Realizing the other day that it's none too soon to start thinking about and planning for homeschooling, I decided to read a book that's been on my list for a while now--The Well-Trained Mind, by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. It's a guide to classical education at home, and is laid out chronologically, with detailed chapters for each subject. One could follow their program to the letter, as pretty much everything is covered; or use it as a guide in developing one's own curriculum.

Already it's clear that the method Odious and I will use will tend more towards the unschooling movement--we both greatly enjoy watching Sam learn on his own and discover things for himself without unnecessary teaching on our part. But still I'm finding the Wises' book useful, both for things we probably will do and things we probably won't. They follow the classical method, using the trivium and quadrivium, so that reading, writing, and math are of highest importance. However, in my opinion, their curriculum separates subjects too sharply, and requires more scheduling and formality than I could handle. I've always felt that education tends to be formalized far more than necessary, giving it a tinge of both elitism and tedium. As infants we learn from life, from the ordinary hustle bustle and domesticity around us, and there's no reason why this should change so drastically as we grow older.

I do agree that a formal math program is essential--even Odious, I don't think, could manage to teach math entirely without books and worksheets--but it needn't be tiresome if approached properly. Likewise grammar textbooks that teach the rules of the English language so that children are prepared to write well. But writing programs? I don't think so. They may teach one HOW to write, but they don't make it much fun. If I'd had to write an outline and composition for every reading assignment during my schooling years, I'd've gone crazy--what a waste of time. My sisters and I have been commended for our writing throughout our entire lives; I attribute our skills to all the reading we did as children and our familiarity with books, and, perhaps most importantly, the years and years of bedtime stories. Until I went to college (and I believe it continued for some time after that as well), our family would gather nearly every evening before bed and listen while my mother read aloud from Laura Ingalls Wilder, L.M. Montgomery, Dickens, Richard Adams, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Jane Austen, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Alexandre Dumas, A.A. Milne, Mary Norton, and dozens of others. Not only was it a wonderful family time that we all looked forward to, but it meant that the English language in all its elegance was constantly sounding in our ears. My sisters and I know what good prose looks like and sounds like from all those excellent books, and because of that we have no problem putting together a well-written, well-structured essay with a sound argument. In fact, it's so easy that there have been some feelings of guilt about turning in papers that have taken so little effort.

The Wises divide childhood learning into three stages: Grammar (ages 6-9), Logic (10-13), and Rhetoric (14-17). The Grammar stage is also called the poll-parrot stage, where children are gathering information from everything around them and repeating it back without completely understanding it. This, they claim, is the time for memorizing all sorts of facts without worrying about comprehension. Questions and connections come later, during the Logic stage, as children's brains mature and broaden. In the Rhetoric stage, they are able to present and defend (through composition, elocution, art, etc.) original thoughts and opinions. This division also allows for a chronological study of history, from ancient to modern in each stage, at appropriate levels of complexity.

I like this system because the expectations for ability are age-appropriate, something that public schools completely ignore. However, the Wises do follow an unfortunate public school method in which they schedule separate subjects for set time periods (i.e., Math for 1 hour, Grammar for 1/2 hour, etc.). For one thing, many "subjects" can be integrated (History/Reading, for example), and time periods are not necessary. When an assigned task is completed satisfactorily, the child should move on to the next, regardless of time spent.

Again, this is an excellent though pedantic guide to homeschooling in the classical method. Be inspired, think hard, and rearrange to suit your fancy.

If Sam turns out like this boy, I will be so happy.

Irresistible indeed, Steve. And so satisfying when the nearest book is an impressive one (AND one that I was reading, not Odious, as is more usually the case by the computer)!

Lord. The King and Queen and all are coming down.
Hamlet. In happy time.
Lord. The Queen desires you to use some gentle entertainment to Laertes before you fall to play.

--The Kittredge Shakespeares Hamlet, edited and with notes by G.L. Kittredge

We just spent a lovely sunny week in California visiting relatives, and my dear sister took us to a charming little oldtown shopping area where we went crazy in a couple of antique stores. I found all these delicious old books--so much fun! I was hoping the titles would show up better in the picture, but I guess I'll have to list them. There are only a couple of replacements (Rose In Bloom and White Fang); the rest are just wonderful little finds.

