On Bad Attitudes

Okay, I admit it: I'm swamped. I'm almost drowning. I dropped enough balls last week to fill up one of those play areas at Chuck E. Cheese's.

Or something.

So I'm going to do something that I plan to do off and on this summer while I try and get my act together, and that's rerun an old series. I'll have edited it, of course, or made notes if my opinions have changed. But I figure if I forgot that I wrote this, you probably forgot that you read it, so we're all good.

Am I right?

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In my inbox this week was an email from Mystie. I tried to ignore her, but she got into my brain, and so here I am, tackling a subject for which I feel almost totally unqualified. The deal is: I don't have it all together. But I'm learning that the idea that someone has to have it all together in order to speak on a subject is ridiculous because...no one has it all together.

The ideas I'm about to present are not my own. I have been blessed with many wise tutors, from my own mother, to real-life friends, to British governesses. It is from them that this series of posts will flow.

But first, of course, we have the requisite disclaimer. I am not talking here about children with severe behavior problems {though our friend Charlotte Mason does spend a number of pages in her first volume explaining that creating and maintaining the conditions of healthy brain activity is foundational for all learning}. In this post we are talking about what Mystie called in her email to me "just your basic obstinacy or laziness, or a generic, low-grade bad attitude."

What ought we to do if little ones tell us they "hate school" or they don't like studying on their own, anyway?

This series of posts is going to focus more on principles--things to consider--rather than anything really practical. This is because principles are easily applied to any child. I don't know any particular children as well as my own, and my children may or may not be like your children.

If that makes sense.

Please do not think that I am denying that children are sinners and need discipline and instruction. This is not the case, and we will get to that. But when I come across a negative attitude, especially in regard to lessons, and especially if the child does not have a habit of bad attitudes, these are the things I think through first before I assume that the root issue is sin.

The two things we will consider today are: starting too young and bad books.

Starting Too Young

Our culture tells us that if our children are failing at something in school, we need to start them younger. We need to make them spend more hours on the subject. And so on.

The older I get, the more I believe that what we need to do is lay off and allow their brains to mature, rather than pressuring them to use areas of their brain that aren't even myelinated yet. The human brain is not a finished organ at birth. Charlotte Mason observed that children will reject what they are not yet ready to deal with: This reminds me very much of my oldest child, who decided that he "hated math" when he was in first or second grade. The funny thing is that I thought I had delayed math because I didn't do any math until he was in first grade {other than counting objects and learning to identify the symbols}. But he struggled through math that year, and his conclusion was that he not only hated math, but that math hated him. "I'm bad at math," he would say.

One limitation I did discover in the minds of these little people; my friend insisted that they could not understand English Grammar; I maintained that they could and wrote a little Grammar...for the two of seven and eight; but she was right; I was allowed to give the lessons myself with what lucidity and freshness I could command; in vain; the Nominative 'Case' baffled them; their minds rejected the abstract conception just as children reject the notion of writing an "Essay on Happiness." But I was beginning to make discoveries;...that the mind of a child takes or rejects according to its needs.

On the inside, I panicked. Here I was, teaching him at home, believing that a huge side-benefit of this was that no one would ever kill the love of learning for him, and already, at age six or seven, his love for math was dead.

After a little reading, thinking, praying, and consulting with my husband, we dropped math. In its place, I added in some workbook pages from Critical Thinking Press that didn't look or feel like math, and yet purported to help children develop math ability. They were more like little logic puzzles. E. loved them. He told me he wanted to do more "like this."

About nine months later, I noticed that he was easily adding up scores for Yahtzee games, and decided to try math again. He took to it like a fish to water. There was no bad attitude, and no self-doubt. Only enjoying playing with the numbers.

All I can say about this is that he was finally ready for math. I didn't change my discipline. I didn't change the curriculum. All we did was wait.

Today, even though we took nine months off, he is only about six months "behind" because he is moving at such a rapid pace.

This sort of thing takes wisdom from above. There was a very real chance that I could have been being manipulated by a bad attitude, and that he would have learned that his attitude would get him out of doing something he didn't like. One child's rejection can be due to brain immaturity, while another's can be due to rebellion. This is why I say that the possibility of having begun too early is only something to consider.

Bad Books

I am writing the Term Two examination today, and, as is my habit, before I write an exam, I reread Charlotte's words on exams. I wish I could remember in which volume it was that she explained that trouble narrating or recalling for exams can sometimes be due to "bad books," as I call them. We can think we have found a living book upon the subject, but when the child is struggling joylessly through it, we can say one thing about the book, and that is that it is not life-giving for the child. One way I judge the quality of a book is based upon how easy it is for me to narrate and to enjoy. Do I, as a fully-capable adult, catch ideas from the book?

