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We are a large family, so we don't get invited over much. I am okay with that. I also know that people just don't do that much anymore. So when they do, because we are a large family, my delight in that invitation is tripled. Or quadrupled, or something. Really, when somebody invites us over I get an immense sense of joy from it.
Until I learn it was to sell us something.
Then I want to say rude, tacky, and regrettable things about the rudeness and tackiness of never, ever bothering to speak much to a person, let alone invite them over, until you want to sell them something. I don't say these things, of course, because my mother brought me up better than that. And also because I find it so unspeakably rude and tacky and low that I can't even think of the things I want to say. I just sputter. Even in my mind.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
One Of Life's Little Let Downs.
Traveling with Children
Many years back when we had just three children (and one was a baby), we flew from Japan to California, bought a mini-van, loaded up our then three children (the youngest an infant), Granny Tea, an ice-chest and some supplies and drove to the Great Lakes area. Granny Tea flew back to California from there and we continued our journey through Canada and into Fairbanks, Alaska, our next duty station.
We took our time, stopping at museums and historical sites along the way, visiting roadside parks, streams, and lakes as we found them. From CA to the Great Lakes area we stayed in hotels or with friends at night. The journey through Canada and Alaska was an extended camping trip.
Granny Tea was welcome to come with us on the second leg, but she said she had to work. Later she confessed that she'd not taken the time off of work because she was afraid that she would be fed up with us all by the third day and she wanted an escape plan. She was astonished at how well the children traveled. They didn't fight, bicker, whine, or complain for extended periods of time (they were human children, not plaster saints, so there was always some behavior in need of remediation on a daily basis).
That was perhaps our longest road trip, but we've also taken the entire crew (of seven) around the Olympic Peninsula, down the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California and back again, and we've traveled with the Headmaster on some of his Air Force business trips from time to time (on our own expense, dear taxpayers). Our Progeny are good traveling companions, though I say it who shouldn't.
My brothers and I were not such pleasant companions on journeys when we were small. We fought- physically- we whined, cried, tattled, and kept up a constant barrage of 'he's touching/looking at me/ on my side/ looking out my window/ bugging me/ breathing my air.' I'm pretty sure we were intolerable enough that somebody should have tossed one of us out the window. I vote that they should have started with my brothers.
One reason my children are better traveling companions than my brothers and I were is, I believe, because my children are just nicer people (see above).=) But another reason is because their father and I do not tolerate the intolerable. No matter what we say to the contrary, when we do not have a consistent, measurable standard of behavior and a consistent response to unpleasant behavior, we are tolerating it. Repeatedly requesting that this behavior stop and getting louder with each request is tolerating it (and that's my tendency when I'm falling down on the job), not correcting it. I'm not going to tell you how to correct it, whether it's that dreaded and yet oh, so biblical spanking, pulling over and making everybody do push-ups, or making everybody hug each other, or insisting on complete quiet for five minutes every time somebody bickers, or whatever you do, the most important thing is that the response be consistent, and that it be a response to the behavior and not a reaction to how you feel at that moment (not, I'm not as good at this as I would like, but it is my goal).
My father's rule seemed to be that when he was annoyed, we were in trouble. The trouble was that his annoyance level was a constantly shifting target. There was no way to tell what would annoy or when enough was enough. There was also no personal benefit to being pleasant if everybody else wasn't on board, because when his annoyance level peaked, he just reached an arm back over the seat and started swinging. It didn't matter if you were the cause, the victim, or an innocent bystander, you had just as much chance of being in the path of that Arm of Doom as everybody else in the backseat. My father was 6 foot 2 or so in his socks, and he was a large man. When I say the Arm of Doom, I am not indulging in light hyperbole.
So rule number one for traveling is the same rule you'll need for parenting- have consistent rules and consistent responses. If it is against the rules for your offspring to call one another names, then it should be just as much against the rules and merit the same level of response whether the most recent episode has completely driven you out of your gourd or whether it makes you want to write a blog post about it because they were so clever and amusing with their name-calling.
