"Days when the air is full of fallacies"

by Anne White

A due recognition of the function of reason should be an enormous help to us all in days when the air is full of fallacies, and when our personal modesty, that becoming respect for other people which is proper to well-ordered natures whether young or old, makes us [too] willing to accept conclusions duly supported by public opinion or by those whose opinions we value. (Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education, p. 143)

Let's pick that apart, shall we?

If we, adult or child, teacher or student, have a well-ordered nature, we will display a certain respect for other people, adults or children, teachers or students, nice or irritating. Full stop. As in, first of all, we are born persons, and so are they; and, second, within that ordered nature, we recognize the need for authority. There are captains in the army, bosses in the office, monitors in the hall, and at any given time, you may find yourself holding one of those roles--or having to obey someone who does. Now, at this point we're only talking about outward behaviour, right? We walk this way or that, we turn in the report, we don't shout in the library. We don't get in trouble.

But the respect owed to others takes us beyond simple behaviour, from  listening to what people command us to do, to listening to and agreeing with what they say. Don't speed over this, now--Charlotte says this is still part of our well-ordered natures. A default setting, maybe, if our dials haven't already been turned too hard towards "cynical." A certain amount of agreement and trust is, we assume, going to be part of a relationship that goes beyond captain-private, foreman-line worker, hall monitor-late student, and more into parent-child, tutor-learner, rabbi-disciple. Or, maybe, just a peer relationship: neighbour to neighbour, colleague to colleague. These are people whose opinions we value. We don't expect to be always disagreeing and arguing, or disbelieving and ignoring. As Charlotte says, a certain amount of that is necessary to keep us modest. 

However, there are days when the air is full of fallacies, and, as that line supposedly written by Martin Luther goes, you can't keep those birds, or fallacies, from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair. The tension comes not so much from the vultures we shoo away (or the Canada geese we run from), as much as friendly sparrows arriving from people we know and respect.

"Reasonable and right are not synonymous terms" (Philosophy p. 142). Respect is one thing, Charlotte says. Reason is another. We owe it to our own minds, our own wills, and our own loyalty to the One we serve, to look for the deepest truth, to do what's right.

Even if it's not reasonable.

Always something happenin' and nothing goin' on
There's always something cooking and nothing in the pot...
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed, strange days indeed
(John Lennon, "Nobody Told Me")

"To work on what has been taken in": this says it all

by Anne White

I've heard the same thought about food a couple of times recently (you may have seen the same video): that it's a good practice to bless the cheese, the eggs, the fresh vegetables, the life-giving meat as these things come into your kitchen, because, sooner or later, they're all going to be YOU and your family.

Consider this quote from Laurie Bestvater's The Living Page:

Parents also need time to assimilate that 'notebook' is actually a misnomer. We are not note-taking at all; by notebooks we simply refer to Mason's various paper activities...[a] child's notebooks are not primarily products...[they are] not so much to directly reproduce knowledge but to allow personality to work on what has been taken in.

This applies not only to notebooking, but to oral and written narration as well: the success of a lesson is not based on perfect reproduction, any more than we are attempting to become carrots and ground beef by eating dinner. The food becomes part of us, not the other way around.

Now read what Denise Gaskins says in Prealgebra and Geometry: Math Games for Middle School:

When we give students a rule, we give them permission not to think. All they need to do is remember our instructions. But it is only by thinking — by struggling their way through mental difficulties — that our students can build a foundation of mathematical knowledge strong enough to support future learning.

The knowledge that is thought for, and fought for, gives us energy and also becomes part of our bones and muscles. The well-studied painting, the narrated story, the notebook-chronicled history event or literary quotation, all become us, as our minds go to work on them. These blessed things we take into ourselves change us, and we change them.

As a postscript, here's something I found in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders.

What is it, exactly, that fiction does? Well, that's the question we've been asking all along, as we've been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We've been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that's what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind.

So--eat with grace. 

Revisiting A Touch of the Infinite

 

by Anne White

In 2016, Megan Hoyt published a book especially for the C.M. community, titled A Touch of the Infinite: Studies in Music Appreciation with Charlotte Mason.  Mason’s own books recommend composer study, singing, ear training, and instrument lessons, but often in too-brief snippets. The original Parents’ Union School programmes refer to specific music books, or (later on) to detailed term notes published separately, but these have also been hard to access. Hoyt’s book fills in the gaps: it's a how-to, a what-to, but, even more importantly, a why-to.

