"Goodbye, and thank your mother for the rabbits": Part the First, March 2016

You can take the mother out of the homeschool, but you can’t take the homeschooler out of this mother . . . especially when it comes to (ta-da) . . . Unit Studies!

Take this morning, for instance, when I happened upon the seemingly innocuous phrase, “Goodbye, and thank your mother for the rabbits.”

Harmless enough, you may think . . . But not for a home-educating parent who thinks in unit studies. She would take this phrase and milk it for every possible drop of teaching content. You will be surprised how much there is!

Let me show you how it works for me, in hopes that you’ll find something you can use, or at least be infected by my enthusiasm. Let’s start with:

1)   “Goodbye”: the word originated in the late 1500’s; “Godbwye,” a contraction of “God be with ye”, was soon further shortened to a simple “goodbye.“ To find the reason behind this truncation, have the whole family say godbwye every time they leave the house—or just a room—for one day. Which is easier to say, godbwye or “bye”? Is anything lost in the simplification?

2)   “Thank you” and gifts: thank you letters always made me feel sick with guilt; I knew my children should write them, and I really meant to make them, but so much got in the way … End result, everybody felt bad, (especially me) and the letters never got written.

Now that I have 20/20 hindsight, I can do it right: I create a “Thank You Box” with paper, stickers, crayons, envelopes and postage stamps, and make producing one thank you letter per day part of every school day till they are all done. (I find that glitter helps.) The box makes it easy for the children, while envelopes and stamps make addressing and mailing easy for me until the children are old enough to do it themselves. I call attention to articles about letter-writing going out of style, and the children feel proud to be different.

We have fun brainstorming situations where thanks are appropriate.  These include Worship of God; thanks for gifts (of time, kindness, money, physical things etc.) Who do we suppose wrote the first thank you letter? What did it look like? Might it have been a scratch on a rock? A whale tooth? A feather? (I like that—a thank you feather!) When have I been particularly touched by a gift? Can I give a gift like that to someone I love? Do gifts always have to cost money? 

Google and read out loud the poem ‘Bobby’s Presents’ by Elsie Duncan Yale. Bobby buys things he wants for himself, and gives them to his family members—a baseball for mother, a bat for daddy, a jack-knife for baby . . . Being a thoughtful chap, he realizes that these gifts may not be entirely suitable right now, so he’ll borrow them—just for a while . . .

The poem is, of course, intended to be humorous. But I have a friend whose husband and two adult sons really like Games of Thrones, and just guess what she got for Mother’s Day last year? (and, I believe, her birthday as well!)Perhaps her husband should have read ‘Bobby’s Presents’ as a boy.

So I only got through goodbye and thank you; that’s what happens with unit studies.

Tune in next time to discover what happens . . . beyond the rabbit-proof fence!

To Draw, That We Might See: Part The Second (Still February ’16)

As I hope you recall, my last blog left you on tenterhooks, perched on the edge of your seat, pondering the burning question: Was John Ruskin, the famous nineteenth century London art critic, pleased by the advent of the camera? Would he have been thrilled out of his tree by the miraculous technology of today’s tiny cell phone camera, which puts capturing both panoramic vistas and intricately detailed close ups into the hands of the rank amateur?

As you may have deduced (aided, perhaps, by the title of this blog) the answer is a resounding no. Cameras, Ruskin came to believe, stop us seeing. He noticed that would-be photographers were so preoccupied with their cameras, so busy twiddling and fiddling with various knobs, that they quite forgot to look at the particular bit of the universe that had inspired them in the first place. Not so with the gentle art of sketching; having selected the scene, the artist takes out her sketchbook, pencils and paper, finds a place to sit that is neither too hot nor too cold, too bright nor too shady, carefully sizes up her subject, and finally puts pencil to paper. Producing even a simple sketch requires several minutes of intense looking, and it is in the looking that the magic happens.

Ruskin became a passionate enemy of the camera and promoter of drawing—indeed, he spent four years on a campaign to get people sketching again. He wrote books, gave speeches and funded art schools that still flourish today—schools that were (at least in his day) dedicated not to drawing well, but to drawing at all. His ideal was that people should slow down and smell the coffee (which had become quite a popular drink by his time): “The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”

How beautiful is that—“his glory is not . . . in going, but in being”? (By “man”, of course, Ruskin and everyone else at his time, and many people today,  myself included, understand “and woman.”)

Ruskin died in January, 1900—the year the chief of the Patent Office famously observed that it might as well be shut down, since everything that possibly could be invented, had been (was ever a statement as colossally and monumentally wrong as that!) I am glad, for his sake, that Ruskin wasn’t born a century later, and so was spared the frenetic acceleration of life brought about, first by the motorcar, then by the computer.