Here is our second rule for making travel more pleasant for all involved. It is against our rules for the children to ask any question resembling, "How much longer, are we there yet, when are we gonna get there?" This may seem mean, but really, when you have numerous small children (remember we had five under nine at one time), this question alone can occupy the entire journey and it is tedious beyond belief. However, this rule of ours has two parts to it. The first half you just read, and it is for The Progeny (at least the younger ones). The second half is about our obligations. When we made this rule we promised our children that we would make it a point to tell them from time to time how long we had been driving and how much longer we though we had to go before stopping. If it is tedious for us to listen to endless questions about how much longer, it is equally tedious to them to sit in the car without any idea how much longer their forced constriction of movement will be. We try to keep up our end of the bargain several times a day. The 'consequence' for any infraction on their part is simply that we don't answer the question. Instead, they get a reminder that 'We're not allowed to ask that question unless we have a very good reason. If you will wait, we will tell you something about how much longer in a little bit.'
Over the next few days (or weeks) I will be posting more interesting ideas about traveling with the kids, games we played, traveling arrangements, and that sort of thing. One thing you will never see in any of those posts is a suggestion to have a DVD player in your vehicle. We have never had one, and I seldom let my younger ones use the one in Granny Tea's van.
One of the best things to do on a trip is to talk to each other. Now, children are in the back seat, watching videos or they have headphones in their ears. They live in a bubble which seals them off from the physical world and are inundated with the electronic media. But kids need the physical world.
I'm not advocating dumping the carseats or letting kids up front where you have airbags, but I do advocate popping that electronic bubble and letting your children's minds out. Truly, they will learn more watching the telephone poles go by than watching a DVD in the car.
The Trouble with The Equuschick
The trouble with The Equuschick is essentially that she is the type of person who will devote an hour's worth of planning in the morning to grocery shopping for that afternoon, scanning the sales ads, making a detailed shopping list of what to get at each store, clipping coupons, and then storing the coupons and the shopping list and the pen and the scissors and the calculator all in the handy-dandy coupon organizer that Shasta purchased for her.
Then will she hit her first grocery store and purchase the listed items.
And then, walking blithely out the store, she will leave the coupon folder and its entire contents on the store counter behind her.
She would like very much to assure her readers that she really would have noticed its absence before the next grocery store and that, having noticed, would have recalled where she'd left it.
But all she can tell the readers positively is that The Equuschick had made it through the parking lot and was in the truck, all but about to shut the door and drive off, when two good Samaritans came by inquiring if she'd left a blue binder in the store.
READ our bills before voting?! It is to laugh.
So says Democratic House Majority Leader Hoyer. Or words to that effect:
“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
He says it's okay because the staff members read the whole thing, and members read 'substantial' portions.
But I think it's a white hot light on just all that is wrong in Washington that he cannot take such a requirement seriously.
The political class obviously views itself as quite superior to and separate from the rest of us. The more we know about their bills, the more they know we'll want them fixed- and I don't mean a politics as usual Chicago fix.
Transparency, much? They think not.
Little Golden Books
The editors had a wealth of talent to draw on. New York was teeming with refugees from the war in Europe, among them accomplished artists. Tibor Gergely would illustrate over 70 Golden Books (the larger line of which the Little Goldens were probably the most successful format), among them The Great Big Fire Engine Book, Tootle, and Scuffy the Tugboat. He was born in Budapest and drew caricatures for Viennese newspapers before emigrating to the United States in 1939.
Feodor Rojankovsky was a graduate of the Moscow Fine Arts Academy. Wounded during service in the Russian infantry in World War I, he sketched and painted war scenes that became his first published art. He worked in Poland, then Paris in the 1930s, fleeing to America after the fall of France in 1940. His The Three Bears bristles with Russianness, planting in young Boomer minds an image of the quintessential wooden dacha in the woods.
There are lots of well known children's book illustrator's names in that article- and there's a 60 picture exhibition tour of some of their original art work. It might be coming soon to a venue near you:
Booked nearly solid through January 2012, "Golden Legacy" opened at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha on June 6. It is slated to be seen later in Amherst, Massachusetts; Wauconda, Illinois; Weslaco, Texas; Chicago; Richmond; Salt Lake City; and Greenville, South Carolina.
I hope to see one of those. How about you? Have a favorite Little Golden Book illustrator? Favorite LG book?
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Hard Ideas and Good Books
Hard ideas define a culture — that of serious reading, an institution vital to democracy itself. In a recent article, Stephen L. Carter, Yale law professor and novelist, underscores "the importance of reading books that are difficult. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing — and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share."