A few years ago, I planned to use A Touch of the Infinite with a local study group, as a change from Mason’s own books. That particular study, unfortunately, was a bomb, for a couple of reasons: people had to buy copies of the book, which was a deterrent; our group was moving into a low period anyway; but the biggest one, I think, was that people assumed that a book About Teaching Music, even if it was About Charlotte Mason and Teaching Music, would have little to say about Everything Else. For many people, music seemed optional, something to think about once the math and reading were in hand (as we have been told so many times by so many homeschool experts). This was an unfortunate (and incorrect) assumption, as Hoyt points out:

There is beauty all around us and the possibility of experiencing great joy. But in our quest to fill our minds with tiny packets of news and sayings on social media, we have quickened the pace of thought and neglected to slow down long enough to examine meaning or notice the beauty that is so near. And if we are not noticing what our eyes can see, how will we notice what our ears should hear? (Chapter One: Our Reason For the Journey)

Recently I wondered, if I were bringing the book back to our group-study table, what might I do to bypass the objections? The everybody-has-to-buy-a-copy-of-the-book problem is one I can’t help with, unfortunately. But I think I would try to make it clearer that this is a book about Charlotte Mason, and the arts, and education, and life stuff, written by a longtime C.M. educator with a particular passion for music. 

I should not have been, but I was surprised (in a good way) to learn that each book Miss Mason chose for composer study and music education was littered with those same thoughts and principles she placed within her volumes: the importance of relationship, the value of ideas over dry facts, the use of story to engage a child’s mind with the subject at hand. (Introduction)

Talking about music, in a sense, is a doorway into the rest, just as a book about history, literature, or even mathematics could be, with the guidance of the right person.

God can use music in innumerable ways to get our attention. It inspires us, heals us, blinds us with its glory, tears at our despairing souls until we choose to seek Him, for nothing else will suffice. (Chapter One: Our Reason For the Journey)

On the practical side, A Touch of the Infinite is a handbook for the C.M. educator who wants to know more about ear training (it's important!), and composer study, and what sort of piano or violin lessons should be part of the curriculum. But it occurs to me that it would also be a very good follow-up to Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, which is the sort of teaching/parenting book that makes you want to open the world up a little more for your children, if only in a bit of rebellion: in time spent outdoors, in good books, in human relationships, and in things like art and music that used to be integrated into life.

This life is glorious, isn’t it? All of this—the entire universe of living ideas—belongs to every human being…The world is in desperate need of this universe of thoughts and things. We pine for them and fill our lives with busyness because they are missing. And most of us don’t even realize what it is we’re pining for. (Introduction to A Touch of the Infinite)

I don't know if or when our local group will get another chance to read Hoyt's book together. But in the meantime, I can at least recommend it for the bookshelves of those who want to look at Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy from the orchestra seats. 

Lovin', really livin'

Without it you ain't livin', boy

You're just gettin' up each day

And walkin' around

Your world is cryin' now, my friend

But give it love

And it will mend 

And teach you all the music

(Ian and Sylvia, "Lovin' Sound") 

Generosity: A Certain Large Trustfulness

by Anne White

Many years ago, I read Susan Cooper’s fantasy novel The Grey King. In a key scene, young Will Stanton is commanded to answer a riddle: “Who were the three generous men of the Island of Britain?” Will, having been granted an exceptional knowledge of such things (it’s a long story), digs through his memory, and then says boldly, “The three generous men of the Island of Britain. Nudd the Generous, son of Senllyt. Mordaf the Generous, son of Serwan. Rhydderch the Generous, son of Tydwal Tudglyd. And Arthur himself was more generous than the three.”

Now, first of all, I didn’t know that Cooper did not make up that triad of names—they’re part of a very old British tradition. Second, that didn’t sound like any kind of riddle I had ever heard; it wasn’t meant to be funny, it was more like the “Riddles in the Dark” in The Hobbit. And, third, I wondered about that word “generous.” “Generous” as in "maybe they gave great birthday presents" didn’t seem quite intense enough for this scene.