So today, in honor of John Ruskin and all the many 20^th century self-help gurus who have rediscovered the beauty of life in the slow lane, I invite you and your children to join me on the cool, unhurried pages of a sketchbook. And when you have produced a drawing —you’ll notice, I didn’t say “a good drawing”—whip out your cell phone, snap a photo, and save it till I’ve figured out how you’ll send it to me.

To Draw, That We Might See: Part the First Feb ‘16

                                          

It’s not every day that a voice emerges from the pages of history to give a ringing endorsement to an educational notion you thought you’d scraped off a mossy rock somewhere in Devon some fifty years ago: but precisely such a great pleasure befell me This Very Day. I was fortunate enough to make the online acquaintanceship of the arrestingly titled The Book of Life, and in it the chapter that effectively shut down all other activity for the day: On the Importance of Drawing.

Those among you who have read my book, Entropy Academy, may remember that I waxed most enthusiastic about the benefits of drawing—not because cameras were so unwieldy and expensive way back in the 1990’s (which they were), or because film was so temperamental and annoying to have developed (which it was), but because drawing trained me to see!

I had discovered this during my son’s Special Olympics soccer practices, which lasted about an hour and a half. Hour one was easy—the dog and I wore ourselves out with a speed walk of roughly 60 minutes’ duration. The remaining 30-40 minutes lent themselves admirably to a more sedentary pursuit: finding a flower, whether two feet high or the size of a grain of rice, and painstakingly committing its details to paper. I was familiar with the parts of a flower from the enormous amaryllis we grew indoors every Christmas, and the more I drew anthers, stamens and pistils, the easier it became for me to recognize them in the field. (Incidentally, for those who care, moss doesn't have flowers.)

So picture my delight when I read about John Ruskin, a famous English art critic of the nineteenth century. Ruskin noticed that people have an innate desire to capture beauty and try to preserve it. In Ruskin’s day, the newly invented camera was about the size of a grandfather clock, and thus quite unsuitable for slinging around one’s neck on a visit to Niagara Falls. The only way to capture a “souvenir” (French for “memory”) was to purchase it from one of the aptly named souvenir shops that sprang up like mushrooms at every scene of great natural beauty, and have remained there ever since.

One might assume that Ruskin would have been thrilled by today’s tiny cell phone camera, which boasts some ridiculous number of pixels per image—far more than even camera cognoscenti can appreciate with the naked eye. Surely, technology that puts such creative power into the hands of your average Joe Sixpack enjoying his annual two-week vacation on the rocky expanse of Brighton Beach would have allayed Ruskin’s suspicious mind, and caused a hearty endorsement on his part?

You might well assume so: but the answer may surprise you.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait for my next blog to find out.

Shoes and socks

Shoes. From soft, tiny baby shoes to gigantic clodhoppers, they demarcate the transition from infancy to teenagerhood. And with them (one might possibly be tempted to say, ’hand in glove’) go socks. Indeed, keeping track of shoes and socks might be termed a Metaphor for the Marvelous Journey of Motherhood

Time was, I could put my hand in my clothes pocket any time, anywhere, and pull out a tiny, soft, colorful baby sock. Happy indeed was a day when I would later find its mate. Matching a pair of socks became a Major Life Event and called for great rejoicing, representing as it did a successful foray into that day’s battle with entropy. I also knew, however, that the day would all too quickly dawn when my hand would search my pocket in vain, and come up empty. Fully aware of the poignancy of the moment, I’d give the sock an appreciative sniff (“Aah, baby powder!”) and return it to my pocket.

But socks , inevitably, outgrow pockets; and as they do, like cowboys and Greta Garbo, they want to be alone. Solitary mismatched socks soon filled a red plastic bucket kept (in what proved to be a futile attempt to stop them metastasizing the length and breadth of the house) behind the laundry room door. This was raided every Sunday morning in a desperate quest for a matching pair: “Surely somewhere among these tens of thousands of odd socks there must lurk two that remotely resemble a pair? “

But no. Incredibly enough, and in complete defiance of the laws of probability, never mind of logic, the bucket yielded an apparently infinite number of individual socks that were united in one thing and one thing only: a fervent desire for their rugged individualism to remain . . . well, rugged, I suppose, and individualistic.

Shoes, on the other hand, are a good deal more tractable. Pin a pair together with a clothespin, buckle a pair together or tie their laces, and there is at least an outside chance of them staying together.

Just please don’t tell shoes that I called them more manageable than socks. I shudder to think of the shape their retribution might take.

Guy Fawkes: Gunpowder, Treason, and Mushy Peas.

One thing I knew for certain: Guy Fawkes was a bad man. A very bad man. So bad, in fact, that every year, in the days leading up to November 5th, my brother Ian and I would round up old clothes from the rag bag, stuff them with crumpled newspaper into a reasonable facsimile of a human being, and trundle him around the streets of Clifton Village, requesting “a penny for the guy” from passers-by. The money went to buy fireworks, while Guy met his fate, sizzling on a bonfire. Gleefully, we sang,

"Please to remember the fifth of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder, treason

Should ever be forgot."