Vinzi, Johanna Spyri: Heidi is the best, of course, but all her books are charming; couldn't pass it up.
Shelley's Poetical Works: Because it was pretty?
The Bobbsey Twins Keeping House, Laura Lee Hope: A walk down Memory Lane--I think this is one of the few I never read as a child. Incredibly dorky, but fun.
Roads of Destiny, O. Henry: There was a whole beautiful set that I WANTED, but the stack was too big already.
The Son of Porthos,The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliere, Alexandre Dumas: For Odious--he was very pleased.
A Good Place To Hide, Louis Slobodkin: A cute little story.
Elsie's Holidays, Martha Finley: NOT to keep--urgh. But a young friend enjoys these books, and I thought she'd like a nice old edition for her upcoming birthday.
Millbank, Mary J. Holmes: I hope someone else out there will know why I bought this one! Neither my sister nor Odious guessed it--the book Laura "reads" to Ma to avoid going to school in On The Banks of Plum Creek. Had to have it!
Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner, George Eliot: I got Scenes for Christmas, but I never pass up a lovely old hardback just because I already own a shiny new paperback.
The Winning of Barbara Worth, Harold Bell Wright: No reason, really, other than it looked like a fun read and is set on a Colorado ranch.
Camilla, Elizabeth Robins: Ditto, except for the ranch.
My Book House, vols 7 (The Magic Garden) & 8 (Through Fairy Halls), Olive Beaupre Miller, ed.: Beautiful Victorian illustrations and lots of delightful stories. There were more volumes, but these were the best.

I could have bought them all...

My latest phase of potato-chip reads is over, and I'm back to Victorian novels as inspired by the wonderful book Inside the Victorian Home, by Judith Flanders.

Miss Marjoribanks, Margaret Oliphant: Lucilla Marjoribanks is my hero! She's the Dolly Levi of Victorian novels--I loved her sensible, level-headed approach to life and to arranging everyone in it. So far I haven't had any luck finding further Chronicles of Carlingford, but shall keep looking assiduously.

Period Piece, Gwen Raverat: Not a novel but a cheery memoir of a young girl's life around the turn of the century. Light and amusing and utterly without angst.

Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell: More interesting than North and South, but still my least favorite of Mrs Gaskell's books. Ruth is a good character, in that her faults are clear but she works hard to overcome them, but she's just not my kind of gal. I prefer heroines with a little more backbone. The most interesting thing about this book is how appalling the treatment of seduced women and their illegitimate offspring was. I'm no fan of having children out of wedlock, but thank goodness our society no longer views such situations so harshly.

New Grub Street, George Gissing: More than slightly autobiographical, this novel looks with a icily realistic eye at the plight of those who venture into the writing life. Those who wish only to be "men of letters" or write purely from their hearts end up dying of starvation in a freezing garret, while those who are willing to make social connections and fulfill any writing assignment that comes their way are rewarded handsomely. Strangely, I found it inspiring... And while I didn't much care for any of the characters, it was quite a compelling story.

The Filigree Ball, Anna-Katherine Green: My sister found this book in an antique shop--it's a highly sensational detective novel that amused me greatly. Complete with mistaken identities, mysterious deaths, secret panels, family curses, tragic love affairs, and a mystery complicated beyond words--delicious!

Now I'm happily absorbed in Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall. What a writer she was! Somewhere in Heaven there's a library filled with her unwritten works...

Lots of good books the past couple of weeks--I've been reading more than getting things done...

Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley: I probably should've read some Jane Austen after this, to protect my own writing style; as with Sunshine, McKinley gives her narrator (in this case, a teenage boy) a very specific voice. It works, but is a little wearing after a while--too many likes and totallys and you knows and run-on sentences. It's the sort of style that gets into one's head, and that's not a good thing. But the story is excellent; her perspective on dragons reminds me a bit of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Jake lives in a privately-owned preserve for dragons, but few of the people there have ever actually seen a dragon until Jake apprentices with the Rangers and goes on a solo trip into the wilderness. What he finds there is only the first of many surprises.

The Woods Were Full of Men, Irma Lee Emmerson: The kind of memoir people used to write before everybody got all angsty and revealed their childhood traumas. A fun light tale of a woman's experience cooking for sixty hungry loggers in an Oregon camp.

