Long Headed Locust in Japan

I was trying to identify a giant insect that we had land on our balcony last summer. In the process I found a cool site with little posts about insects and other animals in Japan. Natural Japan is based in Kyushu (southern Japan). But even so, it has some good info. If you can narrow your search down to an order (like arachnids - spiders, lepidoptera - butterflies & moths, or orthoptera - grasshoppers & related insects) you can click on that term in the sidebar and see all the entries for that order.

By the way, the lovely on the balcony was an oriental long headed locust. Below is another one that we found last fall on the soccer fields. I think it's interesting that they seem to change colors as the rice in the fields changes from green to golden brown. If you're headed out to harvest rice this fall, or just hanging around the soccer fields, keep an eye out for these hoppers.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Get a wide look at homeschooling at the panorama edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling.

Taxes Favor Mortgages Over Home Ownership

I liked this observation in this article, "The government allows taxpayers to deduct mortgage-interest costs from their federal taxes. The program doesn’t really support home ownership, then, but home indebtorship."

I find this to be very true. We started considering paying of our house early a couple of years ago. We kept getting counseled that we would lose the tax deduction. Aside from the fact that this meant that we'd be paying more interest in order to get a fraction of it back in tax savings, I have to think that this does support having a mortgage, not owning a home.

If home ownership is something worth favoring, why not continue to favor it after the hard work of paying it off is done? Does the tax structure encourage buying a larger or more expensive house than you would otherwise (ie, without the tax benefit off the repayments)?

Music Appreciation - Children's Music

I've been working on our music and art appreciation for this semester. This is an area that I've had high hopes and poor execution on. So this year, I'm trying to be more specific and actually pick our composers ahead of time, as well as adding it into our schedule.

We're starting with a cavalcade of pieces written for and about children. Some of these are very familiar. Some of them I've never heard of before. A couple have surprised me with how familiar they are, even though I didn't know what they were (for example Aquarium from Saint-Saens' The Carnaval of the Animals). Speaking of Carnaval of the Animals, I'm using a version that I heard a decade ago, driving in to work and was finally able to track down. It includes poems for each section by Ogden Nash, read by Noel Coward. You can find it on iTunes listed under Andre Kostelanetz, the conductor of the orchestra that recorded it. Kostelanetz was evidently quite the pioneer in popularizing instrumental music, sort of the Erich Kunzel of his day.

There is quite a bit going on in this month musically, even though I'm looking for basic exposure to instrument sounds and developing a habit of music listening more than composer biographies or deep understanding of the music. Still, we will probably start this right away rather than waiting for September. [NB: The list of children's oriented music grew from a list from Ambleside Online from the 2003-4 school year. It seemed like a nice place to begin.]

September

Children's Classics – This is a month of a various works that were written to be popular to children or to reflect children’s themes. What we have of these in iTunes are in the folder marked Children’s Classics.

Do all of the following pieces

Benjamin Britten-Young person's Guide to the Orchestra

o Play game at http://listeningadventures.carnegiehall.org/ypgto/ (Each kid will need a log in) Plan to spend about 4 hours playing the game over a couple days.

o After completing game, then listen to entire symphony.

Sergei Prokofiev-Peter and the Wolf

o Listen to either Ferrer or Stewart version.

o After you’ve listened once or twice, try to act this out with stuffed animals or Playmobil.

Paul Dukas-Sorcerer's Apprentice

o Read the poem Der Zauberlehrling by Goethe, first in German, then in English

Do one of the following (or check our music collection and suggest an alternative piece about or for children from classical music):

Saint-Saens- The Carnaval of the Animals

o Saint-Saens bio

o Text of the Nash poems is available at http://www.wausaudancetheatre.com/studyguides/sg_Carnival.pdf

o P.D.Q. Bach has a different version (iTunes library) This is sort of a double joke, since the Nash poems were already tongue in cheek.

o Bond’s song Oceanic is a remake of Aquarium. Listen to the Bond piece from our iTunes.

o Listen to Aquarium. Does it remind you of any movie music? (It has been used as inspiration for several pieces of movie music.)

Engelbert Humperdinck-Hansel and Gretel

o Read about Humperdinck http://www.firstcoastopera.com/humperdinck%20bio.htm

o Read a story version of Hansel & Gretel

o Read the synopsis of the opera http://www.firstcoastopera.com/hansel%20&%20gretel%20synopsis.htm

Claude Debussy-La Boite A Joujoux (The Toy Box, a ballet for children)

o Read Anderson’s The Steadfast Tin Soldier and The Tub People

o See illustrations for the ballet http://www.fulltable.com/vts/b/boite/boite.htm

Georges Bizet-Jeux d'enfants, op. 22 (Children's games)

o This is a series of short duets that are intended to represent various children’s toys or games. Listen to each one and make a guess what it represents. Check the titles of the pieces, then listen again.

