Monday, May 27, 2013

The CM Blog Carnival -- A Deliciously Delightful Journey

by Megan Hoyt

This is my first time hosting the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival, and I do feel like a child skipping through the crowds on the Midway back at the Texas State Fair, munching on fluffy clouds of cotton candy that melt into sweet nothingness on my tongue, skimming skeeballs up the chute, and winning a turquoise blue stuffed poodle. More on the poodle below, but for now... 

Let the Carnival begin!

The topic this week is The Way of Reason. Gulp. Lest we think more highly of our reasoning capabilities than we ought to, I assure you Miss Mason's point here wasn't that we can reason our way through life but rather to warn us that we probably shouldn't. That said, Shirley gives us a great reason to use reason in Developing Reason to Defend the Faith.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Nebby, for this explanation of The Way of Reason. I am learning so much from you -- I also loved your article on Composition. I, too, used Progymnasmata through the Fable and Narrative stage and then went back to narration. 

Dewey does it again -- Dewey's Treehouse, that is, in The Way of Reason in Fellowship of the Ring, a beautiful analysis and portrayal of what goes wrong when faulty reasoning takes over. Or tries to. Stay strong, Frodo! 

Tammy blew me away with this examination of the pitfalls of reason in science. I did not know all this. Wow. 


Marguerite Henry
Nancy Kelly takes us to the Grand Canyon this week -- along with Marguerite Henry's Brighty!

Take a look at First Steps to Reading from a Charlotte Mason perspective with Bobby Jo Nickel. I love this content and photo rich article. You have a beautiful blog, Bobby Jo.

Loved Amy's look at nature study. I always enjoy hearing how she lives out the CM life in Peru. I don't get to travel much, so I live vicariously through Amy. :) But I think I love this post even more. Thanks for such a personal glimpse at the way of the will. I'm going to have my 16-year-old math dawdler read it.

Brandy gives us an awesome analysis of Endangered Minds and a side by side comparison with the Series in her blog post this week: Jane Healy and Charlotte Mason

I just spent way too long drooling over all the books Carol shared on poetry here. Wow! Thanks so much for posting all these. It's so fun to get recommendations for books from and about other countries -- loved hearing about Australia's poems.

Celeste takes us on a gorgeous nature study outing this week at Joyous Lessons. I love the duck in your nature notebook, Celeste! 

And what a fantastic lead-in to Jen's Snowfall Academy blog post sharing pics from her daughter's nature notebook. You can watch the progression from 2010 to today. How wonderful! Jen also gives us a meaty analysis of Miss Mason's second principle in a separate blog post. 

One of my absolute favorite Charlotte Mason blogs is more of an online Commonplace book. The reason I treasure Laurie's blog so much is that she finds things I haven't yet discovered -- beautiful things -- and then I get to put them in my Commonplace notebook, too. Thanks, Laurie!

Personal plug here for the music of Gungor and their incredible song Beautiful Things. Click on it and you can listen while you read the other blog entries. I really love Gungor. 




This one wasn't sent in as part of the carnival, but when I read it I gasped. Here's a look at the sterner side of nature! Apologies if this was already posted in a previous carnival. I don't remember seeing it back in March. Jen G., you should be a documentary filmmaker! Also, check out Jen's other posts. Looks like she's having a regional CM conference in her neck of the woods soon

My latest blog post has little to do with reason. Or beauty. In fact, after reading it, you'll find it has more to do with nonsense than sense. And a wee bit to do with the assimilation of knowledge and narration. Take a peek



Now about that poodle... When I was very young, say around four or five years old, I used to go to work with my parents rather than stay home with a babysitter or an older sibling. My parents were symphony musicians in Dallas, Texas, and they worked at Fair Park Music Hall back then. When they were rehearsing during the state fair, I was always itching to get off that stool backstage, to stop listening to the beautiful orchestral music and head out to the Midway! But alas, I was only four years old. I wasn't allowed to melt into the crowd alone like that. And rightly so. I must have looked pretty dejected to everyone around me when I was told it wasn't possible for me to go to the fair. So imagine my excitement when one of the stage hands came back from his lunch break with a surprise for me -- a fluffy, stuffed poodle! I treasured that poodle. I slept with it and played with it until it fell to shreds. What a sweet man. He didn't have to do that for me, but he saw a bored little girl wandering the halls or sitting quietly in the wings for two hours and had pity on me. To the kind stagehand who won me a poodle, you showed me that people can be kindhearted and good. What a great example to a self-focused child. 

As we wind our way through life with starts and stops and moments of supreme faith, often superceded by seasons of pride in our own abilities to reason, I so appreciate the work of all of you wonderful, amazing teachers and bloggers.

