The Mass; The Glory, the Mystery, the Tradition by Archbishop Donald Wuerl and Mike Aquilina - Book 36

I've been reading this book off and on for several weeks.  It is not a thick tome at all and very easy to read, but I just sort of read it at my leisure here and there.  I've decided to use it as one of several books, to prepare my 12 year old for Confirmation.  Our parish (or probably it is the diocese) requires a two year preparation period.  Most kids receive the sacrament in the spring of their 8th grade year.

The Mass is written in a very straightforward and simple way and basically walks you through the holy sacrifice from beginning to end.  I recognize Mike Aquilina's writing style here (I've never read anything by the good Cardinal) which is at once smoothly readable yet conveys much greater depth than at first realized.  There are many references to Scripture and the writings of the early Church Fathers, so the reader gets an historical perspective on everything.  There is a great tone simple reverence.

One thing that I both liked and found a little jarring, was that the authors refer to the language from the New Roman Missal translation, which will be the translation used beginning this coming Advent, 2011.  So the authors would say:  the celebrant says. . . . . . . and we respond . . . . . .  and the language would not be exactly what I'm used to hearing or saying.  But I do think this is a good preparation for the language change.  And I reminded myself that this is the language my son will come to know for many years in the future, so it will be the language he is more  familiar with.  At his age, years from now, the translation we now use will be a dim memory.  The changes really are pretty minor and are done in the name of a more accurate translation from the Latin.

So I give this book two thumbs up!  It is a lovely, gentle, edifying explanation of the Mass.  I read this book on my Kindle.

For more book reviews go to Read 52.

What We've Been Up To - 7/29/11

Hmmm.  I should have been taking notes.  Can't remember what happened earlier this week.  Well, maybe as I type, it'll come back to me.

• Becky continues with her music camp.  She is more into playing the trumpet than she's ever been with any other instrument and that includes violin.  Not that she's stuck with any of these instruments.  We did try violin lessons for a little bit, but her interest soon faded.  But she really is into learning The Saints Go Marching In. She also continues to enjoy basketball.  Rick started reading The Penderwicks aloud to Becky.  She knows the story backwards and forwards.  She just loves being read to by daddy!
• Sean is still into contemplating things like which Batman villain is the most evil.  He's 'writing' a movie about Batman, Mr. Freeze and the The Riddler.  He's also still into knowing all the details about new games and developments in the gaming world and is full of talk about that.  He spent almost the entire day Tuesday over at his friend's house.  Wednesday a.m. he went to a little origami class that a slightly older homeschooling boy was giving.  He enjoyed it and said the boy was very nice.  Thursday and today we are focusing on preparing his and Josh's room for painting.  We went to the paint store yesterday and picked out a color and got drop clothes, painters tape, etc.  Maybe we'll get started today???  Maybe not.
• Joshua is back to his old tricks of reading a bazillion web comics or playing videogames all day.  But I keep bugging him about it, so he's at least a little bit more self-conscious about it!  His big job as been to clean and prepare the big turtle tank for give away.  He's also done lots of little chores for me, like laundry and trash, etc.  We went to the library and he got out a bunch of graphic novels which he consumes like potato chips.  He's also been preparing his room for painting.  He went to his CLC meeting Wed.  Hopefully, this a.m. he and Will are going to the 9:15 Mass at our parish.
• Will has been busy helping me get Becky to and fro from camp.  He also has been busy with last minute stuff for Berklee.  He had to go to the dentist and to the drs to get his final check up so he could send in the info to Berklee.  Will has really gotten into playing with this band.  He goes to a place called the Soundry on Tuesday nights to play  Hannah went too and said they were really good.  He's all excited because he's invited a bunch of musicians over for next Friday night to form an old timey jazz band.  Apparently there is some all night music thing at this place, coming up, and this impromptu band is going to play.
• Hannah has been focused on getting the 1970's VW van here from TX.  Apparently, the transportation company she hired (she picked them because they had the least complaint posted about them) is run by obnoxious idiots.  She's been regaling us with blow by blow acts of incompetence performed by these folks.  Very irritating.  But hopefully, the van will be here this Sat. or Sun.  Since the A/C works very poorly in her office, and since her boss has been taking time off, Hannah hasn't had a lot to do this week.  She didn't go in two days this week.  One day she did have to go to the NIH library to do research.  We went to the chiropractor together yesterday and she got acupunctured. Hopefully, it will help with her constant backaches and headaches.  My shoulder and arm have been really in pain lately.  So he gave me a treatment too.  It felt much better afterwards, but right now it is killing me again.  This a.m. Hannah and Rick went into DC really early.  Hannah has some kind of special tour of the Capitol to attend.
• I did manage to read David Copperfield for an hour on Monday, I think.  But I haven't had another chance since then.  Dare I hope that tonight I'll be able to read?  Rick has been coming home later.  Wouldn't you know it, he's got some big thing to do for work that is generating a lot of stress.  And it is due right after our beach vacation.  He's worried it will impact that severely, so he's trying to get as much done now as he can.  