Optional: Listen & watch Fantasia

Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

If you are working on music appreciation this year, you might find the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra game useful. It is a computer game that follows the pieces in the Britten symphony to teach students about the different instruments in an orchestra. The game features clips of the individual instruments playing as well as many repetitions of the main movement. I like that each phase of the game actually reinforces the characteristics of the instruments, rather than being arcade games or games that are exploratory (and sometimes fail because the student doesn't know enough about music to explore wisely). I don't have experience playing instruments, although I like to listen. I found that I was learning a lot about why instruments sound the way they do. It would take a couple hours to play through the entire game. With a free registration, the game can be saved and returned to.

The game is a production from Carnegie Hall Listening Adventures. Listening Adventures also has a feature for Dvorak's New World Symphony. Rather than a game, it is more of an illustrated performance. Images of both the featured instruments and the notes of the melody help you to "see" what you are listening to.

Carnival of Homeschooling

I haven't done much blogging this summer, and it's been ages since I was part of a blog carnival. But I thought I'd throw a recent rant out to the wider world.

If you'd like to see the whole Carnival of Homeschooling, it is posted at Notes From a Homeschooling Mom.

Rockwell's Realism

One of my favorite artists is Norman Rockwell. And while we're studying traditional masters like Monet, Durer and Carravagio, I decided to slide Rockwell in among them. The plan is to study him in November, a month when our thoughts tend to turn to family, traditions and American images. Rockwell's art seems like such a perfect fit for a month that includes both Veterans' Day and Thanksgiving (and is the lead in to the Christmas holidays, which feature in still more of his art).

Evidently an exhibit opened this summer at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. There was a long article about the exhibit in the Washington Post. Two comments in the article caught my eye.

Rockwell remains resolutely, immovably on the mild side even when he goes "serious," as in his famous "Four Freedoms" series from 1942. (The conservative critic Dave Hickey, otherwise a Rockwell booster, has said that "when he's doing ideas, he's really awful.") Rockwell's vision of "Freedom of Speech," included in the Smithsonian's show, doesn't invoke a communist printing his pamphlets or an atheist on a soapbox. It gives us a town hall meeting of almost interchangeable New Englanders, no doubt agreeing to disagree about something as divisive as the rates for those new parking meters. For this, the Founders risked powder and ball?

Well, yes, actually it was. The original goal of the founders wasn't an anarchist bombing of the king's coach. It was to join their taxation with representation in Parlaiment. And it wasn't until there had been years of failed efforts to gain this voice that they finally felt no other option than independence. And for all that freedom of speech does protect even the speech that I detest, I think that it takes far more courage to stand up in front of ones friends and neighbors than to run off a broadside in the basement (or on the internet) or to stand on a soapbox and preach to passing strangers.

The author snidely refers to parking meter rates as the subject matter of the local town meeting. But it could just as easily be about daytime curfews, homeschooling liberties, the integration of the local high school, enforcement of immigration laws, gay marriage, term limits, zoning restriction on businesses and on and on. And rather than seeing this group as interchangable cogs just because they are all Caucasion, I prefer to see them as men and women, business owners and hourly workers (perhaps even the unemployed), town dwellers and farm owners, college graduates and high school drop outs. Maybe this man is just standing up to say his piece. Maybe his opinion is pretty crack brained. But it could just as easily represent a moment of "speaking truth to power" and the rest of the story might include his running for and election to public office.

Later in the article:

Painting from scenes he set up, propped and cast -- or more often from snapshots of those scenes -- Rockwell achieved a photographic vision meant to convince us of the simple truth of what his images show. Even after all these years, high realist pictures never fail to play the magic trick of making us think that because they look so real, they must show things as they are.

I'm not sure if it is intended to, but it comes across as criticism to my ear. As if by being selective in setting up his lunch counter or living room or doctor's office, he is somehow being deceptive. The article goes on to point out that the point of view of the pictures sometimes couldn't exist in real life, belonging instead to a viewpoint that would have to float in mid air. I think this misses the point of the paintings and of the world the Rockwell was depicting, which might have been messier, but did (and does) exist.

I'm reminded of a painful tour I once had through a German museum of contemporary art. Spurning even modern art as too old and contrived, the currator explained that since a camera could capture "reality" so much better than a painting could, there was no reason for artists to even try to represent real objects in their art any more. So we were toured through galleries with installations that included open boxes of sulphur on long winding tables, "blood" spattered televisions and rocks in empty gilt frames resting on brocaded pillows. Really? Give me a room full of Rockwell any day.