Thanks for stopping by and a huge thank you to all our contributors this time around. It's so nice to know I'm not alone on this winding ascent.

Megan

This Memorial Day blog carnival is dedicated to the memory of my mother's dear friend and fellow Dallas Symphony musician, Mimi McShane.  
RIP, Mimi! Thank you for being such a caring, devoted cello teacher, a loyal friend to the end, and a wonderful human being!




Monday, May 20, 2013

Feeding the Mind -- a treatise on education by the esteemed _____________?

by Megan Hoyt

This week I have a real treat for you! I'm going to post a large excerpt or two from a pamphlet on education that was written by someone you have all heard of -- and you get to guess who wrote it. (No cheating from those who already heard me read this aloud several months ago!)

There are some gems of truth in this witty piece that prove we are on the right track with narration. And it's really so very simple. I promise!

Like learning to ride a bicycle, once you get the hang of it, you never forget how to read and remember. Thank goodness.

 Without further ado, here's the treatise:

"Breakfast, dinner, tea; in extreme cases, breakfast, luncheon, dinner, tea, super, and a glass of something hot at bedtime. What care we take about feeding the lucky body! Which of us does as much for his mind? And what causes the difference? Is the body so much the more important of the two?

By no means: but life depends on the body being fed, whereas we can continue to exist as animals (scarcely as men) though the mind be utterly starved and neglected. Therefore Nature provides that, in case of serious neglect of the body, such terrible consequences of discomfort and pain shall ensue, as will soon bring us back to a sense of our duty: and some of the functions necessary to life she does for us altogether, leaving us no choice in the matter. It would fare but ill with many of us if we were left to superintend our own digestion and circulation. 'Bless me!' one would cry, 'I forgot to wind up my heart this morning! To think that it has been standing still for the last three hours!' 'I can't walk with you this afternoon,' a friend would say, 'as I have no less than eleven dinners to digest. I had to let them stand over from last week, being so busy, and my doctor says he will not answer for the consequences if I wait any longer!'

Well, it is, I say, for us that the consequences of neglecting the body can be clearly seen and felt; and it might be well for some if the mind were equaly visible and tangible -- if we could take it, say, to the doctor, and have its pulse felt.

'Why, what have you been doing with this mind lately? How have you fed it? It looks pale, and the pulse if very slow.'

'Well, doctor, it has not had much regular food lately. I gave it a lot of sugar-plums yesterday.'

'Sugar-plums! What kind?'

'Well, they were a parcel of conundrums, sir.'

'Ah, I thought so. Now just mind this: if you go on playing tricks like that, you'll spoil all its teeth, and get laid up with mental indigestion. You must have nothing but the plainest reading for the next few days. Take care now! No novels on any account!'

Considering the amount of painful experience many of us have had in feeding and dosing the body, it would, I think, be quite worth our while to try and translate some of the rules into corresponding ones for the mind.

First, then, we should set ourselves to provide for our mind its proper kind of food. We very soon learn what will, and what will not, agree with the body, and find little difficulty in refusing a piece of the tempting pudding or pie which is associated in our memroy with that terrible attack of indigestion, and whose very name irresistibly recalls rhubarb and magnesia; but it takes a great many lessons to convince us how indigestible some of our favourite lines of reading are, and again and again we make a meal of the unwholesome novel, sure to be followed by its usual train of low spirits, unwillingness to work, weariness of existence -- in fact, by mental nightmare.


 Then we should be careful to provide this wholesome food in proper amount. Mental gluttony, or over-reading, is a dangerous propensity, tending to weakness of digestive power, and in some cases to loss of appetite: we know that break is a good and wholesome food, but who would like to try the experiment of eating two or three loaves at a sitting?

I have heard a physician telling his patient -- whose complaint was merely gluttony and want of exercise -- that 'the earliest symptom of hyper-nutrition is a deposition of adipose tissue,' and no doubt the fine long words greatly consoled the poor man under his increasing load of fat.

I wonder if there is such a thing in nature as a FAT MIND? I really think I have met with one or two: minds which could not keep up with the slowest trot in conversation; could not jump over a logical fence, to save their lives; always got stuck fast in a narrow argument; and, in short, were fit for nothing but to waddle helplessly through the world.

Then, again, though the food be wholesome and in proper amount, we know that we must not consume too many kinds at once. Take the thirsty a quart of beer, or a quart of cider, or even a quart of cold tea, and he will probably thank you (though not so heartily in the last case!). But what think you his feelings would be if you offered him a tray containing a little mug of beer, a little mug of cider, another of cold tea, one of hot tea, one of coffee, one of cocoa, and corresponding vessels of milk, water, brandy-and-water, and buttermilk? The sum total might be a quart, but would it be the same thing to the haymaker?

