Mother/Daughter Creativity

Here's the promised garland of autumn leaves. My evening photos are always too dark - sorry.

The large burgundy leaf in the center turned out well. I'm hoping someone at the market thinks, "Ooo! I want that in my kitchen!"

Julia finished this street scene in art class Wednesday. She likes studies in perspective and distance.

She says it's Italy ... thus, the dome. Note the woman in a long red dress walking along.

I like the little street-side cafe she added around the corner. Perhaps the fellow in blue jeans is waiting for the woman in the red dress?

When the Husband Is Tired of Cooking ...

This is what the wife cooks. Fast and yummy.

Normally I only use my 10" cast iron for pancakes, but this evening I wanted mini-pancakes, so I needed three. The pot on the back burner contains a new batch of chai.

Adam says food that you don't have to cook tastes so much better. I said that for years, and now he knows the truth of it too. He still loves cooking, but sometimes he needs a break. This week he's been cooking lunch for an elderly couple each day, so he's a bit 'cooked out'!

The chai -- I'm pleased with it, considering I was unable to add to my spice collection at all during our visit to a Super WalMart. I bought more whole cloves. I'm using powdered cardamom, the spice that makes all the difference in getting that yummy chai flavor. I use probably 2 parts milk to 1 part hot water. I steep the spices in the milk and the tea/sugar in the water, and combine.

It's definitely autumn-feeling now. Cool mornings, low humidity, low afternoon light, and stubbly fields. I bought two pots of mums today and a pumpkin. The pumpkins at WalMart were $9.98, and the ones at the grocery around the corner were $5.99! Never assume WalMart has the "lowest prices." It's just not true. Anywho, I'll show you them tomorrow.

Pizza and Leisure Suits

Julia and I have been craving pizza for ages. So on Tuesday when we returned from sailing, we decided to eat at Silos Restaurant here in Oriental. They have excellent pizza, and Tuesdays are their Buy-One-Get-One-Free night!

That's the Greek pizza ... so good! I give Adam all my olives. I love the fresh tomatoes and spinach.

Our free pizza was a cheese, for Julia.
Silos is slowly expanding their musical decoration upstairs. (The restaurant building is actually two silver grain silos, pushed together.) They're adding old LP album covers to the walls and ceiling.

Cat Stevens and The Rolling Stones:

Ahhh ... Chicago.

There were no Joni Mitchell albums, I'm sorry to say, but there was one Fogelberg. And doesn't John Travolta look silly in his white leisure suit? He was so skinny.

Fun eating, and great food! And a little trip down memory lane.

Crocheting into Autumn

Well. Last Saturday at market I sold this silky, shimmery infinity scarf. I love selling yarn products. In a few minutes time, you hand over something your hands have created and you have $15 in hand instead.

Last week I crocheted lots of lovely blue/white washcloths for a lady. I thought she wanted washcloths. Turned out I misheard, and she wanted soap pouches. So this week I spent time making pouches instead. I have lots of washcloths available now!

You might notice I'm packaging my soaps differently. I found (at last!) the perfect size clear, simple bag, and simple white labels. The bags remain open so people may sniff the soap scents. I wanted each bar labeled and priced so customers wouldn't have to ask me to weigh them. Some market customers love to chat and finger and ask and interact. But many are like me -- introverts. They want little interaction sometimes. I appreciate that.

One lady loved a pair of smittens. They were too small for her, so I said I'd make a new pair to fit her, exactly like the ones she liked. I finished them yesterday. But the original pair that didn't fit -- I made them ages ago. They didn't sell. I put them away in the closet for the warm months. And now ... they still aren't sold! But they helped me sell a pair just like them instead. Isn't that crazy?

While meeting all these orders (and one for a bunch of scarves too, which will be lovely), I find myself longing to make fun, new things I've never made before. Time is limited and sometimes we must grab the minutes as they come flitting past.
One such fun crocheting I longed for was to make an garland of autumn leaves, rather like the ones at this site.  But you know me, Little Miss Scrimpy. I'm not gonna pay money for a leaf pattern! The photos are so close-up, I can see  the pattern. I also recalled a lovely fall leaf garland over at Mags's Hookery site from last year.  Mags (my Irish friend) was the one who first inspired me to want a fall garland. So, I've begun:

I like them! Hopefully I'll improve in my leaf-shape-making as I go along.

But, not bad for a start!

I'm burning a cookie candle, listening to the old Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album, and crocheting fall leaves. And, it's gorgeous and 70º outside! Ahhhh. Julia is at art class this morning, and all is right in my little world. Autumnal blessings to all out there. May God's lovingkindness come down upon you like these leaves.

Sailing!!

At last! Our outboard motor is out of the shop, working well, and good wind and sunny skies on the river lured us to the water.

The water was rolling a bit.

With some splashing, white caps, and waves.

