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Notes from Greencastle
Jun. 4, 2008
Living the Distracted Life
So the other week we to a demonstration for homeschoolers put on by the local SCA group. It's a possibility that we will even succumb to become SCA'er ourself: friendly people, fellow history nuts, a handful of other homeschoolers and people with kids our kids age, and activities that the whole family would find interesting. Kind of neat to find an activity that everyone in the family can go and participate in at the same time.
But here's the point of my post: So I went to the SCA event. Which caused me to go to the SCA website. Whch caused me to suddenly take a detour in my goofing-off hours to learn Old French. As I mentioned to friends the other day, *it seemed like the right thing to do at the time*.
Meanwhile an internet acquaintance laments that her husband wants her (a stay-at-home mom to young children) to take up some intellectually stimulating, "improving" hobbies. Learn Latin, read theology, things like that. I want to tell him, "Noooo! Don't do it! No no no!!!!" If you have a perfectly good housewife, do not, repeat do not, ruin it all by getting her started compulsively learning ancient languages and entering into Great Discourses. Dinner will never be on time again, and you will be very, very sorry.
On the other hand, last year this time my obscure language of sudden-obsession was Latin. And I am pleased to report that I have actually made progress. My course of study consisted of 1) Checking out all the Latin books at our public library, skimming through most of them and even doing a couple lessons, in a manic learn-Latin orgy. 2) Listening to part of a very dry free-bin-rescue tape on classical Latin pronunciation. 3) Detouring into a brief study Occitan, which I quickly fought off. 4) Coming to my senses. Probably only cost us a couple weeks of productivity.
Since then, though, I have made a point of reading the Latin bits in my Daily Roman Missal, when I go to read the day's mass readings. Unless very tired, I read the Latin first, then check the English underneath second. And I realized this morning that lately I haven't much needed to really read the English. Very exciting. Not going to be counted in the ranks of the great scholars any year soon, but it's nice to be getting somewhere.
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Why "Greencastle"?
We have a green castle in our back yard. We named our school after the castle. (We were required to name it something. I don't know why. It was on the form.) Now I've named my blog after our school. Because it's supposed to be a blog about our homeschool. But I blog about other things, too.
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