It turns out I was right. Yes, “generosity” means a willingness to give of oneself and one’s possessions; and it means an ability to go beyond one’s own desires, for instance “generously” forgiving someone for a wrong.  But its early meaning is closer to other words that English also borrowed from Latin and Old French, such as "gentility" and "gentlemen." The word has its roots in the Latin genus, referring to one’s stock or race—so, well-born, noble, and possessing the characteristics that were believed to belong to a person of such birth, such as courage, honour, kindness, gentleness. In short, magnanimity (with one caveat which we'll get to in a minute).

So, when Charlotte Mason states, not once but twice in her principles of education, that children should have a generous curriculum, is she perhaps saying not just that they should have teetering stacks of schoolbooks, but that, even more so, they need a curriculum based on generosity?  Consider this, from Philosophy of Education page 111:

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."

“This and more.” Yes, we want to keep these children well fed, we want to be as generous to them as we can; but we also want them to have minds and hearts that give to others out of that abundance. And why? On page 249 of the same book, Mason refers back to John Milton, who said that “a complete and generous education” is “that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of peace and war.”

And, to go even further, Charlotte wrote a whole chapter on "Generosity", in Ourselves Book I, in which she straight off acknowledges the noble roots of the word, but makes it clear as well that Generosity is for everyone.

At first sight it seems as if Generosity were not a Lord in every bosom, but ruled only the noblest hearts; but this is not the fact…The nature of Generosity is to bring forth, to give, always at the cost of personal suffering or deprivation, little or great. There is no generosity in giving what we shall never miss and do not want; this is mere good-nature, and is not even kindness, unless it springs out of a real thought about another person's needs.

She not only notices the connection to Magnanimity, but adds a distinction between them:

...what Magnanimity is to the things of the mind, Generosity is to the things of the heart…It is a certain large trustfulness in his dealings, rather than the largeness of his gifts, or the freedom of his outlay, that marks the generous man… There are so many great things to care about that [the generous person] has no mind and no time for the small frettings of life; his concerns are indeed great, for what concerns man concerns him.    

We do often use the word “magnanimous” to describe generous acts, so perhaps the lines between them don’t have to be so strictly defined. However, what is more important here is something that brings us back to my puzzlement over the Three Generous Men. Generosity is not “the largeness of [a person’s] gifts, or the freedom of  his outlay,” Charlotte says; it is instead “a certain large trustfulness in his dealings.”

The generous man escapes a thousand small perplexities, worries, and annoys [sic]; he walks serene in a large room.

In To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, John O’Donohue wrote this:

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,

Time will come good;

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning.

As magnanimity keeps our minds occupied and helps us to back-burner our own problems, generosity keeps our hearts so busy that we don't have time to feel offended, resentful, or, just possibly, anxious. Generosity gives at a personal cost, but out of a firm belief that God will make up the difference one way or another. 

So let's "remain generous"; and, someday, maybe, our names will be added to the riddle.

Photograph by Bryan White.

As Many Begin the School Year

by Anne White

If you are familiar with the priest/poet Malcolm Guite, you may also have followed his You-tube study visits over the past few years. In one of the most recent, he read from the chapter “The Three Sleepers” from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Guite titled the video “At Aslan’s Table,” referring to the way that the scene and certain objects described in it mirror those of older legends and even Scripture. In this passage, a group of  travellers land on an island and are invited to feast from a well-spread table.

But on the table itself there was set out such a banquet as had never been seen, not even when Peter the High King kept his court at Cair Paravel. There were turkeys and geese and peacocks, there were boars’ heads and sides of venison, there were pies shaped like ships under full sail…there were nuts and grapes, pineapples and peaches, pomegranates and melons and tomatoes. There were flagons of gold and silver and curiously-wrought glass; and the smell of the fruit and the wine blew towards them like a promise of all happiness.

However, wary from previous experiences with Turkish Delight and other nasty enchanted things, they hold back. It is the chivalrous and swashbuckling mouse Reepicheep who takes the leap of faith.

…the Mouse, standing on the table, held up a golden cup between its tiny paws and said, “Lady, I pledge you.” Then it fell to on cold peacock, and in a short while everyone else followed its example. All were very hungry and the meal, if not quite what you wanted for a very early breakfast, was excellent as a very late supper.

Lucy (we all know Lucy, don’t we?) asks their hostess (whose name we don’t yet know) why the place is called “Aslan’s table.” “It is set here by his bidding,” said the girl, “for those who come so far.”

Sometimes food, even in Narnia, is just good food.