She Got Up Off the Couch, Haven Kimmel: See above; angsty memoir. This sequel to A Girl Named Zippy grows more depressing as Haven gets older and begins to realize how incredibly dysfunctional her family is. It's hard to believe that anyone could live as she did, in a condemned house full of mice and rats, with a mother who spent many years of her life sitting on the couch with a book and a bag of pork rinds; and even harder to believe that she could manage to write about it. It is funny, though, in a I-probably-shouldn't-laugh-at-this kind of way, and she has a particularly wry sense of humor (fortunately for her survival).

The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls: I can't actually include this in the "good books" list for the week, but I got on a memoir roll and figured I'd mention this one as well. Angsty does not even begin to cover it. With a ne'er-do-well drunken gambler for a father and an unbalanced artist for a mother, the four Walls children were forced to take care of themselves as soon as they could walk. At last they hit what has to be rock-bottom--they're living in a coal-mining town in Appalachia, and they are the poorest family there. Poor white trash kids throw rocks at them. It's appalling, and horribly depressing, and I kind of wish I hadn't read it. At least the ending is sort of happy, or at least positive.

Renegade's Magic, Robin Hobb: The final book in the Soldier Son trilogy. This was certainly not a predictable story! Everything was a surprise, although not necessarily a good one, and I got really tired of the protagonist's incessant and repetitive whining. Interesting, fascinating, and, of course, well-written, but not as good as some of her previous trilogies.

The List of Lost Books

These are some of the books we lost in the flood. I know there are more, and we'll probably add titles as we remember them; we'll also remove titles as we reacquire them. Again, it's not a wish list--more of a eulogy, really--but anyone who wants to give us a gift in the future can refer to it. Aren't you glad we've simplified your gift giving?