M.K. at the tiller ~

Adam holding the lines ~

Julia gets the first wind on the bow. She's our figurehead :)

Waiting for Lady Autumn

It seems so many bloggers are celebrating autumn's arrival or eagerly, anxiously awaiting her coming. I read about school children elsewhere wearing winter coats to school. Really? I'm sure it must be so. And people buying pumpkins and picking apples and enjoying the trees in their color. Here in the Deep South, we've learned to be patient while Lady Autumn contemplates visiting us.
Here are some photos that were sitting on my camera. I love these fluffy grasses! The sun made them gold and silver.

Different grasses, same sun.

I love the flavors of red and peach in this:

Such stillness. The water is calming.

Why paint shrimp boats a perky bright red and name them fun, romantic names? I don't know, but it seems whimsical to me.

This tree is the first to call out the coming of winter, the first to lose leaves. I notice it on every bike ride. Every bike ride leads me to the river. Why shouldn't it? Where else would it lead, in such a place?

Tiny hints, merest whiffs of autumn, are around, if you look. This tree has some turning leaves, some bright berries.

Study this photo closely. Do you see, in about the middle of the photo, a patch of dark on the water just in front of the trees? Just a line, really, but in the water it would be a dark, slightly-churning patch. It's not current, like the other dark lines are. It's a school of shrimp, and you can see them lightly frothing the rivers and creeks in little patches like this. The river is truly teeming with life.

I have no idea what this fruit is. It looks like fruit, but actually that outside is more like the soft outer covering of a pecan. It splits and reveals some sort of nut beneath. I'll have to keep an eye on it and let you know what the nuts look like when all the hulls split, dry, and fall.

Another fabulous sunset looked to be in the works this evening, but I had no time to hang around waiting for it. I'd already stopped and chatted and photographed, and it was time to be home.

These massive anchors lie around town in various yards, but this may be the only yard with two! Don't they look like gymnasts, doing some swirling move on the floor, trying to be in sync, each with an arm up in the air?

I came home and made a weak attempt at autumn in the house, a candle. This is a Mrs. Fields candle, a chocolate chip cookie smell, I believe. Dollar General Store had a shocking sale on all their summer stuff. I found two of these candles on their clearance aisle for 75¢ each. What a deal!

For a glimpse at a real autumn blog post from somebody living in a cooler climb, here's Posy Gets Cozy's fall food post. Yummmy. I'm thinking of baking bread or some such festive activity tomorrow morning. Click over and be inspired.

The UnCommon Core

I intend to give a clear comparison of a modern Common Core aligned textbook with a textbook used forty years ago. I was unable to find a simple table of contents for a new Common Core literature text online for middle or high school. The Common Core standards themselves are easy to find. Remember than the Common Core is a set of benchmarks, or a scope and sequence standard, delineating what skills a student must master at a certain grade level. Textbooks have had these standards in place for decades; they're nothing new. And if you read the Common Core standards, after a few minutes your eyes will cross slightly from all the educationese language. Then you'd ask yourself what exactly was wrong with things like, "Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text," or "Analyze how particular elements of a story or drama interact." I've written such unhelpful documents myself. They are produced en masse by educators to pacify the accreditation agencies. If you were a new teacher, hurled into a classroom in which you were clueless how to teach, it might be helpful. Maybe. But you really shouldn't be in the classroom in the first place if that were true.

When Adam taught 9th grade literature once, he used the standards laid out in the front of a newish textbook published by Holt, to show the students how their literature selections were chosen in order to meet the standards. "See how they've inserted this little chunk of Homer's Odyssey about the dog?" he'd ask. Then he'd turn to the standards in the front of the back-breakingly-heavy textbook and show them the box where he could check off that yes, he'd taught them literature that included an animal. I kid you not. This wasn't a public school. This was a Christian school, using secular textbooks.

Not that I'm against standards - oh no! I want education to be challenging and thorough. How can we know that we've covered it all, if we don't have a check list? But here's my question: What are we teaching? Are we teaching literature, or are we teaching a laundry list of skills?

That's an important question. I'll be honest with you; I'm not interested in checking off a set of skills my students have mastered after studying Homer's Odyssey. I'm interested in teaching them the Odyssey itself.

Our educational system clearly does not agree with me. I know this because they are systematically (and rapidly) removing the literature, and inserting other things. New textbooks have a sprinkling of classics and traditionally acknowledged masterpieces. But if we're not teaching the literature -- if we're only teaching a skill set -- then does it really matter which texts we use?

The old 1973 Harcourt literature text for 9th graders

This explains why literature texts are organized so differently now. I have a 1973 Harcourt/Brace/Jovanovich Adventures in Reading textbook for 9th graders. We used these lovely textbooks at a Christian school in Iowa. I've hoarded them since because they're wonderful, useful, and mostly untainted by modern thinking. The units in this text are divided thus: Short Story, Poetry (with a deeper focus on five poets: Sandburg, Kipling, Burns, Millay, Tennyson), Essays and Sketches, Biography, Drama, Shakespeare (poetry and a slightly-abridged Romeo and Juliet, probably without offending scenes), all of Homer's Odyssey, and an abridged Great Expectations. The focus is always on the literature, and on great literature. The study questions and written assignments lead the students into deeper understanding of the themes, but it's the repeated, thorough exposure to excellent writing that teaches them to identify exceptional style, to enjoy and evaluate strong plot, to identify with powerful characters. In the back of the book is a brief 4-page "language program" chart clarifying what each piece does:  "a character sketch," or "short personal essay," or "description of a place." Notice the intent is not to show how each piece should develop some skill in the student.