We may approach the educational table with some of that same nervousness. Are we even supposed to be here? The food looks good, though not what we’re used to; but, on the other hand, those three hairy men sleeping around the table might throw up some red flags. (Later it turns out that their enchanted state had nothing to do with the food.) The sane, sensible, cautious adults may hang back, wondering what they’ve gotten themselves and their children into. We are invited, our children are invited, and yet we hesitate.  This does not look like food from the children’s menu. The peaches and grapes should be okay, but cold peacock?

I cannot possibly describe my bewildered, fascinated disbelief when the first batch of books arrived. Of them all, 'Plutarch's Lives' hit me hardest. Those long, measured periods in difficult language! Alison, at eleven, would not understand a word! How on earth was Robin going to assimilate 'Mankind in the Making' and 'The Spangled Heavens'? What was Charles going to make of 'Pilgrim's Progress'? ("To Prosper in Good Life and Good Literature" by Joyce McGechan, in The Parents’ Review, January 1967)

Even those who have been here before may feel a bit of hesitation, an uncertainty over these new-again pomegranates and pies shaped like ships. But we nevertheless light the candles, bake the back-to-school cookies, and raise our cups of tea.

We bashed--and that is the only verb that describes our progress in those early days--through the text-books, got the gist of them by determined attention, and miraculously found ourselves enjoying every minute. Narrations were wobbly affairs, half inarticulate, half incorporating remembered phrases from the reading. Parsing and Analysis they found absorbing and rewarding. French and Latin were fun. After all, languages were words, weren't they? A sudden word-hunger seemed to grip them all; and a new world had opened up. When, at morning prayers, they sang: 'Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning! / Praise for them springing / Fresh from the Word!' their eyes shone. They were not thanking God as a dutiful routine, but joyfully. (Joyce McGechan, same)

We come by invitation, "for those who come so far." Languages are words, and food is food. We eat and drink by God’s provision, and under his protection. And we pray that this small leap of faith will bring others to the table as well.

We Need More Gargoyles

by Anne White 

Reflecting on the way the brave new world was going in the 1940’s, scholar and critic Russell Kirk wrote, “The men of the Enlightenment had cold hearts and smug heads; now their successors were in the process of imposing a dreary conformity upon the world, with Efficiency and Progress and Equality for their watchwords--abstractions preferred to all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society which are products of prescription and tradition.” Referring to his admiration of Gothic architecture, he added, “I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”

In an article written years later, Kirk added, “What we have lacked more than anything else since the Second World War, I suspect, is poetic imagination in the minds of public men.”

John Ruskin, also a huge fan of all things Gothic, predated Kirk’s words about “fascinating and lovable peculiarities” in The Stones of Venice:

For the very first requirement of Gothic architecture being that it shall admit the aid, and appeal to the admiration, of the rudest as well as the most refined minds, the richness of the work is . . . a part of its humility [which is] shown not only in the imperfection, but in the accumulation, of ornament… if the co-operation of every hand, and the sympathy of every heart, are to be received, we must be content to allow the redundance which disguises the failure of the feeble, and wins the regard of the inattentive.

For Russell Kirk, keeping the “poetic imagination” alive meant sidestepping abstractions and going straight to the gargoyles.

For C. S. Lewis, I think, it meant including a bear as part of the household in That Hideous Strength. Without a great deal of explanation as to why.

With that she opened the bathroom door. Inside, sitting up on its hunkers beside the bath and occupying most of the room was a great, snuffly, wheezy, beady-eyed, loose-skinned, gor-bellied brown bear…”Why don’t you go out and take some exercise that lovely afternoon, you great lazy thing?” said Mrs. Maggs. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, sitting there getting in everyone’s way.”

What might poetic imagination mean for us, in a time when dreary conformity has indeed knocked many gargoyles on the head? What might it require of us?

Possibly more humility, with minds that can celebrate the richness of imperfection.

Sometimes more redundance. And certainly less efficiency. It’s harder to take a bath when you have to push the bear out first.

But also…co-operation, sympathy, and “the regard of the inattentive.” Poetic imagination allows grace which is sufficient to “disguise the failure of the feeble.” Efficiency clears out anything or anyone that cannot be conformed or categorized; but imagination finds a place for such things; even, if necessary, turning them into water-spouting gargoyles.

This is our “human nature and human society,” in all its “prescription and tradition.”

