Mother Culure & Self-education

Step by Step...

It's been nearly four years since we first started using Ambleside Online, which was also when I began to read the Original Charlotte Mason Home Education series. Up until then if I started a book, I'd generally finish it before I'd start another. 

I began to notice how well my children were retaining with what they'd read over a period of months so I decided to try it for myself, although the idea didn't appeal to me at all.

So four years later I think I can say I've gone to the other extreme - I'm almost embarrassed to say that I'm still reading a book I started two years ago. 

I've been enjoying the Back to the Classics Challenge that I started at the beginning of the year. The challenge is divided into categories which has helped me choose books I might not otherwise have read. I'm also continuing with the Classics Club Challenge which is over five years.

These are the books I'm in the process of reading (and keeping):

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks - nearly finished! I wrote a little about this book here and I'll write some more when I've finished.

Madame Curie by Eve Curie (the two year saga) - it was interesting to read in the book above that Oliver Sacks read this book and loved it when he was ten years old. He had the pleasure of meeting the author, Madame Curie's daughter, in her old age.

 My messy Commonplace...

Knowledge of the Holy by A.W.Tozer - Tozer is direct and no nonsense. This is another of my slow reads.

The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act if worship has taken place...

Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they themselves are idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voscamp - I didn't think I'd like this book but by the end of the first few chapters I was sucked in. Suffering, pain, joy, gratitude...I keep getting hit with beautiful thoughts. The writing is a grammar jungle but I love the heart of what she is sharing - and I needed to hear it.  Some quotes that I loved:

Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all of those who don't numb themselves to really living.

On observing a hummingbird:

Her long bill swills back July sun transfigured into nectar.

I watch her, become her, drink the sweet right out of now.

Beauty? Beauty requires no justification, no explanation; it simply is and transcends.

The weight of God's Glory, not illusory or ephemeral, but daily and everywhere, punctuates earth's lid and heaven falls through the holes.

Do I believe in a God who rouses Himself just now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on haemorrhaging humanity?

The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis - I usually find Lewis very readable but this has been hard going for me. I'm taking it paragraph by paragraph and I'm still having to re-read sections. 

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie - pure pleasure. I sat up later than normal last night to finish it.

The Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason - I've been reading this for about 9 months and have written about it here & here and probably in other places as well. It's good.

Read Alouds

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason

I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall - an Australian classic which we finished today.

Listening to:

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - a re-read but it's not my favourite Austen. I just discovered Jane Austen's phrase which Charlotte Mason appropriated, 'warming the imagination.' I'd been wondering where in Jane Austen's writing it came from and I obviously didn't catch it when I read the book awhile back.

On the present occasion she addressed herself chiefly to Miss Crawford and Fanny, but there was no comparison in the willingness of their attention; for Miss Crawford, who had seen scores of great houses, and cared for none of them, had only the appearance of civilly listening, while Fanny, to whom everything was almost as interesting as it was new, attended with unaffected earnestness to all that Mrs. Rushworth could relate of the family in former times, its rise and grandeur, regal visits and loyal efforts, delighted to connect anything with history already known, or warm her imagination with scenes of the past.

A 15 Year old Boy's Keeping

Benj is reading his way through the Renaissance and Reformation with books from Ambleside Online Year 8 and most of his Commonplace entries have been inspired by those books. He chooses his own quotes but when he first started keeping a Commonplace book and happened to comment on something that impressed him while he was reading, I would suggest he record the passage in his book. I don't do that anymore because the habit is in place. I just like reading what he has written and to see what books have kindled his interest enough that he would record something from them.

Recently, he has quoted mostly from Churchill's The New World and Whatever Happened to Justice by Richard Maybury.

It is very helpful to read with a commonplace book or reading-diary, in which to put down any striking thought in your author, or your own impression of the work, or of any part of it; but not summaries of facts. Such a diary, carefully kept through life, should be exceedingly interesting as containing the intellectual history of the writer; besides, we never forget the book that we have made extracts from, and of which we have taken the trouble to write a short review.

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason 

Commonplace Books have been around for hundreds of years and were kept by many great thinkers and writers. I came across this post recently, not from a Charlotte Mason perspective, and not a blog I'm familiar with, but I enjoyed the thoughts there on the how & why of Commonplacing.
Jonathon Swift, the author of the book Gulliver's Travels amongst others, wrote a letter to a young poet in 1720 with this advice:

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

 

Science Notebook

Benj is using a combination of Apologia Physical Science and Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov. He loves the detail in Asimov's book and uses Apologia as a general overview and for experiment ideas and this has been working quite well. He's almost finished the Apologia book but will continue with Asimov and start doing Biology, which I'm in the process of planning.

Timeline

Nature's Role in the Disposition of the Mind

I've been reading aloud the Australian classic, I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall, the story of a young boy who contracted polio in the early 1900's when an epidemic swept through Victoria.