I don't see Rockwell's vision or his product as "pandering" to his audience's "fear of change". I do see him chronicling a slice of the world that many Americans, then and still today, found worth valuing and protecting.

Homecoming Marine could be seen as a bunch of good ole boys swapping tales of derring do. I think it is more likely that they young Marine is explaining how the heroics that were reported in the paper were actions taken in the middle of a battle that was filled with chaos and sorrow. The older listeners seem to be thinking of other Marines, perhaps classmates or brothers, who didn't return from Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima. The young Marine's name is Joe and you can see his jacket hanging in the background. But he seems to still be a long way from being "home". A related scene, "Homecoming G.I." could be the World War II version of the viral You Tube clips that show returning soldiers surprising their children. This is a cover from the May 25, 1945 Saturday Evening Post, with Halsey's Typhoon, the loss of USS Independence and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still to come. There are three service flags in windows, representing five service members (there is a three star flag under the label in the linked image), but one has to wonder how many have yet to be filled in with gold.

Armchair General is one of my father-in-law's favorites. It shows the father of a Marine, a sailor and an aviator, painstakingly traking the invasion in Italy as he waits for news of the pending invasion in France. Flags on the map mark sons in North Africa and England. This is the same urge to gather news that leads my father-in-law to follow his son's command's homepage and my mother to follow the weather reports for where ever we are stationed.

War Bond could be read as jingoistic pap. Or as recognition that there are higher sacrifices than money in defense of freedom. And that some pay a price far higher than others.

And seriously, I defy you to look at The Golden Rule or Freedom to Worship or The Problem We All Live With and see Rockwell as an apologist for the one dimensional world that the art critic in the article thinks he was painting.

Online Art Resources

I've been putting together my plans for artist study this year and found a great resource from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. It has essays on various themes from artistic movements to artists to specific subjects to specific objects. For example:

Japanese Art (over 30 essays)
Greek and Roman Art (over 90 essays)
Horse Armor in Europe, with links to related essays and exhibitions, including Let's Look at Armor, which compares European, Japanese and Ottoman Turkish armor.

Another favorite of ours is Janson's History of Art. There is an extensive companion website for Janson's that includes study guides and activities like fill in the blank, true false questions, essay questions and maps. If you hover above the chapter numbers at the top you can see what the chapter topics are. I have three different versions of Janson's and I'm going to be hard pressed to pick which one to get rid of when we move.

One more nice art resource is the National Gallery of Art's website. It has both an art education section with lesson plans and activities by artist and topic; and an NGAKids section that includes fun online activities using various artists and movements for inspiration. They have children's guides and longer Family Guides.

These can be helpful when visiting exhibits at local Japanese art museums, which might not have printed or audio guides available in English. When we visited the Pompeii exhibit in Yokohama this spring, they had lots in Japanese, a tiny bit in Italian and nothing in English. Fortunately I'd found guides for other similar exhibits in English that helped the kids put into context what they were seeing. NGA Classroom even has a cool guide for viewing a Pompeii exhibit with a Latin classe. It emphasizes the Roman culture and daily life as well as pointing out Latin inscriptions.

Homeschooling Moments

Sometimes you just plug and chug your way through school. Even homeschool.

But there are other times when you really find your balance and are able to ride a moment to an awakening of senses and discernment and new ideas. Here is a lovely post about such a moment that has arisen out of a pioneer simulation.

Artist and Music Study

I've been plugging away at making our school schedule for the coming semester. There are several things that I'm dropping as not adding enough value for the time we spent on them. And several subjects that I'm carving out time for: drawing practice; artist and picture study, and composers and music appreciation. I've picked out four artists and four composers to focus on, one per month. We'll also be going through the lessons in Draw Squad and some other drawing books.

Our artists will be Monet, Durer, Norman Rockwell and Carravagio. A couple of these are from the Ambleside Online list for 2010. I added Rockwell just because I like him and wanted to start pointing our studies toward some good Americana as a piece of re-entry prep after a long time away from American culture (Hawaii is part of America, but it is also a very unique cultural environment.)

Our composers will be Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi and a selection of children's classics like Peter and the Wolf. Oddly enough I found that I had hardly any classical music in my iTunes library. Eventually I realized that I had an entire binder of disks that I'd never entered into the library. So I've been plugging away at uploading them. It's almost like getting hundreds of dollars worth of classical music gifted to me. I've gone from having a couple pieces by Tchaikovsky to having over seven hours. From nothing to several hours of Vivaldi. And a smattering of fun children's pieces, including Peter and the Wolf narrated by Patrick Stewart. What a smorgasbord.

I expect that I'll be learning as much as the kids will in out music and picture studies. For example, I just played a snippet of a waltz from Swan Lake and realized that I've heard it over and over in movie ballroom scenes without realizing what it was.