Now we must deal with a child of man, who has a natural desire to know the history of his race and of his nation, what men thought in the past and are thinking now; the best thoughts of the best minds taking form as literature, and at its highest as poetry, or, as poetry rendered in the plastic forms of art: as a child of God, whose supreme desire and glory it is to know about and to know his almighty Father: as a person of many parts and passions who must know how to use, care for, and discipline himself, body, mind and soul: as a person of many relationships,––to family, city, church, state, neighbouring states, the world at large: as the inhabitant of a world full of beauty and interest, the features of which he must recognise and know how to name, and a world too, and a universe, whose every function of every part is ordered by laws which he must begin to know. (Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education, p. 157)

(“Kirk out.”)

Thomas Carlyle’s Really Ripping Yarn

by Anne White

In the depths of Charlotte Mason’s Formation of Character (p. 280 to be exact), we are given some life history about someone, apparently fictional, named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.

This chapter, all by itself, may be one reason homeschoolers quietly slip Formation of Character  to the bottom of the C.M. volume stack.

Why does Charlotte drag this person with the hard-to-pronounce name into the chapter (which, she admits, is an already tenuous comparison of two other obscure German characters)? It might have been because she was discussing a novel by Goethe, and one of Carlyle's chapters is titled "The Sorrows of Young Teufelsdröckh," which is a riff on Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. Charlotte had the kind of mind that liked to dredge up weird things like that. She would have been a terrific blogger.

However, whether Charlotte intended it or not, her use of Teufelsdröckh as a character pasted on top of other characters is not that far removed from his original appearance in Thomas Carlyle’s un-novelish novel Sartor Resartus, which also contains a story within a story. Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is a professor “of everything,” which tells you something right off. (His name is also an indicator that, as Charles Kingsley said a generation later, you must not take this story as anything other than a fairy tale.) As the story begins, this Professor Teufelsdröckh has written a rather massive book, in German, about the “philosophy of clothes.” An English editor has been given the task of explaining the book to English readers, and he has also been sent several bagfuls of stuff documenting Teufelsdröckh’s so-average-it’s-funny early life. In the best Ripping Yarns style, our editor plunges in, making his best guesses about his subject’s childhood, schooling, love life, and later career. Along the way we get slices of Teufelsdröckh’s magnum opus, carefully translated and cited. If we make it to the end, we ask: was Professor Teufelsdröckh a sane genius, an insane genius, or just a fool? The same might be asked of the editor, and/or the author. Hopefully it won’t be asked of Charlotte for including it in an otherwise serious chapter about how children (even fictional ones) grow and learn from what’s around them.

Here are a couple of other things you might or might not know about Sartor Resartus. Carlyle started writing it in 1831, when he was in his thirties (a good age to be writing satire, or fairy tales). It was serialized in a magazine over the next couple of years—more to public puzzlement than acclaim, but at least it won the admiration of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who arranged for it to be published in Boston in 1836. The first British edition did not appear until two years later. The Latin title (which helped ensure that the book would be forever ignored) can be translated "The Tailor Re-Tailored." In her book English Literature for Boys and Girls, H. E. Marshall gave up on trying to explain it to students, but she did write this:

I do not think I can make you understand the charm of Sartor. It is a prose poem and a book you must leave for the years to come. Sartor Resartus means "The tailor patched again." And under the guise of a philosophy of clothes Carlyle teaches that man and everything belonging to him is only the expression of the one great real thing--God. "Thus in this one pregnant subject of Clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been." The book is full of humor and wisdom, of stray lightenings, and deep growlings. There are glimpses of "a story" to be caught too. It is perhaps the most Carlylean book Carlyle ever wrote. But let it lie yet awhile on your bookshelf unread.

Did Marshall fully get the gist of the book? Is that what Carlyle was actually trying to say? Perhaps. My take on it is something more like “The world is pretty nutty and it’s full of pompous, presumptuous people who will try and tell you what it’s all about; and in that situation, the most meaningless thing you could spend your life studying might be the philosophy of clothing. However, when you really get down to it, perhaps that tells us all we need to know…and it actually starts to make some sense, in a Fish Called Wanda kind of way.” To extend the John Cleese analogy, Sartor Resartus is believed to be the first literary use of the phrase “The Meaning of Life.”

And if you can read it in that way, it’s rather a ripping yarn.

Stay tuned for, quite possibly, some more thoughts on Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.