And yet we are increasingly a group of day-trippers to the kingdom of the mind. We all have a good reason for taking the easy way out.
A Leftist Examines Leftist Loathing of Palin
Via Neo-NeoCon, this link is a good read. So are the comments. The blog author is a feminist and staunchly left. Yet she has the good sense to see lies for what they are-
reading through the blogs... I’m reminded of how so many feminists seem possessed of a wholly irrational hatred for this woman.
Why?
[...]
Of course, the first answer you’ll get if you ask feminists why they hate Sarah Palin is that “it’s because she ____” — and then fill in the blank with the lie of choice: made rape victims pay for their own kits, is against contraception or sex ed, believes in abstinence-only, thinks the dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago, doesn’t believe in global warming, doesn’t believe in evolution, is stupid and can’t read, etc., etc., etc., etc.
But none of those things is true. None of them.
Which brings me to my first puzzlement: why don’t people bother to find out what Sarah Palin really believes? I don’t mean people as in the usual sexist freaks; I mean feminists.
[...]
But even weirder is what happens when you try to replace the myths with the truth. If you explain, “no, she didn’t charge rape victims,” your feminist interlocutor will come back with something else: “she’s abstinence-only!” No, you say, she’s not; and then the person comes back with, “she’s a creationist!” and so on. “She’s an uneducated moron!” Actually, Sarah Palin is not dumb at all, and based on her interviews and comments, I’d say she has a greater knowledge of evolution, global warming, and the Wisconsin glaciation in Alaska than the average citizen.
But after you’ve had a few of these myth-dispelling conversations, you start to realize that it doesn’t matter. These people don’t hate Palin because of the lies; the lies exist to justify the hate. That’s why they keep reaching and reaching for something else, until they finally get to “she winked on TV!” (And by the way: I’ve been winked at my whole life by my grandmother, aunts, and great-aunts. Who knew it was such a despicable act?)
The language is rough. Very rough. So is the absolute garbage that has been thrown on Sarah Palin by women who profess to be something very different from what they obviously are. and the author claims she knows for a fact that some of these feminists were knowingly spreading lies about the woman. She won't say who because that would be talking out of school. I think that's deeply regrettable. Nobody should be given a free pass for this kind of horrific filth, and certainly not because they are feminists.
And all this from feminists. Forget the NAACP sponsoring a lynching; this is like the NAACP ripping off their masks to reveal that they’ve been replaced by white supremacist pod people.
There's a rich mine of irony in the frothing at the mouth, sputtering, spewing hatred many on the left have professed for Palin:
Her speech also delivered some welcome punctures to the national gasbag known as Obama. And that’s another thing: it has not escaped my attention that many of the things Palin is accused of, falsely, are actually true of Obama. This is a guy who, as a U.S. senator from Illinois, didn’t even know which Senate committees he was on or which states bordered his own. (And don’t even get me started on Joe “The Talking Donkey” Biden, who thinks FDR was president during the stock market crash and that people watched TV in those days.) I’m not saying Obama’s a moron, but he’s sure as hell no genius. People say Sarah Palin rambles; excuse me, but have you actually heard Obama speak extemporaneously? As for being a diva, surely we all remember the Possomus sign and the special embroidered pillow on the Obama campaign plane. The fact is, Obama is an intellectually mediocre narcissist with a thin resume who’s lost without a teleprompter and whose entire campaign had all the substance and gravity of a Pepsi commercial. Yet people say Sarah Palin is a fluffy bunny diva.
Most of the comments are thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Then there's this very telling one, comment 120 by one 'Apostate':
My dislike of conservatives and of anti-choicers is really quite strong, enough that I’ve banned people on my blog who have expressed the mildest of reservations about choice, and I refuse to sign up for a bone marrow registry because I might accidentally end up helping an anti-choicer, a Christian, or a Republican. Really!
Reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich's desire to give E Coli to somebody who was a complete stranger to her simply because she didn't like the books they had on their bookshelves.
Some are saying things were just as bad against Hilary. It doesn't seem that way to me, although it's no secret that I didn't much care for her (for the record, I actually have a bit more respect for her now than I did then, but I still find the Tammy Wynnette bit and the vast rightwing conspiracy and if he lied that would be serious stuff contemptible), so I may not be the best judge.