Alan had been taken to hospital to have surgery on his lower body. He was encased in a plaster cast but there were some nasty complications and he was in misery from the constant pain he suffered.

One day his dad, desperate to cheer him, came to visit with a little new pup hidden beneath his jumper. He tucked the little dog into bed with Alan while the other patients kept a watch to warn of approaching nursing staff. It was a brief moment of contact with the world outside, but Alan soaked up the warmth of the little creature snuggled up beside him, and the sweetness of that filled him with strength and hope.

Later the day came when he could be wheeled outside:

As we passed through the door leading to the garden, the fresh, open air and the sunshine poured itself over me in one immense torrent. I rose to meet it, sitting upright in my chair, facing the blue and the sparkle and the gentle push of the air against my face, like a diver rising from the sea.

For three months I had not seen a cloud or felt the sun upon me. Now they were returned to me, newly created, perfected, radiant with qualities they never possessed before.

I was struck with the power of Alan's words. He was seeing things in a whole new way after a long separation. A common bird's call was a gift to him. Even the grains of gravel upon which his chair rested took on a beauty and their 'strange little hills and hollows' were delightful to him.

Sometimes it can be hard for a mother to get outside. There's washing to get done, dinner to be made, maths to be corrected, the bathroom's a mess, there are other more important things that need to be done...

Nature...gives us certain dispositions of mind which we can get from no other source, and it is through these right dispositions that we get life into focus, as it were; learn to distinguish between small matters and great, to see that we ourselves are not of very great importance, that the world is wide, that things are sweet...

 Ourselves, Book II by Charlotte Mason

I usually try to get out and have a good walk a few mornings a week but I haven't been sleeping well and it hasn't happened for about two weeks. My motivation for walking was mostly fitness, but I've been aware that the omission has affected the disposition of my mind more than it has affected my body. 

It's not the walking I need so much, although that is beneficial. It is the contact with the natural world that helps me to get my life into focus and helps me to distinguish between the great and the small.

Yesterday I sat in the sunshine for two hours reading and writing in my commonplace book while my children were having swimming lessons and later played with friends. I felt like Alan on that day he described above,

I hung my head and closed my eyes and the sun wrapped itself around me like arms.

Linking up at Stronghaven for A Mother's Feast
https://stronghaven.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/a-mothers-feast-april-2015/

Intellectual Culture and a Boy's Commonplace Book

I've been encouraging Bengy, who has recently turned 15 years of age, to keep a commonplace book. In Sir Walter Scott's novel, Rob Roy (Ch II), there is an instructive example of how not to go about doing this. Frank Osbaldistone was a young man whose father was a man of business and he required his son to keep a journal related to that field of endeavour. But the young man was more inclined to the poetic, of which his father had no appreciation:

"...Have you kept your journal in the terms I desired?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Be pleased to bring it here.”

The volume thus required was a sort of commonplace book, kept by my father’s recommendation, in which I had been directed to enter notes of the miscellaneous information which I had acquired in the course of my studies. Foreseeing that he would demand inspection of this record, I had been attentive to transcribe such particulars of information as he would most likely be pleased with, but too often the pen had discharged the task without much correspondence with the head. And it had also happened, that, the book being the receptacle nearest to my hand, I had occasionally jotted down memoranda which had little regard to traffic. I now put it into my father’s hand, devoutly hoping he might light on nothing that would increase his displeasure against me.

Unfortunately for Frank, a piece of paper containing a poem fell from his book as his father was reading the contents:

"What’s all this? — verses! — By Heaven, Frank, you are a greater blockhead than I supposed you!”

I wanted my son's quotes to be something he connected with personally and not something I forced upon him. Keeping a book of quotes isn't something that came naturally to some of my offspring but that didn't mean that their reading had no impact upon them. Often when Bengy narrates he'll make a comment about something that aroused his interest as he read. I want to encourage him to record those sparks of interest and delight in order to help cultivate his power of appreciation. 

I know myself that if I don't record these impressions when they are fresh, they pass through my mind and go unappreciated.

Yesterday he chose a couple of quotes that showed something of his character:

The first one gives a hint of his sense of humour and how he likes to stir his mother up by asking why he has to study so much history when he wants to be an engineer etc...

"Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; But knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind." 

 - Plato, circa 400 B.C.

This one shows more where his heart lies and it gave me a little thrill to see that he'd written this in his commonplace book/reading-diary:

"Resolved, never to do anything which I would be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life."

- Jonathon Edwards 

'...intellectual culture...the young people must get at home, or nowhere. By this sort of culture I mean, not so much the getting of knowledge, nor even getting the power to learn, but the cultivation of the power to appreciate, to enjoy, whatever is just, true, and beautiful in thought and expression...'

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason, Part III