In Which Tom Learns His Lesson

 by Anne White 

In English, a sentence stretches from left to right…A writer composes a sentence with subject and verb at the beginning, followed by other subordinate elements…Think of [the] main clause as the locomotive that pulls all of the cars that follow…If the writer wants to create suspense, or build tension, or make the reader wait and wonder, or join a journey of discovery, or hold on for dear life, he can save subject and verb of the main clause until later…[but] this variation works only when most sentences branch to the right, a pattern that creates meaning, momentum, and literary power. (Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer) 

Every sentence speaks of someone or of something, and tells us something about that of which it speaks…In our sentence we speak of 'Tom.' We say about him that he 'has learned his lesson.' The thing we speak of is often called the SUBJECT, which just means that which we talk about. (Charlotte Mason, Home Education) 

Listen.

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.

If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

Any story is about a host of things. It is about the author; it is about the world the author sees and deals with and lives in; it is about the words chosen and the way those words are deployed; it is about the story itself and what happens in the story; it is about the people in the story; it is polemic; it is opinion. (Neil Gaiman, introduction to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451)

 Listen. I will tell you a story about stories.

In high school we were handed a book of classic short stories. We handled that book objectively, tightly, scientifically, trying to identify the exact bacteria on the lens of “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Rocking Horse Winner.” We mapped the rising action, the climax, the denouement; wrote up our lab reports; got our marks.

In university, we had a course on The Short Story that took the opposite, subjective, biblio-therapeutic approach. If “Young Goodman Brown” or “Bartleby the Scrivener” reminded us of our boyfriends, landlords, weird uncles, that's what the story meant. Well, as Neil Gaiman says, if a reader tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.

However, as every sentence speaks of someone or of something, so does every story. A good story deserves more than the reader’s subjective reaction. It is, though, about more than stuffing a square peg of character, voice, polemic, opinion, into a round hole of rising action, saying that's "all the story is about." Writing professor George Saunders has expanded on the idea of “someone”:

… perhaps the most radical idea of all [is] that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind. (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain)

Saunders also says that, as we read a particular story by Tolstoy,

we begin living it; the words disappear and we find ourselves thinking not about word choice but about the decisions the characters are making and decisions we have made, or might have to make someday, in our actual lives. (same)

So, what is a better way to read, to write, or to teach novels, plays, stories? We go back to what Charlotte told us about sentences: they speak of someone, they speak of something that happens. We follow someone around as they swim in a pond in the rain, or drive through a blizzard, or surreptitiously slip a book into their pocket. As musical compositions begin with a theme and then introduce variations, so do stories. You thought the wolf was going to blow the brick house down, but surprise, you’re wrong. And here is the kicker: the story, as we receive it, is not only about the decisions made by the characters, but also by the author.

As apprentice writers, we watch for the ways the words themselves, the shapes of the sentences, the parallels and variations build suspense, fear, relief, delight. As readers, we are allowed to let them disappear, but only so that we can make even more discoveries (beyond weird uncles); so that we can begin living it. 

Start with subjects. Continue with verbs. If it worked for Tom, it can still work for us.

More Tea in the Jar

by Anne White

This morning I saw an online video where someone cut up the contents of four boxes of herbal teabags, and put the tea leaves in a jar. Short version: it was a pretty skimpy amount. The video creator also showed a much fuller jar of tea leaves that had been bought in bulk, for the same price as the four boxes. So, by that account, we can have a large jar of tea, bought without packaging waste; or we can have a small jar of tea, plus a pile of garbage, for three times the price. Pretty much a no-brainer, isn’t it?

Charlotte Mason said that her principles of education “tend in the working to simplification, economy, and discipline.” (School Education, p. 214)  Perhaps we could think of them as more tea in the jar, with less wasted effort and financial cost.

Now, we do need to be careful here that we don’t measure education with a calculator or a stopwatch. Karen Glass has mentioned the benefits of eating a real apple, pointing out that with all its stem and core and seeds and soft spots, it is still superior in many ways to any kind of more efficient apple pill or powder we could create. For instance, perhaps—just perhaps—the tea that comes in those tea bags is so superior to the bulk stuff that we don’t mind paying more money for a smaller jar.

However...what if the bulk tea turns out to be more flavourful, more calming, or whatever more we wanted it to accomplish? Well, then we’d probably be even more annoyed when we viewed that pile of empty tea bags and the large receipt for what we paid.

But we might find ourselves telling others about our great discovery. 

And then…inviting them for a cup of tea.