But.... the comments against Palin are so violent, and so specifically sexualized in a way that the hostility towards Hilary wasn't/isn't/doesn't seem to be to me. For another, it's absolutely mind boggling how often somebody wills criticize Palin on the basis of A, and when you point out A is a lie, they say never mind, it's B, and when you point out B is completely false, they say who cares, because of C, and when you say, well, YOUR candidate also believes C, then they insist that it doesn't matter because their candidate believes C with more credibility than Palin, who, after all, said D, and of course, Palin didn't say D, their candidate did, and that doesn't matter either.
And all the while, no matter how false their reasons are shown to be, they merely get angrier, more vitriolic, more hateful and more personal in their attacks.
The Book as Ice Pick
A book ought to be an ice pick, to break up the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka
Two books that were that ice pick for me in the last few years were Wendel Berry's Jayber Crow and Deerskin by Robin McKinley.
What books have served to break up the frozen sea for you?
Drinking and Breastfeeding
DRJ has an interesting post up at Patterico about the recent case where cops, called by a mother to come to her house and arrest the boyfriend who assaulted her, instead arrested the mother because they believed she was too drunk to be breastfeeding her child.
There are some aspects of the case I'd not known about, and there is this:
there is little or no medical research on drinking and breastfeeding because
...“[r]esearchers cannot ethically conduct controlled research on intoxicated women who breast-feed.” Instead, experts rely on anecdotal evidence to advise against breastfeeding after drinking or drinking to the point of intoxication, but it’s not clear what the risks really are.
DJR is quoting Dr. Amy Tuteur, a retired obstetrician and gynecologist, and the AP writer James MacPherson.
I find them both hard to believe. They don't have to do controlled research by getting a woman drunk and then having her breastfeed her child. The place to at least start would be to have her drink a glass or two of alcohol and then pump and test the breastmilk to see how much transfers through to the milk.
In fact, I find it impossible to believe such research has not already been done, and it turns out I am right. I found this out because I had a pretty good idea of just who might have already done such research, so I googled his name and found it here. It is unfortunate that neither MacPherson nor the retired doctor are apparently aware of the wonderful work of Thomas W. Hale, R.Ph. Ph.D., member of the LLLI Health Advisory Council, and author of a book every breastfeeding mother and every medical person who has anything to do with breastfeeding mothers should have- Medications and Mothers' Milk. Here's a quote from the 12th edition:
.
Significant amounts of alcohol are secreted into breastmilk although it is not considered harmful to the infant if the amount and duration are limited. The absolute amount of alcohol transferred into milk is generally low. Beer, but not ethanol, has been reported in a number of studies to stimulate prolactin levels and breastmilk production (1, 2, 3). Thus it is presumed that the polysaccharide from barley may be the prolactin-stimulating component of beer (4). Non-alcoholic beer is equally effective.
In a study of twelve breastfeeding mothers who ingested 0.3 g/kg of ethanol in orange juice (equivalent to 1 can of beer for the average-sized woman), the mean maximum concentration of ethanol in milk was 320 mg/L (5). This report suggests a 23% reduction (156 to 120 mL) in breastmilk production following ingestion of beer and an increase in milk odor as a function of ethanol content.
Excess levels may lead to drowsiness, deep sleep, weakness, and decreased linear growth in the infant. Maternal blood alcohol levels must attain 300 mg/dl before significant side effects are reported in the infant. Reduction of letdown is apparently dose-dependent and requires alcohol consumption of 1.5 to 1.9 gm/kg body weight (6). Other studies have suggested psychomotor delay in infants of moderate drinkers (2+ drinks daily). Avoid breastfeeding during and for 2 - 3 hours after drinking alcohol.
In an interesting study of the effect of alcohol on milk ingestion by infants, the rate of milk consumption by infants during the 4 hours immediately after exposure to alcohol (0.3 g/kg) in 12 mothers was significantly less (7). Compensatory increases in intake were then observed during the 8 - 16 hours after exposure when mothers refrained from drinking.
Adult metabolism of alcohol is approximately 1 ounce in 3 hours, so mothers who ingest alcohol in moderate amounts can generally return to breastfeeding as soon as they feel neurologically normal. Chronic or heavy consumers of alcohol should not breastfeed.
It's debatable whether or not the police officers who arrested that mother are correct (significantly, they never tested her blood alcohol levels, and she had been hit by her boyfriend, so it's questionable whether she acted funny because she'd been punched or because she was drunk), but it's not true that 'experts' rely on anecdotal evidence.