At first it was all good, clean fun. Even when I learned the word “effigy,” and understood that the guy we were burning represented a real person, I was unfazed. He was a traitor, pure and simple. He deserved to die.

As I grew older, the black and white certainties of childhood history became clouded with nuanced shades of gray. Was Guy Fawkes really the scheming villain of my youth, or might he have been set up?

What is known is that on 5th November, 1605, Guy Fawkes was caught in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament with several dozen barrels of gunpowder, looking for all the world as if he was about to blow up the Houses of Parliament, King James I, and with him, the cream of the English aristocracy's fairest and finest (which if you ask anyone of Irish extraction, isn't saying very much.)

Nobody asked questions like: how did he manage to procure so much gunpowder when it was so scarce, and how did he get it past the guards?

Guy was found guilty, and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. I won’t spoil your breakfast by describing the technique, which ranks among the most brutal methods of execution ever devised by man (which is saying quite something): suffice it to say only that the castration which began it was the easy part, after which things rapidly got worse. So determined was our hero to avoid the torture that he jumped headlong from the scaffold and broke his neck, thus depriving the assembled onlookers of their morning’s entertainment.

While not quite in the same league as the Borgias in Italy, the court of James I was not far behind. In particular, the Lord Cecil was a ruthless schemer such as would make Richard Nixon look like the Easter Bunny. There is some considerable evidence to suggest that Cecil masterminded the whole plot, including Guy Fawkes’ arrest. And execution. His goal was to stir up vehement anti-Catholic sentiment, and in that he was more than successful.

Historical revisionism notwithstanding, November 5 was always a good excuse for a party and the best were in Yorkshire. Being in the north of England, Yorkshire is considerably colder and darker than the south; and on November 5^th, the darker and colder the better. Certain traditional delicacies were prepared in advance: parkin, a dark and gloriously sticky gingerbread made with black treacle and golden syrup, and the aptly named "mushy peas"—overcooked peas mashed to a glutinous paste (a technique pioneered and perfected in the kitchens of British Rail)—and rendered strangely exotic by the addition of mint sauce (finely chopped mint leaves mixed with white sugar and vinegar.)

Most major holidays are relatively homogeneous, and involve dinners round a table using knives, forks and spoons. Not so our Yorkshire Guy Fawkes celebrations! The contrasts were thrilling: icy cold at our backs driving us ever closer to the ferocious, skin scorching, hair frizzing heat of the raging bonfire; fingers frozen numb, threatening to drop the paper cups that did little to insulate against the veritable furnace of mushy peas; the biting cold of the icy ground snapping at our feet through ridiculously thin soled shoes; the roaring whoosh of flames devouring everything we fed them— leaves, branches, broken down furniture, even on one occasion a piano deemed beyond all hope, wildly out of tune, with a cracked sounding-board….It serenaded us in its death throes, twanging a macabre melody as one by one its strings exploded, curling red-hot into the black night sky. Wild, pagan, celebrating a revolutionary who sought to overturn the status quo by unthinkably violent means: five dozen barrels of gunpowder, ready to blow the English government to kingdom come.

Or was he some poor stooge, easily manipulated by those more devious, more ambitious, more malevolent than he? Are the children’s voices, still urging their listeners five hundred years later, to “remember, remember the fifth of November” doing exactly what Cecil wanted: stirring up anti-Catholic feeling in a country where to this day “all religions are the same, except Catholics, and they’re wrong.”

Big Pharma loves me . . . or does it?

 

As a starry eyed newlywed in San Francisco some thirty-three years ago, I bypassed the butter at the supermarket and brought home a tub of semi soft margarine. It was low-cholesterol, made with non-hydrogenated oils, and I felt like a health-conscious, savvy shopper.

My husband Robin was less impressed: "What on earth did you buy that for? I'm not eating that toxic … “(he used a brief, emphatic word unfit for publication). “You’d be better off with butter.”

Now, the annoying thing about Robin is that, at least in matters medical, he’s always right. Watching TV medical dramas, he beats the doc to a diagnosis every time. This shouldn't really surprise me given the impressive list of his medical credentials, but it’s still annoying.

In The Case Of The Soft Margarine, I rose to the defense of my purchase: I knew—I had read in a magazine—that hydrogenated fats were bad for you, oils were good. Therefore soft margarine was infinitely preferable to its hard cousin, stick margarine, or worse yet, butter. Research had proven it—scientific research.

The very mention of "research" brought on a whole stream of brief emphatic words; apparently this was something of a sore point with my husband. I soon found out why.

