts...

My urban view

I have been enjoying the quiet of the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Modesto, California since yesterday afternoon. I am always shocked at how much I can accomplish when I am alone. I can read (a lot) AND eat (when I want) AND iron my clothes AND walk AND solve the questions of the world with friends. I wouldn't trade this for the rather more demanding life I have at home, but every once in a while it is a lot of fun. Tonight I will be sharing a room with a woman who takes the idea of late night and pushes it into the wee hours of the morning, so I better catch a nap before the conference starts this afternoon. If you are staying here in the Doubletree Hotel, and you hear strange voices yelling out "Ewan McGregor" sometime between midnight and dawn, just know that we don't get out often and this is our idea of crazy fun, okay? And, no, we don't know why it is so funny either.

From my quieter moments of praying, reading, planning, thinking and productively staring out at the urban surroundings come these notes:

From The Book of Common Prayer

A Collect for the Renewal of Life

O God, the King eternal, whose light divides the day from the night and turns the shadow of death into the morning: Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep your law, and guide our feet into the way of peace; that, having done your will with cheerfulness during the day, we may, when night comes, rejoice to give you thanks; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

It's the cheerful part that always causes me to pause and ask for a measure of grace.

From One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Actually, ever since she had found it in Aureliano Segundo's trunks, Fernanda had put on the moth-eaten queen's dress many times. Anyone who could have seen her in front of the mirror, in ecstasy over her own regal gestures, would have had reason to think she was mad. But she was not. She had simply turned the royal regalia into a device for her memory. The first time that she put it on she could not help a knot from forming in her heart and her eyes filling with tears because at that moment she smelled once more the odor of shoe polish on the boots of the officer who came to get her at her house to make her a queen, and her soul brightened with the nostalgia of her lost dreams."

I have commented before (here and here) about my struggles with Solitude; I was right that a block of quiet has allowed me to get into the rhythm of the writing. Fifty-four more pages to go.

From A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason:

"One of our presumptuous sins in this connection is that we venture to offer opinions to children (and to older persons) instead of ideas. We believe that an opinion expresses thought and therefore embodies an idea. Even if it did so once the very act of crystallization into opinion destroys any vitality it may have had;"

and

"All roads lead to Rome, and all I have said is meant to enforce the fact that much and varied humane reading, as well as human thought expressed in the forms of art, is, not a luxury, a tit-bit, to be given to children now and then, but their very bread of life, which they must have in abundant portions and at regular periods. This and more is implied in the phrase, 'The mind feeds on ideas and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.'"

I have been spending time thinking through our approach to next year's school plan, and I find myself returning to Charlotte Mason's original writings for some perspective on the middle school and high school years. If you are interested in Charlotte Mason's philosophy of education, I strongly recommend you read her writing, not someone else's interpretation of her writing. The interpretations are extremely helpful in the application of the ideas, and I have benefitted immensely from them, but I think you owe it to yourself to hammer through as much of the original as you can.

A tremendous resource for schedules and book lists is Ambleside Online; the yahoo groups associated with it provide an excellent forum for questions and files with sample schedules and forms. We're going to be studying from around 1800 up to World War I this year, so I will be using a lot of the books on the fifth and tenth year lists, adapting the schedule to work for my fifth, eighth, ninth and tenth graders. My second grader will study the same years, but I will need to put together some age-appropriate readings for him.

Back to planning and coffee. Happy Saturday!