Don't Count
When my youngest brother was born it was in the dark ages when mothers got to stay in the hospital for ten days or so (it was also in Canada). One day Mom called home and got the middle child, who was not quite 3, and he told her she couldn't talk to Daddy, he was sleeping. Then he hung up.
A few minutes later my father called her right back and explained. He was not sleeping. He was doing a complex math problem. You see, one thing that always bothered him about my mother's housekeeping was the fact that she did nto keep the back doorjamb clear of finger prints. He thought that was slovenly and slacking. So he determined to keep it clean in order to prove how easy it was.
About the fifty-billionth finger print he wiped off that hour, he took to the couch with an ice-pack to calculate just how many little muddy finger prints clutched that doorjamb every single hour. I may be exaggerating about the ice-pack. Between my brother and I we had the full 20 fingers complete with prints. We went in and out that door X number of times in an hour, there were six hours of the day we could go in and out- and about that time he was on the couch groaning, my 2 year old brother was answering the phone, and I, well, I don't know where my 5 and 3/4 of a year old self was. Probably surreptitiously adding a few muddy foot prints to the door just to make life more interesting.
I once thought it seemed to good to add up how many years I'd had a child in diapers. And then I thought it seemed better to forget it right away.
Currently I am calculating how many servings of food we dish out each month and I'm already at over 300 for this month alone.
And today the HG came in and said, "Do you realize we have had houseguests for three straight weeks?"
INcidentally, that does NOT count our summer resident, the Tea Chemist. She's no longer a houseguest. The Boy says she's a Gumly- part guest and part family (the guest part is we don't make her share her bathroom most of the time, and she never has to give up a bed). She bakes, and we will hate to give her up.
Anyway, the three weeks of houseguests include Blynken and Nod, Stryder, the Chem Grad (NOT the same as the Tea Chemist), three out of state friends from my birth state of Arkansas, and a family of three who came up for a birthday bash and spent the night. In one case within hours of one set leaving the new set arrives?
Asked the HG, "So. Do you think that might explain the steam-rolled feeling we all have?"
It might. It just very well might.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
The Treehouse
Convo with Strider
I answered the telephone and Strider asked, "Is the HG handy?"
"Why, yes," I exclaimed. "I find her exceedingly handy in the kitchen and about the house."
"I knew that was coming," he laughed. "But can I talk to her?"
I called to the HG, who was in the kitchen making dinner for our expected group for supper- meaning, we were expecting to need to feed anywhere from 14-18 people (it was 14). She had to wash and dry her hands first and then, for some reason, wanted to speak privately to her man, so went to another room.
While we waited for her, I continued my conversation with the man who is taking her away from us all.
"As a matter of fact," I told him meaningfully, "I find her indispensably handy."
"Sorry," he said briskly but not unkindly, "Too late now."
"I should have thought of that before we said you could court her?" I asked.
"Exactly," he said.
Of course, I did think of that before, but, while we tease them both about him taking her away, and while we tease her unmercifully about the fact that she is seldom here and rather head in the clouds when she is physically here, it is also delightful to know what a beautiful team these two make and it is a joy to see how happy he makes her.
Nickel and Dimed
So I finally read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, and my opinion is actually lower than it was before. Wow.
I will have more to say about it later, but this paragraph should suffice for now. It's during the period Barbara worked for a cleaning service. She's brought down low, low, low by a dreadful encounter in one of the houses she cleans. The encounter is, oh, the shock and horror of it all, with a shelf of books with ideas with which she disagrees. Ideas! Oh, the pain.
"I encounter a shelf full of arrogant, and, under the circumstances, personally insulting neoconservative encomiums to the status quo and consider using germ warfare against the owners, the weapons for which are within my apron pockets. l All I would have to do is take one of the E. Coli- rich rags that's been used on the toilets and use it to "Clean" the kitchen counters- a plan that entertains me for an hour or more."
Why it's 'personally insulting' that these people own books with a point of view she disdains is for the reader to figure out.
Chicken Cream Enchiladas
For 8 servings:
Saute 4 thinly sliced onions in 4 Tablespoons of melted fat or oil for about 20 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in 4 cups cooked, diced chicken, turkey, or other poultry, 1-2 cups chopped sweet peppers, and 12 ounces of diced cream cheese. Stir until cream cheese is melted. Season further to taste and set aside.