There are many good books, but they are not the best books. This is why I appreciate Ambleside so much. These women took the time to wade through good books until they found what they considered to be the very best upon the subject, meeting the requirements of a living book--high literary quality, full of ideas, etc.

More to Come

I have a list of thoughts on this subject, so I'll continue this series in the near future.

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Stupendous Selections on Sunday

• Science Astronomy.docx
  This is Kathy's first draft of a proposed living astronomy course--coordinating readings from Signs and Season, The Stargazing Year, and Ball's Great Astronomers, with field work. I want to try this. Maybe next year?
• A Pilgrim's Project: An *amazing* chapter about... flower arrangements. {chapter 7}
  I loved this post, but I have been too overwhelmed for flower arrangements lately.
  • When we express ourselves in our homes with beauty, by using our diverse talents, we are bringing those intangible elements to light. Our love, creativity, ingenuity, self-sacrifice, etc. are being made manifest. Whether it be in a careful flower arrangement or in the carefree way we toss the salad. This is how we create atmosphere.
  • Edith draws a correlation between two apparently unrelated things; the seemingly insignificant act of beautifying and understanding, communicative and loving relationships, present or future.
  • We can and should make our places beautiful.
• Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85% « ACEs Too High
  "A quiet answer turns away wrath"--even at school.
  • The kid was ready. Ready, man! For an anger blast to his face….”How could you do that?” “What’s wrong with you?”…and for the big boot out of school. But he was NOT ready for kindness.
• Mooberry Farm Homesteading Journal: How to Make an Onion Bag Dish Scrubby
  Sigh. I want to be this kind of crafty, but I'm not. Not even this much. But these are cute, and I bet they work, too.
  • I have been making these simple little onion bag dish scrubbies for quite some time. Recycled onion bag scrubbies are very effective at cleaning, and they are durable, too. I especially love mine for washing up my cast iron pans.
• Ordo Amoris: Blue Plate Special
  I laughed all the way through this. I must say I had a very similar feeling the first time I read this chapter!
  • I don't have allergies except that eating makes me fat.
  • I have met something very like a hobo. It is a college boy.
  • No other color goes with food so well as blue. I do not know why but it is indisputable.
• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC261948/pdf/iai00115-0275.pdf
  Interesting.
• Will Detection of Unapproved GM Wheat Decimate US Economy?
  Uh oh.
  • As it turns out, the Roundup Ready (i.e. glyphosate-resistant) strain of wheat was developed by Monsanto and field tested in 16 different states between 1998 and 2005.
    
    Plans to bring it to market were abandoned due to opposition against genetically engineered wheat.
  • About 50 percent of the wheat grown in the US is exported.
  • Japan and Korea has already suspended orders of US wheat⁴ in response to the findings.
  • Monsanto and other biotech companies have repeatedly promised that their creations will not escape its intended confines. Today, after hundreds of farmers have been sued for patent infringement after Monsanto’s patented seeds were found growing where they weren’t supposed to, we know how ridiculous such assertions are.
• Sonar image may point to remains of Amelia Earhart's plane in Pacific - Science
  I don't see it, but interesting nonetheless!
  • the images show an "anomaly" resting at the depth of about 600 feet in the waters off Nikumaroro island, some 350 miles southeast of Earhart's target destination, Howland Island.
  • when you're looking for man-made objects against a natural background, anomalies are good
• Indoctrination in Common Core ELA Texts - YouTube
  Coming soon to a classroom near you: how to use emotional language to manipulate people. Bonus points for causing division in the family.
  • Have you heard the notion that Common Core standards don't indoctrinate? Well they don't. It's the curriculum that is susceptible of indoctrinating. Here's an example of social justice activism for 1st graders.
• Edward Snowden: Why did the NSA whistleblower have access to PRISM and other sensitive systems?
  Let's see...low level NSA guy knows everything? Yah, I'm totally comfortable with that...
  • The NSA trusted its most sensitive documents to this guy?
  • Snowden is a 29-year-old high-school dropout who trained for the Army Special Forces before an injury forced him to leave the military. His IT credentials are apparently limited to a few “computer” classes he took at a community college in order to get his high-school equivalency degree—courses that he did not complete.
  • Let’s note what Snowden is not: He isn’t a seasoned FBI or CIA investigator. He isn’t a State Department analyst. He’s not an attorney with a specialty in national security or privacy law.
       