Abelard & Heloise: Letters
Adams, Richard: Watership Down, Tales of Watership Down
Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys, Eight Cousins, Rose In Bloom, Jack and Jill, Under the Lilacs, An Old Fashioned Girl, A Long Fatal Love Chase, Behind A Mask
Ashley, Mike: British Kings and Queens
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Lady Susan/Sanditon/Watsons, Juvenilia, Selected Letters
Babbitt, Natalie: Tuck Everlasting
Bagnold, Enid: National Velvet
Bodio, Stephen: Eagle Dreams
Borland, Hal: When the Legends Die
Boylan, Clare: Collected Stories
Bristow, Gwen: Jubilee Trail
Bronte, Anne: Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Agnes Grey
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Bronte, Charlotte: Villette, Shirley, The Professor
Bryson, Bill: Neither Here Nor There, Notes From A Small Island, I’m A Stranger Here Myself, A Walk in the Woods, The Mother Tongue
Buck, Pearl S.: House of Earth
Bujold, Lois: The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, The Vor Game
Bunyan, John: Pilgrim's Progress
Burney, Fanny: Evelina
Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh
Byatt, A.S.: Possession, The Shadow of the Sun, Sugar and Other Stories, The Virgin in the Garden, Babel Tower
Carroll, Jonathan: Sleeping in Flame, The Bones of the Moon
Cather, Willa: My Antonia, O Pioneers, The Professor’s House, Death Comes To The Archbishop
Chadwick, Janet: How To Live On Almost Nothing and Have Plenty
Chevalier, Tracy: Girl With A Pearl Earring
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening, Short Stories
Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White, No-Name
Copland, Aaron: What To Listen For In Music
Cunningham, Michael: The Hours
Dalkey, Kara: Crystal Sage, Steel Rose
Darwin, Charles: The Origin of Species; The Voyage of the Beagle
Datlow, Ellen, & Terri Windling, eds: The Green Man, The Faery Reel
Dean, Pamela: Tam Lin; The Secret Country; The Hidden Land; The Whim of the Dragon; The Dubious Hills; Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary
de Lint, Charles: Moonlight and Vines, The Ivory and the Horn, Tapping the Dream Tree, Spirits in the Wires, Wolf Moon, Yarrow, Dreams Underfoot, The Little Country, Jack of Kinrowan, The Wild Wood, Moonheart, Spiritwalk, Someplace To Be Flying, The Onion Girl, Forests of the Heart, Waifs and Strays
Dillard, Annie: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, The Writing Life
Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee: The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
Duane, Diane: The Book of Night With Moon, Young Wizards series
Eliot, George: Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss
Euclid: Elements
Faulkner, William: Go Down, Moses; The Reivers; Absalom, Absalom!; The Sound and The Fury; Light In August; As I Lay Dying; Requiem For A Nun
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, Tender Is The Night, Complete Short Stories
Flagg, Fannie: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Café
Forster, E.M.: A Room With A View, A Passage To India, Where Angels Fear To Tread, Howards End
Frazier, Anitra: The New Natural Cat
Gaskell, Elizabeth: Mary Barton, Cranford, Wives and Daughters
Gibbons, Stella: Cold Comfort Farm
Gies, Frances & Joseph: Daily Life in Medieval Times, Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: Herland
Goethe: Faust
Grimm, Brothers: The Annotated Brothers Grimm
Hamilton, Edith: Mythology
Hardy, Thomas: Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
Hillenbrand, Laura: Seabiscuit
Hobb, Robin: Tawny Man Trilogy, Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage
Hoffman, Nina Kiriki: A Red Heart of Memories, Past the Size of Dreaming
Hubbell, Sue: A Country Year, A Book of Bees
Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Jenkins, Joseph: The Humanure Handbook
Jewett, Sarah Orne: The Country of the Pointed Firs
Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners
Keats, John: Selected Poems
Kingsolver, Barbara: High Tide in Tucson
Lawrence, D.H.: Women in Love, Sons and Lovers
Lee, Harper: To Kill A Mockingbird
L’Engle, Madeleine: A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, A Wind in the Door, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
Lewis, C.S.: Till We Have Faces, The Black Tower
Lively, Penelope: Pack of Cards
Lo Kuan-chung: Romance of the Three Kingdoms
London, Jack: The Call of the Wild, White Fang
Mansfield, Katherine: Short Stories
Martin, Judith: Miss Manners’ Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millenium, Miss Manners’ Guide to Domestic Tranquility
Martin, Tovah: The Private Life of Tasha Tudor, Tasha Tudor’s Garden, Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts
Mayes, Frances: Under the Tuscan Sun
Mayle, Peter: A Year in Provence, Toujours Provence
McKillip, Patricia: The Tower at Stony Wood, Alphabet of Thorn, In the Forest of Serre
Millay, Edna St. Vincent: Complete Poems
Mitchell, Margaret: Gone With The Wind
Mitford, Jessica: A Fine Old Conflict, Hons and Rebels
Mitford, Nancy: Love In A Cold Climate, The Pursuit of Love
Murdoch, Iris: The Unicorn, Under the Net, An Unofficial Rose
Neill, A.S.: Summerhill
O’Brian, Patrick: Master and Commander, Post Captain, HMS Surprise, The Mauritius Command, Desolation Island, Fortunes of War, The Surgeon’s Mate
O’Connor, Flannery: Complete Works
Orczy, Baroness: The Scarlet Pimpernel
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Pascal: Pensees
Patmore, Coventry: Collected Poems
Perez-Reverte, Arturo: The Flanders Panel
Plath, Sylvia: Unabridged Journals
Plato: Dialogues
Proust, Marcel: Remembrance of Things Past
Ptolemy: Almagest
Radcliffe, Ann: The Italian
Rossetti, Christina: Collected Poems
Seymour, John and Sally: Farming for Self-Sufficiency
Sophocles: Plays
Spock, Benjamin: Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care
Taber, Gladys: The Stillmeadow Road, Especially Father, Stillmeadow Daybook
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion
Virgil: Aeneid
West, Rebecca: The Thinking Reed, The Return of the Soldier
Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence, Twilight Sleep
White, T.H.: The Once and Future King
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Collected Plays
Willis, Connie: Passage, Doomsday Book
Wodehouse, P.G.: Carry On, Jeeves; A Jeeves & Wooster Omnibus; Leave It To Psmith
Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own, Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, A Common Reader, The Waves, The Voyage Out, Night and Day, The Years
Xenophon: Anabasis
Yeats, W.B.: Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, Selected Poems