Is that distinction clear? Because I think it's important.

My piano student was here recently and pulled our her new Common Core literature textbook. She's in 7th grade. I glanced at the table of contents. Then I quickly typed the list of authors from the first five units. The units are: Fiction, Fiction, Non-fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry. And here's another significant change over forty years -- the amount and nature of the non-fiction included in literature textbooks. We've always had non-fiction, things like Washington's "Farewell Address," or the letters of Robert E. Lee, Lincoln's Inaugural Addresses or "The Declaration of Independence." More recently we've added M.L. King's "Dream" Speech, and rightly so -- these are seminal events, crucial documents to our nation's identity.  I don't think of Washington, Lincoln, or King as literary giants, but they were well-versed and -spoken men. In my old textbooks, the non-fiction includes essays by literary greats like Priestley, Twain, Irving, Addison, and Bacon. Great enough that I don't have to give their first names. Some of the biography portions were penned by Thurber and Steinbeck. All this in that 40 year old text.

And the modern textbooks? What kind of non-fiction do they include? Cell phone manuals, instructional manuals, sports reports, news articles, op-ed pieces, and in my piano student's textbook, an essay on global warming by Al Gore. (That one might have been a bit presumptuous to include.) The pieces are all in a jumble -- no attempt at chronology. Robert Frost is in the non-fiction unit. Lewis Carroll is in poetry. Millay is under fiction, not poetry. A NASA press release is also included in the fiction chapter. Why? When I look in my newish Holt textbook for 10th graders, I find an entire unit on reading "Consumer and Workplace Documents." This is not right in a literature class! I never taught that chapter when I taught 5 years ago. I never alluded to it. When we changed subtly from teaching literature to teaching language arts, we did something rather deadly. We took the first step toward jettisoning the literature because we'd decided literature wasn't really what we were teaching.

Holt American literature text I used 5 years ago

In some ways the Common Core literature text is just the expected next step from the huge useless tomes we've been using for the past ten years or so. The big departure from real literature anthologies for 7th-12th grades happened decades ago. I'll continue teaching literature. And when I do use an anthology, I pick and choose pieces from it, wanting to give students only the best, Five Michelin Stars for their reading palate. My piano student's book includes pieces by Louis L'Amour, Arthur Ashe, Bill Cosby, sports announcers and modern journalists ... slapped right next to some letters by Queen Elizabeth I! I think perhaps the chaos of it all is what offends my sensibilities the most.

Still, it is an UnCommon Core. This is not the way literature was taught for centuries. Literature was books, excellent books that had stood the test of generations of evaluation by great thinkers, and still lived to speak to the newest readers. These writers have been stripped from textbooks. From the first five units of my piano student's book, I'll list for you the writers I'd identify as worthy of being in a literature text: O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Thurber, Robert Frost, Lewis Carroll, Longfellow, Langston Hughes, Basho, e.e. cummings, and Whitman. That's it. You should know that the selections are very short for each writer, just a taste. That may look like a nice list, but it's not enough for a year's literary study. 61 other writers are in the table of contents, but I don't know why they're there. Even Michael Pollan made it -- a modern slow-food guru! Just because you've published a book on a hot cultural trend does not qualify you for literary glory!

Almost all the writers in this new Common Core text are 20th Century writers. Thus, "old thinking" and traditional ways are excluded. In the textbook's 2nd unit, "Fiction," of the 13 authors, only 4 are white. Only one is a white male. However, in 2010, whites made up 72.4% of the population. I'm thrilled that more black, hispanic, and Asian people are writing. I wish them success. I do not think their ethnic background should give them automatic entry into literary history. But from the sheer numbers of black, hispanic, and Asian writers included, and the exclusion of most people white and just about anybody dead, I'm left with the conclusion that the new Common Core has another agenda:  to push out some thinking and foster other thinking. Most of the ethnic writers (I looked them up online and read about them) specialize in racial issues and write about ethnic topics. I'm happy to embrace ethnic writers who deserve to be lionized in literary anthologies because of their talents. (I can think of quite a few who have, and whose writing I love.) I'd prefer writers who would broaden their minds enough to write about more than just their racial experiences. And I'm really sorry to have to end this post on such a sour note. I'm not being unkind. I'm really just noting a significant shift in the contents of your child's literature textbook.

Content has been removed. Content has been added. Most authors are current and untested. And the teaching objectives have changed. This is only in the field of literature. If you dislike these changes, I suggest homeschooling if you can, or find an excellent Classical school for your child.

(Another article by World on the Common Core)