          
    

       
    Instead, he’s the IT guy, and not a very accomplished, experienced one at that.
  • The scandal isn’t just that the government is spying on us. It’s also that it’s giving guys like Snowden keys to the spying program. It suggests the worst combination of overreach and amateurishness, of power leveraged by incompetence.

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Understanding Plutarch as a Historian

One of my summer projects is to attempt to write a study guide for Plutarch's Life of Theseus. Even though we aren't done with school yet, I started on it because I was feeling a little off-kilter and, frankly, projects like these recharge me. At the end of a school year, no matter how good it has been {and this year fully qualifies as a good year}, I'm a little dry and empty. The end run always involves giving and going a little past Empty, if you know what I mean.

So Plutarch is one of the things filling me back up.

The first thing I did when I started this project was to look for a free, readable, online copy of Thomas North's translation of this life.

Well.

That was easier said than done. A lot of the Google ebooks are fine for personal reading, but they are scanned copies, not actual text documents, and when you try and resort to text identification software {as I did}, it gets a little tricky, especially if there are pullout quotes in the margins.

Which there were.

Oh, there were copies of Dryden's translation galore, and I did look at those, only to realize why it was that Charlotte Mason preferred North.

So I've been typing up my own copy of North. In the process, I've been reading it aloud to myself, as well as modernizing spelling {but not wording}, changing names to the modern version if possible {i.e., the Oracle at Delphi rather than Delphus}, adding annotations and paragraph breaks, and basically any other footwork that should be done prior to trying to write any lessons for it.

If I groaned a little at the commencement of this typing project, I have fully repented by now. I'm finding that the best way for me to become intimate with this work is exactly what I felt forced to do: type it, read it slowly and aloud, check to make sure I did it right. I'm getting a great first look at the Life.

This summer I'll probably be chatting about Plutarch off and on because that is where my mind is going to be. This ties in to my why-fight-it philosophy of blogging.

What has been fascinating to me is that in this life, more than any of the others I've read {granted, I've only read four or five of them}, Plutarch is explaining his work as a historian. He tells us exactly who his sources are, and why he deems them credible {or not}. He admits that when we try and reconstruct the lives of very ancient persons, such as Theseus or his Roman counterpart Romulus, it is hard to know exactly what is true. So he gives the various versions he has discovered, and then speculates as to which version he likes best.

Today I felt like a light flipped on in my brain in regard to sociological and archaeologically evidence. In the past, I've thought of the latter as merely all the buildings being in the right place. For example, when we say there is "archaeological evidence" for the Bible--or that there is not archaeological evidence for some other religion's major work ahem--we mean {or at least I mean} that the cities, buildings, and monuments are there. If the Bible says there was a big city somewhere, we find a big city there. Make sense?

Essentially, the geography is right.

But Plutarch is taking archaeological--and by extension sociological--evidence to a different level. Over and over again, Plutarch says things like:

...the names of the places which continue yet to this present day to witness it...

After reading variations of this statement 37 times, it finally dawned on me that this was significant. {Quick I am not, apparently.} Why does this matter? Well, here is the exciting thing: this culture had a habit of naming a place--or a temple or an altar or what have you--after a major event. We see this sort of thing in the Old Testament over and over as well. The Israelites experience something of significance, and they build an altar or dig a well or what have you, and the name of the place tells us about what happened there. The unfortunate thing about the Israelites is that sometimes they did this while wandering in a desert in which they were lost, making those specific monuments very hard to find. But Plutarch is able to say in regard to Theseus, "Hey look: we know that this happened because the city named after this event is still with us, bearing that name, even to this day."

This is amazing! I suppose a thousand years from now, when someone is doubting whether George Washington was ever a real person, the existence of multiple cities named after him might provide a similar sort of evidence.

Similarly, there are semi-religious feasts that are produced as evidence. This is what I meant by sociological proof. Plutarch uses these feasts in the same way he uses architecture, even though they are technically intangible things and much more easily lost than entire cities. At the time Plutarch was writing, the people in these areas had feasts they had been celebrating for centuries. Sometimes, he offers two possible reasons for the feasts, and then explains logically which one is most probable. But the more important point he makes is that the feasts exist, therefore something happened.

It's sort of like how Hanukkah exists because something happened. Hanukkah does not exist because someone made up a fictional tale and thought it'd be fun to design a holiday around it.

Here's what I'm getting from this: the Greeks did not name their cities after, and by extension did not invent feasts celebrating, persons and events that didn't happen. That just wasn't done. It is because of this cultural practice that Plutarch can produce evidence of certain events in the life of Theseus, the founder of Athens.

