Winter Tree Observation

It hasn't really felt much like winter here. It did get chilly and I had to break out the hats and warm coats. But nothing like the incredible tons of snow that the east coast is getting. But this is likely to be all that we get, so there is little reason to keep delaying out winter nature challenges.

We got out yesterday to look at a few trees. We have a lot of Japanese cherry trees around the apartment. Right now they are leaf-less and you can pick out the little branches and even see some of the buds waiting for the beginning of spring.

One tree in particular was obviously much older with a nicely divided trunk. It was also covered with some strange growths all over the older stretches of trunk. Rutabaga thought that it might be galls. It looks like something had happened under the bark and the bark itself had errupted in an irritated response. Maybe it is an insect infestation, because much of the tree showed signs of being rotten.

This tree was in nice contrast to the cedars growing nearby, which still have foliage and have one straight trunk with loose peeling bark instead of the cherry's smoother bark. The cedar looks like an upside down ice cream cone balanced on a stick.

Then we sat down to sketch one of the trees by the road. Another Japanese cherry tree, but not as old as the first. I was very please with what the kids saw and tried to capture in their drawings. Each focused on something a little different, but they all clearly reflected that they had looked at and seen the tree for what it is right now.

I'll have to go back and take some photos to add.

Ramen in Japan

I can't claim that we've ranged far and wide exploring Japan's food offerings. We started out with ton-katsu (which is pretty much a pork cutlet) and gyoza (which are yummy little pork dumplings). We have finally branched out into steamed dumplings (I call them moanapua, but they probably have a real Japanese name too) and ramen.

The Frugal Traveler from the New York Times has a long piece about Tokyo's ramen shops. We have been to the Shinyokohama Ramen Museum (shown above), which I think depicts post-war Japan c. 1958, not the 30s as the article suggested. The museum is fun, featuring restaurants from all over Japan who come and set up shop for a few months. The museum actually goes around auditioning restaurants from different regions. But it is something of a bother to trek so far for ramen, when nearly every street has at least a couple of shops on it. I think our favorite so far is the ramen at a shop in Kamakura that has a spicy chili sauce in the broth. Looks a little like this.

There is a ramen shop right outside the main gate here in Yokosuka. It is popular as an entree into Japanese food and rightfully so. Having had to ask the waitress to come outside where I point to various pieces of plastic food and wave my fingers around to order, it is wonderfully helpful to have a bilingual menu in hand. After our last visit, Rutabaga, my oldest son, turned to me and sighed. "Mom, I love Japan." Well worth the price of a visit to a ramen shop to hear that.

Letter Shy but Media Savvy??

Many writers suggest that while modern students might be poor readers, who struggle to follow what is going on in a book, they are instead media savvy consumers of film and other visual content.

Thomas Bertonneau suggests in Can't Read, Can't Watch, Can't Comprehend that they aren't that great at reading a film either.

I would suggest that several things feed into this from the general passivity that is fostered by heavy media consumption, to the shallowness of much of what passes for modern media to the self-centeredness and short attention span of the average young adult. Watch even a television series episode from twenty years ago and marvel at how long some of the scenes are, how little it flits from one locale to another. Then try to watch something like Manon of the Spring or even an older action movie like The Great Escape or Rear Window. You do in fact have to develop an attention span and the background to understand allusion. It doesn't just come upon you one day while you are texting.

Books Read in 2010

I fell off the wagon on recording books read in 2009, even though I did keep reading. This year I'm going to copy Palm Tree Pundit's habit of separating the running book tally and comments on what I read. Should make keeping the list going a bit less onerous.

January
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Pocketful of Pinecones - Karen Andreola (One of the few fiction books about homeschooling. Highlights the joys of Charlotte Mason style education and nature study)
Desolation Island - Patrick O'Brian (Book 5 of the Aubrey-Maturin series)
The Fortune of War - Patrick O'Brian (Book 6 of the Aubrey-Maturin series) NB: DH found that this series was mentioned as good reading by Adm Stavridis in Destroyer Captain, a short book about leadership and command that DH recently enjoyed.
Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede
At All Costs - David Weber (book 11 of the Honor Harrington series)
Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
The Grand Tour - Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer (Fun book. If you like Harry Potter AND Jane Austen, you should give this series a try.)

February
The Mislaid Magician - Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

Picking Homeschool Curriculum

I enjoyed this post from Peace Creek on the Prairie about when not to make a change in curriculum. Reminds me of the refrain in Brave New World: I want new things. I don't want old things. I want new things . . .

Last year we did our first Sonlight core after years of happily doing other stuff. We loved it, but I'd viewed it as a departure from norm and set about trying to plan what came next. I was having conversations with my husband along the lines of, "This year was great, but I have to change." Finally he asked me why I was putting so much work into planning a switch from something that I'd been pleased with.

I was truly speechless. And that's pretty rare.

Turns out that I hadn't realized how much the reputation of Tapestry of Grace had swayed me. I was turning my back on something that had worked really well for our family because it didn't match up with the time I thought we should spend on historical periods. But I was turning to a curriculum that matched the time periods, but where I was spending hours on the computer trying to figure out what books we owned I would use instead of the listed books.

I was proposing spending a couple hundred dollars on a framework, but I was going to change the books and ignore most of the questions in favor of my own. Tapestry of Grace has worked perfectly fine for many other families, including some dear friends and homeschoolers I trust. But I was spending hours trying to make it perfect and I hadn't even gotten past the trial weeks.

My husband asked me why not just do two cores over a longer period of time so I could use Sonlight's scheduling and still have the time sequence that I was looking for. That was such a wonderful cutting of the Gordian knot that I couldn't really argue with it.

So that is exactly what we've done. Sonlight Core 6 schedules about 18 weeks of ancients. That was quick for me, plus it would have swiftly carried us into midaeval and the books for this era are all in storage until we move again. So what we're doing is alternating Sonlight's reading schedule with a few weeks of independent research. We've started with four weeks of Ancient Egypt from the core schedule. Then the kids get four weeks of ancient Egyptian research projects. They pick one topic a week to read up on and make a report for. This is also giving me some space in which to really concentrate on their writing skills.

After the four research weeks are done then we move on to Greece, which will probably have a couple of cycles of alternating schedule with interest units. It will take some discipline to make sure that we do stay on track with the research and writing. But I think this is working so far.

Updates to follow as we see how everything holds together.

Will the Brits Ban Homeschooling?

Having lived in Germany for three years, I'm well aware of the fact that homeschooling is not universally legal nor are parents universally considered to be operating in the best interests of their children. In fact in many places, it seems that the movement is to assume that the children's interests are best determined by outside government officials and "professionals," who operate under guidelines about what is good for "children" even though they may have only a couple hours of experience with the particular child in question.

So I sat up and took notice when I read about some of the proposed legislation to radically regulate homeschooling in Britain. It would seem that the legislation would mostly be effective in England and that it would give immense authority to (dis)approve homeschooling on just about any pretense.

Homeschooling and parental rights protection isn't just an uphill battle. It is a struggle that must be continued by each generation. I'm not a sky is falling conspiracy theorist. But I don't think for a minute that the powers that be on the other side will ever concede that maybe their ideas are beneficial than the decisions of millions of parents who act based on a lifetime of experience with their children.

H/T Why Homeschool

Boom and Bust

I love reading about economics. But even if you struggle to understand the basis for economic policies, I think that you'll enjoy the new Boom and Bust video from Econstories.tv the brainchild of a video producer and an economics professor from George Mason University (also home to Walter E. Williams).

Love it.