Robin had spent two years at one of the nation’s top medical schools, researching the causes of high cholesterol. He found that the liver manufactures approximately 80% of the cholesterol found in the blood; only the remaining 20% is dietary. So, assuming an impossibly rigorous diet with zero cholesterol, the greatest possible reduction would be a measly twenty percent. Moreover, it seemed that the liver would simply crank up its production to make up the dietary shortfall. He asked the obvious question, one nobody else seemed to be asking: what causes the liver to over-produce cholesterol, and how can it be regulated?

Following their doctors’ advice, millions of Americans take statins to lower their cholesterol. They endure unpleasant side effects in the hope of avoiding heart attacks, strokes, and premature death.  Robin’s research held out the promise of a non-toxic, low-cost way to help the liver regulate itself. The impact would be felt globally—statins are the most widely prescribed drug in the world. He typed up his proposal, got the approval of the head of department, sent it to the National Institutes of Health, and waited. 

The verdict came back: “Approved but not funded.” He tweaked the proposal a little to make it even more elegant and resubmitted it. Same result.

His head of department told him why it would never be funded: the good folk at the National Institutes of Health were not about to sanction any research that would hurt their friends in the drug industry. And if Robin’s hunch was correct, and a few dollars worth of thyroid hormone each month would regulate cholesterol production and make statins irrelevant, it would bankrupt the drug companies who are making billions of dollars per year from the sale of statins. That’s right, billions. From statins alone. Now, if there’s one thing the drug companies know how to do, it’s make a profit: in 2005, the thirty-three major drug companies made more money than the rest of the Fortune 500 combined. With stakes like these, small wonder the NIH only funds “research” that safeguards Big Pharma’s bottom line.

It’s amazing how many congressmen a few billion dollars can buy.

Hmm, I thought, if money is more important than saving patients from heart attacks and strokes, what about vaccines? Might the same principle apply? I set about some research of my own, No Funding Required.

What I discovered will be the subject of another blog.

Can Two Great Danes Fill an Empty Nest?

The great exodus occurs, the children leave home. Whether you call it an empty nest or a successful launching pad, the result is the same: a silent house. Not so for me! By a great accident of serendipity, my two Great Danes seized the opportunity to fill the silence: they began to speak.

While seated at my computer the other morning I became aware that I was being watched, and that intently. Glancing over at the dog bed I saw Percy stretched out, sound asleep and snoring like a drunken sailor. Next to my chair stood Froby with an agonized expression on his face.

Let me tell you about Froby. We found him, age 7 months, at the animal shelter; he had been rescued from a life of at best neglect, at worst downright abuse. He looked like a walking skeleton and was virtually wild. Taming him was a labor of love that stretched into months, and is still very much a work in progress three years later. Froby has no idea how terrifyingly vast he is, and is scared stiff of everything from a rabbit to an open door. His body language more closely resembles a deer than a dog.

Thinking that a second dog might help to calm his many neuroses, we agreed to take on Percy (short for Persephone), also 7 months, who had ridden down from Bakersfield in the back of a pickup truck when her owners discovered that it takes a tidy sum to feed a Great Dane. Rather like a canine Marilyn Monroe, Percy makes up for what she lacks in moral fiber by looking irresistible. I like to imagine her arrival in Ojai wearing Marilyn’s trademark headscarf and sunglasses. She would have looked so cool!

Percy relies heavily on her looks. Unfortunately for her, Froby has a highly developed sense of justice that is not to be swayed by her beauty. So when Percy took over the whole L.L. Bean Extra-Large dog bed, what could Froby do but appeal to higher authority, to wit, me. "Mum," he said (he gets his English accent from me), "Mum, Percy's in my bed." Then, seeing that I made no move to eject her, he raised the volume and tried again. "I said, MUM!” (this time he barked my name), “Percy's in my bed and she's taking up all her side AND all of mine and It’s Not Fair"!

Percy stopped snoring. One eye opened a slit and promptly closed. Without uttering a sound, she said clearly, “I’m not listening,” and resumed her slumbers.

I contemplated the odds of moving either of them. Froby tips the scales at around 130 pounds, Percy at 120 or so. If they don’t want to move, there is nothing I can do to make them. Happily, I managed to persuade Percy to bend her knees enough to make room for Froby.

You might think that, once they’d proved that there was plenty of room for two, the sharing problem would be at an end. Nothing could be further from the truth! In this the dog bed acts very much like the backseat of the car, where a misplaced elbow or hip can cause a monstrous dispute.

Today, however, all is quiet; Percy nabbed the bed, leaving Froby the ancient wicker loveseat. The only sounds are the dogs’ heavy breathing and the ticking of the grandfather clock.

It sounds suspiciously like the silence of an empty nest.

I wonder if the shelter knows of another Great Dane in need of adoption—preferably a nice talkative one. 

Percy takes up the whole bed,

but she can also look tiny.

Froby relegated to the love-seat

We'll share, as long as I don't have to touch him.