Warm 24 flour tortillas, spoon 1/3 of filling down the cneter of tortilla, roll, set seam side down in 9X13 dish.
When all tortillas are filled and rolled, sppon some whipping cream or milk over the top- about 1 1/3 cup- you don't want them swimming in liquid, just a couple of tablespoons over the top of each rolled tortilla. Sprinkle evenly with 4 cups of grated monterey jack cheese.
For OAMC (once a month cooking), cover and freeze at this point.
To serve immediately, bake uncovered at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.
For freezer cooking- remove from freezer, thaw, and bake until heated through (the safest way to thaw it is to put it in the fridge over night).
For added color add a bit of paprika to the top, or put a few red pepper strips over the top.
Vegetarian version: saute 3 cups of thinly sliced onions, 2 cups of sliced and sauted peppers, and 3 cups of cooked beans (add rice if desired).
Beans: Anasazi beans would be mild and pleasant.
Garbanzo beans, cooked well and slightly mashed and/or crumbled would be filling and interesting- sort of the flavor of a California hippy cafe. Add grated carrot and mushrooms for added interest.
Black beans would be good with a touch of grated orange peel and a spoonful of orange juice in the pan with the onions and peppers while they saute.
Six Percent Off ABE Books Purchases
If you sign up for Cashbaq- when you sign up you get a five dollar credit, and they have various offers for further discounts when you shop at different places. Right now, one that looks particularly attractive to me is six percent off at ABEBooks for textbooks, and currently there's free shipping on selected books.
Yes, Cap and Trade Will Destroy Jobs, admit.... Democrats
According to Friday's Washington Times, the legislation includes language that provides, should it become law, that people who lose their jobs because of it "could get a weekly paycheck for up to three years, subsidies to find new work and other generous benefits—courtesy of Uncle Sam."
How generous are these benefits? Well, according to the Times, "Adversely affected employees in oil, coal and other fossil-fuel sector jobs would qualify for a weekly check worth 70 percent of their current salary for up to three years. In addition, they would get $1,500 for job-search assistance and $1,500 for moving expenses from the bill's 'climate change worker adjustment assistance' program, which is expected to cost $4.2 billion from 2011 to 2019."
Instead of being a the source of millions of new jobs of "green jobs"—as House Democrats are fond of saying over and over again—the provision is a hidden admission that their effort is a job killer, not just a massive new tax on energy.
Building a safety net into the legislation is probably the responsible thing to do. The government is going to be directly responsible for the destruction of millions of jobs if the bill passed by the House becomes law—anywhere from a net loss of .5 percent of total jobs over the first 10 years, according to the liberal Brookings Institution, to 3 million by the year 2030, according to the industry-backed Coalition for Affordable American Energy.
More here.
During the election season, Obama admitted that under his cap and trade plan, utility prices would skyrocket (I believe that is his word). So the price of utilities will skyrocket, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs (and so will the people they buy things from) and to 'compensate' for that, those people directly and specifically in the oil, coal and other fossil-fuel sectors will get a paycheck from the rest of us for losing their jobs- but, in a climate of sky-rocketing fuel costs, they'll get a 30 percent pay cut. Naturally, they'll have to cut back their spending, which means the people downwind of them will also be losing jobs and suffering pay cuts in a climate of skyrocketing utility costs, but they won't be compensated for it.
Waxman Markey is not much better than a bullet to the spine. The bill must go, and so should Wasman, Markey, and the rest of the cesspool that is in Congress, AND the lobbyists. It's time for real, substantive change. Get rid of them all.
Teaching and Authority vs Arbitrary Autocrats
The sense of must should be present with children; our mistake is to act in such a way that they, only, seem to be law-compelled while their elders do as they please.
Basically, parents are in charge, but that that does NOT mean parents have the right to make up and/or break rules merely to suit themselves. Being the authority figure does not mean you have the right to be a dictatorial autocrat and substitute your whims for rules and guidelines carefully reasoned and based on sound principles.
The parent or teacher who is pestered for 'leave' to do this or that, contrary to the discipline of the house or school, has only himself to thank; he has posed as a person in authority, not under authority, and therefore free to allow the breach of rules whose only raison d'être is that they minister to the well-being of the children.