Having settled the proper kind, amout, and variety of our mental food, it remains that we should be careful to allow proper intervals between meal and meal, and not swallow the food hastily without mastication, so that it may be thoroughly digested; both which rules, for the body, are also applicable at once to the mind.

First, as to the intervals: these are as really necessary as they are for the body, with this difference only, that while the body requires three or four hours' rest before it is ready for another meal, the mind will in many cases do with three or four minutes. I believe that the interval required is much shorter than is generally supposed, and from personal experience, I would recommend anyone, who has to devote several hours together to one subject of thought, to try the effect of such a break, say once an hour, leaving off for five minutes only each time, but taking care to throw the mind absolutely 'out of gear' for those five minutes, and to turn it entirely to other subjects. It is astonishing what an amount of impetus and elasticity the mind recovers during those short periods of rest.


And then, as to the mastication of the food, the mental process answering to this is simply thinking over what we read. This is a very much greater exertion of mind than the mere passive taking in the contents of our author. So much greater an exertion is it, that, as Coleridge says, the mind often 'angrily refuses' to put itself to such trouble -- so much greater, that we are far too apt to neglect it altogether, and go on pouring in fresh food on the top of the undigested masses already lying there, till the unfortunate mind is fairly swamped under the flood. But the greater the exertion the more valuable, we may be sure, is the effect. One hour of steady thinking over a subject (a solitary walk is as good an opportunity for the process as any other) is worth two or three of reading only. And just consider another effect of this thorough digestion of the books we read; I mean the arranging and 'ticketing,' so to speak, of the subjects in our minds, so that we can readily refer to them when we want them. Sam Slick tells us that he has learnt several languages in his life, but somehow 'couldn't keep the parcels sorted' in his mind. And many a mind that hurries through book after book, without waiting to digest or arrange anything, gets into that sort of condition, and the unfortunate owner finds himself far from fit really to support the character all his friends give him.

'A thoroughly well-read man. Just you try him in any subject, now. You can't puzzle him.'

You turn to the thoroughly well-read man. You ask him a question, say, in English History (he is understood to have just finished reading Macaulay). He smiles good-naturedly, tries to look as if he knew all about it, and proceeds to dive into his mind for the answer. Up comes a handful of very promising facts, but on examination they turn out to belong to the wrong century, and are pitched in again. A second haul brings up a fact much more like the real thing, but, unfortunately, along with it comes a tangle of other things -- a fact in political economy, a rule in arithmetic, the ages of his brother's children, and a stanza of Gray's 'Elegy,' and among all these, the fact he wants has got hopelessly twisted up and entangled. Meanwhile, everyone is waiting for his reply, and, as the silence is getting more and more awkward, our well-read friend has to stammer out some half-answer at last, not nearly so clear or so satisfactory as an ordinary schoolboy would have given. And all this for want of making up his knowledge into proper bundles and ticketing them. ...

Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his very amusing book, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, gives the following rule for knowing whether a human being is young or old: 'The crucial experiment is this -- offer a bulky bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is easily accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established.' He tells us that a human being, 'if young, will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.'

To ascertain the healthiness of the mental appetite of a human animal, place in its hands a short, well-written, but not exciting treatise on some popular subject -- a mental bun, in fact. If it is read with eager interest and perfect attention, and if the reader can answer questions on the subject afterwards, the mind is in first-rate working order. If it be politely laid down again, or perhaps lounged over for a few minutes, and then, 'I can't read this stupid book! Would you hand me the second volume of The Mysterious Murder?' you may be equally sure that there is something wrong in the mental digestion.

If this paper has given you any useful hints on the important subject of reading, and made you see that it is one's duty no less than one's interest to 'read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest' the good books that fall in your way, its purpose will be fulfilled."


George MacDonald and daughter (No, he didn't write it!)
Well, who do you think wrote this treatise on reading and mental digestion? Any ideas? Here are a few that may or may not have come to mind...

Charlotte Mason

Thomas Rooper

Henrietta Franklin

John Amos Comenius

Abbie Farwell Brown

Arabella Buckley

Margaret Gatty

Thomas Traherne

Elsie Kitching

But no, it wasn't any of these worthy contributors to the study of the mind.

Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson? No, it wasn't written by a poet.


The Liddell sisters
Stop here and keep thinking. If you want to scroll past the answer and leave your guess, you can do that. But here it comes. Just below this beautiful picture (and no, it isn't Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or James Fenimore Cooper, Fanny Crosby or Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott or Mark Twain).


Alice Liddell
Remember the champion of fantasy, the creator of wonderland, the maker of "eat me" and "drink me?" The shrinker of Alices and disappearer of chesire cats?


Yes! It was written by Lewis Carroll!

And he also took all these photographs. More of his work can be found here and here.