Hobbits8 - Homeschool Blogger

Moving

Thu, 7 Sep 2006 15:59:00 -0500

Well, I hadn't planned on moving, but with a variety of niggling things bothering me about being on other spaces, I decided to learn to use WordPress and establish my blog on my own Web space. Juanita inspired me, although I didn't go the same direction she did. I have to say that I love using WordPress.

Oh, I guess it would be good to direct you to the right place:
http://hobbits8.com/patti

My girls will probably be shortly following me.

Nate & Amy's House

Sun, 3 Sep 2006 18:53:00 -0500

This is Nate and Amy's house in State College, Pennsylvania. It's next door to a presbyterian church.

Ben's House

Sun, 3 Sep 2006 18:43:00 -0500

Ben purchased this house in Lafayette, Indiana. It has two bedrooms and one bath and lots of closet space. Yesterday he scraped and painted the garage door.

Sophie

Sun, 3 Sep 2006 18:35:00 -0500

This is Grace's new horse, Sophie.

Truth Through Metaphors

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:12:00 -0500

This morning I've been listening to the CD's in The Lost Tools of Writing by Andrew Kern of Circe. Something he said there clarified in my mind the agrarian vs industrial models I've mentioned before.

God designed us to think metaphorically. This is a very important thing.

[There is an ]Analogy between the material, physical realm we live in and the spiritual world. God created us to understand the spiritual realm through the physical realm. That's why the agrarian metaphors are so important and why the industrial economy undercuts the human spirit. We start thinking in factory metaphors instead of agrarian metaphors. But look at Jesus' parables. He doesn't talk about how the factory owner goes into the factory and lines things up. He talks about the sower going into the field because our spiritual lives are organic not mechanistic.

Ideas Have Consequences--again

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 15:55:00 -0500

I don't know how much sense this will make outside the context of the book, but I liked this:

It has been well said that the chief trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.

Articles Related to Education

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 23:12:00 -0500

Notice the new links I've added to articles related to education by David Crabtree. David is one of the tutors at Gutenberg College where my third son will be returning as a second-year student next month.

Ideas Have Consequences

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 23:02:00 -0500

I've enjoyed re-reading a couple of books this summer. One is Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver. At the time I read it about four years ago, I thought it was so good that I bought a copy for each of my oldest two boys. There are so many good thoughts in it, it's hard to choose one thing to write here. Weaver quotes De Tocqueville concerning different social ideals:

In ages of faith, the final end of life is placed beyond life. The men of those ages, therefore, naturally and almost involuntarily accustom themselves to fix their gaze for many years on some immovable object toward which they are constantly tending; and they learn by insensible degrees to repress a multidue of petty passing desires in order to be the better able to content that great and lasting desire which possesses them...This explains why religious nations have often achieved such lasting results; for whilst they were thinking only of the other world, they had found out the great secret of success in this.

The End of an Era

Wed, 9 Aug 2006 19:18:00 -0500

Well, we've come to another milestone in life. Six years ago my oldest son went off to college in Idaho-- two years later moving on to Rolla, MO. It still felt like he lived at home since he was home for holidays and summers, and many of his belongings still were here. He had a bedroom to come home to. Two years later Ben left for college in Ohio; two years later he also ended up in Rolla, MO. It wasn't 'til the last two years of college that the boys weren't home in the summer.

When my kids left for college, I was excited enough for them that I didn't think of sorrowing over a loss of not having them at home. I missed them, of course, but I was excited for their new opportunities. But it was a bit of a shock the first summer that they had internships when they came home for a short visit but then moved to their respective summer locations two summers ago. That's when if felt as if they were gone from home....but not quite since they still had things here. Since Nate married in December, I could no longer harbor any delusions that he lived at home any more although he still had some things here since they were living in a very tiny house.

Just this last week the final notes have sounded. Nate and Amy came to get the rest of Nate's belongings over the weekend since they will be moving to State College, Pennsylvania for graduate school. Tonight I'm packing up Ben's books in preparation for loading up the rest of his belongings tomorrow night to leave on Friday for Lafayette, Indiana where Ben has just purchased a house. I guess buying a house really means he doesn't live here anymore.

I am still very excited for the boys, but also a little sad. However, we move on to a new phase in life. It just so happens that the boys will be in areas near which we had ancestors. So I'm looking forward to new places to visit, new people to see (okay...so they're dead), and kids to drop in on.

Education and the Industrial Model

Mon, 7 Aug 2006 12:47:00 -0500

I've been reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul (he's taken a back seat to books I'm reading in preparation for school right now). There were some connections I made between that book and things said at the CiRCE conference. Although I didn't want to give away the conference with people like Cindy doing such an admirable job of telling about the workshops, I was so struck at the timeliness of one of the themes of the conference. Education was likened to cultivation rather than production. We have such a production-oriented mentality because of the assumptions we have which have been molded by the Industrial Society. Although I'm not sure I'd want to be a true agrarian and go back to the land and do everything ourselves, I do want to make sure I'm not letting my mind be controlled by industrial models in education. Ellul demonstrates how technology has reached it tentacles into every area of life. One example is the production of the car. Once the car was built and was made more efficient, the demand arose to make roads better because the efficiency of the car was wasted and limited by the poor roads. The roads are then made better, but had to be paid for by taxes which required legislation. So we have technology affecting commerce, economics, and politics. In other books, I've read how business came to be so influential in education and how modern educational philosophies reflect business ideals. The CiRCE conference juxtaposed an agrarian model to the industrial model. An industrial model is concerned with the most product for the least money: efficiency. It's concerned with uniformity, not craftmanship. We should never view life that way. We're dealing with living people, not objects to be manipulated.

I was thinking about this this last weekend in looking over what I accomplished last week. I felt that I hadn't gotten much done. I had looked back over the many things that seemed to interrupt my purposes and realized that all those things were important. They were the interruptions of life and involved relationships with other people. SAHMs can particularly have difficulty seeing the importance of what they do because they don't bring home a paycheck or do something in the world that's deemed important by our society. But where does that mindset come from? I believe it comes from buying into the lie of the industrial model into all of life.

I was touched by something one of my sons told me last week. He has stumbled across a blog where the woman was staying at home with children, but she felt that she wasn't doing anything really important *out* in the wide world. He posted that he thought she should never think that what she was doing was not important and not impacting society. Then he said that he felt that his own mom (me!) had a great impact by being home with him and his siblings. It's sort of like the pebble dropped into the pond. There are repercussions beyond which we will ever know. But I think that if we think about what kind of important role we're playing in our children's lives as something we're crafting or cultivating and not something that we're trying to do with the greatest amount of efficiency with the greatest amount of end product, the more satisified and content we'll be in the lives we live.