The interesting thing to me is that a lot of tall tales grew up around the person of Theseus over the hundreds of years between when he lived and when Plutarch wrote history. As Plutarch is trying to sift out fact from fiction, these place names and feasts are considered huge evidence. If you read a child's story of Theseus, you will think it fiction, and for good reason. His life sounds outlandish, to say the least. And yet, Plutarch obviously believes that Theseus was a real person, and makes a valiant attempt to reconstruct his life.

This life particularly has the spice of faerie in it, which is to say that it is going to be great fun.

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My Top Three Practical Health Tricks

I keep thinking I want to work these three tips into other posts, and I keep not having the opportunity to do so, so before I forget, here are three ideas from which I have gained much personal benefit. I thought I'd share, on the off-chance that they benefit you, too.

Magnesium water {some call it magnesium oil} is easy to make! On your stove top in a small pan, heat equal parts magnesium chloride hexahydrate flakes and filtered water. Stir until the flakes dissolve. Let cool and it's ready for use. I prefer to keep mine in a spray bottle.

So what's it good for? Aches and pains, mostly. Now, I'm not talking bruises, but more muscular pain. I have arms that ache from repetitive motions {such as milking goats}. A little spray takes it away. I had what I thought was TMJ pain--basically a deep ache in my jaw by my ear. This spray takes that away, too. Muscle cramps? Also gone. When various children have come to me complaining of what seems to me like growing pains--those nighttime leg aches--I can take it away by applying magnesium water into their skin.

I've gotten to where I put a few sprays into my palm and lather it on like lotion before bed. What can I say? I think it improves my skin. The only precaution I'd give is that if you've just shaved your legs watch out! It might sting a little. Also, the mixture was too alkaline for one of my children and I had to water hers down. If you try it, you might want to test it on a SMALL patch of skin before trying it on your whole body.

For me, magnesium oil has seemed like magic. I thought I was getting old already, but it turns out a little magnesium makes me young again.

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I've made a lot of homemade toothpaste, and I like it. But sometimes I don't want to bother with making batches of it, and I didn't like my recipe so much in the summer because the coconut oil makes the mixture {which I made in the winter, granted} too runny.

I finally ran out the other day, but didn't have time to make a new batch before I needed to brush my teeth, so I looked around to see what I could cook up on my own and ended up with a winner!

All I did was dip my toothbrush in a tub of calcium carbonate powder. If you look at most toothpastes, calcium carbonate is a major ingredient on the label. I did some research on this when I decided to be weird make my own toothpaste. Turns out some researcher somewhere proved that putting calcium in toothpaste helped remineralize teeth. Once that was known, most toothpastes added it. I consider it the most important ingredient on my list.

My dentist says that it helps more if you leave it on your teeth rather than rinsing your mouth. This is only safe to do if your toothpaste does not have fluoride. Obviously, you wouldn't want to swallow fluoride; it's a neurotoxin.

In addition to the powder, I'm only using one other ingredient: two drops of Uncle Harry's Tooth and Gum Elixir. This is basically a mix of a bunch of essential oils, oils that are called for in my toothpaste recipe. It's easier for me to just use a couple drops of this premade mixture, which I love, rather than making my own. By the way, I've found this to be very helpful in restoring gum health. I had some issues start with my {previously healthy} gums when I was struggling with my health a year ago. I've been trying to find something I thought actually improved them, and this is the only thing that has made a noticeable difference.

This is my new go-to toothpaste solution!

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Do any of you have picky eaters? Well, years and years ago I had a couple children that I was trying to train to eat a bigger variety. Unlike their older siblings, they were not easy to train. I started researching to find solutions and came upon some research stating that vegetables taste bad to that people with zinc deficiency.

I decided to do a zinc challenge. This usually requires the use of liquid zinc. Here's the deal with zinc, especially the liquid zinc designed for this sort of challenge: if it tastes bad, you don't need it. In other words, you're not deficient. But the converse is also true: if you can't taste it, or if it tastes good to you, you are deficient. The same is true for your children, your spouse, or any other picky eater in your life. In general, picky eaters are zinc deficient--but not always, which is why the challenge test is important.

Once I knew who in the family was deficient, I started giving them Zinc Liver Chelate by Standard Process. Now, these can be swallowed whole, but I requested they chew them--at least on occasion--because once it started tasting bad, I knew they were no longer deficient.

So: no more picky eaters at our house, and I attribute this to the zinc. My child who was the pickiest was also the most deficient. He now loves Brussels sprouts and salad.

Sadly, my husband still does not like black olives.

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So there you have it. My top-three practical health tricks--stuff that actually works in my own personal life. I've tried other weird things, but never noticed that they made a difference, so I'll spare you the details. If you try any of these ideas, let me know how they work for you!

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