If there are too many exceptions being made for your 'rules,' you should probably change the rules, as rules for which you can constantly make exceptions are rules that are apparently not in place for the well-being of the children and should be reconsidered.
An alternative is that you are carelessly disregarding of the well-being of the children, preferring to be the popular sugar-daddy sort of parent, and this is the sort of parent who is constantly 'pestered' for exceptions to the rule.
Some children are natural pesterers, of course, but I have found natural pesterers are strongly encouraged by any bending of the rules and it is best to have few, but strong and never bent rules for the child prone to pester for exceptions.
Two conditions are necessary to secure all proper docility and obedience and, given these two, there is seldom a conflict of wills between teacher and pupils.
Docility is a word we moderns loathe to hear in reference to children (or anybody, really), and it has fallen sadly out of fashion, in part because I think we misunderstand it.
It's always a good idea when reading an older book to use a dictionary contemporary with the author so as to see how the words the author uses were commonly understood at the time of the writing.
According to Webster's 1828 dictionary, it meant then:
Teachableness; readiness to learn; aptness to be taught.
We think of 'docile' as somewhat placid, complacent, dull and a little boring. But there is not any reason a lively, spunky, and interesting small human being cannot be docile- that is, engaged, cooperative, willing to meet the parent/teacher half way and ready and eager to learn.
So how do we get a child in a state of cooperative readiness to learn and the obedience necessary if you are to teach?
The conditions are,––the teacher, or other head may not be arbitrary but must act so evidently as one under authority [see also Parents and Children. By the Writer.] that the children, quick to discern, see that he too must do the things he ought; and therefore that regulations are not made for his convenience. (I am assuming that everyone entrusted with the bringing up of children recognises the supreme Authority to Whom we are subject; without this recognition I do not see how it is possible to establish the nice relation which should exist between teacher and taught.)
Basically, this is a further expansion of the first point in this section- do not be arbitrary and inconsistent, do not have rules based on your dictatorial whims- and, according to this author, recognize the supreme Authority, that is God, and that you are merely stewards of the children entrusted to you, not their owners.
The other condition is that children should have a fine sense of the freedom which comes of knowledge which they are allowed to appropriate as they choose, freely given with little intervention from the teacher. They do choose and are happy in their work, so there is little opportunity for coercion or for deadening, hortatory talk.
This point is a significant one in the Charlotte Mason method. To understand it, we must lay some groundwork.
First of all- hortatory talk according to Webster's 1828:
a. Encouraging; inciting; giving advice; as a hortatory speech.
I think of hortatory speeches as those manipulative, sugary sweet, artificial speeches that go something like this, "Now we want to be good little children, don't we, and so we do not want really want to take away the toy from little Joey or color in our picture books, do we? We want to use our nice words, don't we, and...."
Gak. The child is at a disadvantage because of his more limited vocabulary and small size, but most often when this sort of talky talky is going on, if he could only articulate it the child would most likely be responding belligerently, "WHO is this 'we?' Obviously I DO want to take the toy and color in my picture book or else I would NOT have done it!"
Hortatory talk would also be that talk which tells children what lessons they must draw from their books without giving them the opportunity to choose for themselves- even if sometimes they will choose what we would not.
Many people mistakenly believe the CM approach is child-led and that the teacher/parent is to do nothing but give the child books, and this is false. But it is true that Miss Mason did not wish the adults to come between the child and the books.
Charlotte didn't criticize teacher involvement, but she did want to see the teacher's input placed in proper proportion. She speaks of "new" educational systems (those quotation marks are scare quotes which Charlotte uses to indicate that she does not, in fact, consider them new), which offered a grain of knowledge diluted in a gallon of unnecesary words from the teacher. I think she wanted a different balance- not the teacher centered lecture method, and also not the child as center of the universe method- in fact, she specifically criticized "Rousseau's primitive man theory, that a child must get all his knowledge through his own sense and by his own wits, as if there were no knowledge waiting to be passed on by the small torch-bearer…" page 325, v 6
Let the children at their books, real books, living books. Do not give long, emotionally and intellectually manipulative speeches about the books, let them read the books. Certainly discuss them with the children, offer points for them to notice, but in proper proportion- that is, the book should not be dwarfed by long speeches and pages of worksheets.
quoted portions From Volume 6, Towards a Philosophy of Education, by Charlotte Mason, pages 72-73
