Tag Archives: learning

Hurray for Libraries!!

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[this post is written with a sleeping 1 year old boy draped over my shoulder: =) ]

I think one of the great gifts a parent can give a child is a sense of familiar comfort in a public library.  If they know how to get around the stacks and computer card catalogs they have quite a  horizon before them.   My local library has its limitations, but all the same it has blessed me.   Here’s a short list of things I love about  my library.

1.  My son and I are on a first-name basis with all the staff.

2.  They welcome my recommendations for purchases to their collection. 

3.  I get an email reminding me of upcoming due dates three days before an item is due.

4.  They are adding many Teaching Company courses to their collection.  I am currently listening to How to Read and Understand Poetry.

5.  Our library is an original Carnegie library.  This year a new building is going up.  For all its issues, I shall miss the red brick building, the steps up to the main door, the high ceilings, the charm of an older building, and the legacy behind it.  Thank you, Andrew Carnegie!!

6.  I have saved many $$$ by borrowing books from the library for curricula.  It’s not optimum, but I believe you could give a child a decent education from preschool through high school using the public library.

Sailing Into Greece

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Here I am, trudging through the end of Herodotus.  I have 100 pages to go.  Collin finished last week. Sigh.  It’s actually more interesting at the end with the battles and all.  I made it through Marathon, we’re crossing the Hellespont with Xerxes and I figure Salamis will be coming up soon.  It’s been great to listen to Doug Wilson’s sermons on Ezra and Nehemiah while we’ve been studying Persia.  A lovely dovetail.  I’m glad that I’m reading from the Father of History (I guess) but except for some excerpts, I don’t think I’ll be going through it again in my lifetime. 

The point is that we’re leaving Persia and coming into Greece.  Now that is exciting! Isn’t that one of your favorite historical periods, Bonnie?  In anticipation I checked out Thomas Cahill’s book Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Why the Greeks Matter.  Other books about Greece are popping out at me from my bookshelf and reading.  Where are the Kalamata olives?  It’s taking discipline, a quicksilver element in my life, to finish the Histories before I start another book. 

Bad, Bad Babylonians

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I came home from church yesterday with three spanking new books: Humility by C.J. Mahaney, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church by D.A. Carson, and Contending for Our All, Defending Truth and Treasuring Christ in the Lives of Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen by John Piper.  These books were given to the guys that went to the Shepherd’s Conference and are now available for loan.  I didn’t mean to be a book glutton, really, but no one else took them.  I left several on the table that looked interesting. I’m so excited about Piper’s book, because Athanasius is one of my favorite heroes of the faith, one I am anxious to meet in heaven.

I had a few hours to get some great reading in and was weighing my choices. In a most inconvenient manner, my conscience started to yawn and stretch and become a bit animated.  My son is on track with school reading and I am woefully behind.   How am I going to get  the 624 pages of Herodotus read if I don’t start?  Oh, bother.  I wish I could tell you that after reading 5 pages I was enthralled, entranced, bewitched, engaged, eager for more.  Actually it was a book to plod through, to keep at it when I didn’t want to keep at it.  

The point is: I’m glad, overjoyed, I’m not a Babylonian woman living in the 5th century B.C.  Can.  You.  Imagine? 

In every village once a year all the girls of marriageable age used to be collected together in one place, while the men stood round them in a circle; an auctioneer then called each one in turn to stand up and offered her for sale, beginning with the best-looking and going on to the second best as soon as the first had been sold for a good price.  Marriage was the object of the transaction. The rich men who wanted wives bid against each other for the prettiest girls, while the humbler folk, who had no use for good looks in a wife, were actually paid to take the ugly ones…

Every woman who is a native of the country must once in her life go and sit in the temple of Aphrodite and there give herself to a strange man…Gangways are  marked off running in every direction for the men to pass along and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed to go home until a man has thrown a silver coin into her lap and taken her outside to lie with her.  The woman has no privilege of choice — she must go with the first man who throws her the money. When she has lain with him, her duty to the goddess is discharged and she may go home.  Tall, handsome women soon manage to get home again, but the ugly ones stay a long time before they can fulfill the condition which the law demands, some of them, indeed, as much as three or four years.

Deciding to Homeschool

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The year was 1993.  We had two boys in 4th and 6th grade and a two year old boy.  My husband had gone to a conference. I had planned to go along until our young one got sick. He came home fired up.  Oh joy.  “We’re going to make some changes in our family, hon,” he announced.  “We need to talk.”  Uh-huh.  I’m writing honestly, but I’m ashamed of my attitude and behavior.  I put off the talk as long as possible.  Finally the moment came after the kids were in bed. 

He sat at one end of the table and I at the other.  With passion and concern, he outlined the problems he saw with delegating the government to teach our children.  I listened, refrained from rolling my eyes, and prayed for this awkward conversation to be over.  This was my life he was messing with.  It was all good and well for him to say, “Let’s homeschool” when all the sacrifice was on my end. When he didn’t get much response from me he concluded the first session with these words, “Will you at least pray about it?”  Overjoyed at a way to extricate myself from this discussion, I glibly said “Sure.”

1993 turned into 1994 and gently the Lord convicted me that I had not prayed  about this issue.  “You’re right Lord, I did say I would pray.”  I thought, it can’t hurt to pray.  Hah!  Double hah!  Before I knew what was happening my heart was changing.  My sons came home with stories that chilled me.  What do you mean your friend isn’t allowed to have a New Testament in his desk?  Was he standing on his chair and preaching?  No, just reading it during free time?  I was a room mother for both boys every year they were in school.  But I was soon disabused of the notion that I knew what was going on in their classrooms.

The conference that Curt went to connected us with a new church.  We had been looking for a church with Reformed theology.  And mirabile! there was one in our valley.  We began attending and discovered that 90% of the families homeschooled their kids.  And they were lovely families with engaging, polite, and delightful children. (Oh, these families have become my family and my heart aches with love for them as I write and remember.)  We bonded with them; we were never once criticized for having our kids in public school. Their winsome ways won our hearts. My thoughts flipped from what all my kids would be missing if they homeschooled to what opportunities my children would miss if they were in public school.

Soon I was asking for books, magazines, anything to educate myself.  My husband started to smile as I chirped away, talking constantly about the options, the decisions, the changes.  We were committed.  We let the kids finish that year in school and made our plans for the fall.    

One for the Boys

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Cars seem to completely absorb the young men I know (and love).  I ran across this quote last night as I was looking for a home treatment for Carson who had lost the hearing in his left ear.  Today we flushed the ear with hydrogen peroxide and we’re hoping for gradual improvement.  I think flying with his friend Luke while he had a cold, then snowboarding at 8,000 ft. two days later took its toll.  So for all you car fans:

I remember my first lesson in human biology in grade school… “Think of your body as a car.  Your heart is the engine, your backbone is the axel and the suspension, your muscles are the transmission, and your arms and legs are the wheels.”

“But what about the brain?” I asked.

“Ah, that’s where the analogy breaks down,” she said.  “A car lacks one vital component to make it go – the driver.  The body, however, has its driver built in.  We call it the brain and the nervous system.”

I’ve loved automobiles and the secrets of the human body ever since.

~Isadore Rosenfeld MD  in Symptoms