So that's it!  

Getting ready for Aquinas Learning

In March I attended a little talk on a program that was sort of the Catholic answer to Classical Conversations.  I'm this weird mix of unschooling and classical, always trying to incorporate these two in our approach to learning.  I loved the idea of having a classical scaffold (I heard someone use that phrase recently and I love the idea of it) to hang the rest of our learning on.  Aquinas Learning provides a day of structured learning in this rich, concentrated format that gives you lots of freedom to pursue learning your own way the rest of the week.  I think that the Paideia approach to learning, which is the classical model that Aquinas Learning follows, is much easier to mesh with unschooling ideas, than the neo-classical approach espoused by The Well Trained Mind and Classical Conversations.

Anyway, since attending that little talk, so many things have taken place.  I didn't want to be a director and deal with business/finance aspects of setting up an Aquinas Learning Center, but I was so in love with the idea, I knew I wanted to be heavily involved.  Well, God sent a beautiful young couple who are just starting out on their homeschooling journal.  The husband is a business man and lover of philosophy and they are an orthodox Catholic couple.  The woman is lovely.  So he became the official director and I'm the coordinator.  After searching for a place to hold our Aquinas Learning day, the director stumbled onto a Presbyterian church, pretty centrally located, which was willing to lease us space.  We were disappointed in the fact we couldn't find a Catholic church, but we see this as temporary.  The pastor at the church is a wonderful, warm man, so we are actually pretty happy with the space and the generosity of the church.

So I've been really busy exchanging e-mails, finding mentors, cleaning classrooms and pondering all the little details that go into setting up something like this.  I'm excited to go to the mentor training this coming Saturday.

One great thing has been that I've been digging through all my old junk.  An accumulation of 15 years that could be used as resources for the ALC.  (Mike, the director, has named our particular Aquinas Learning Center, Adler Academy, after Mortimer Adler, whom he admires very much.)

I am very happy to make use of all this accumulation.  Justifies my curriculum junkie habits!

Wordless Wednesday 7/27/11

This isn't quite wordless!  I haven't done any of these in ever so long.

Becky and Will playing Oh When the Saints Go Marching In.  (I just realized how messy my house is!!)

Von Trapp Family Singers

Yesterday, I was hungry.  I am on weight watchers and I've been doing really well.  But yesterday was a hungry day.  All day long, my stomach growled and visions of rich, fattening food streamed through my head.  But I was really good and didn't go over my required points plus.  Instead, I went book shopping!  (because I'm a model of self-control, LOL!)

And I found this treasure:

Since we've been involved in 4H, we've had two Austrian gentlemen come to stay with us.  One last summer, and one this.  Neither Florian nor Raphael had ever seen the Sound of Music, so both times we made it a point to watch the movie with them.  They both seemed to enjoy it.  Raphael just left us a week ago, so Austria and the Sound of Music were still fresh on my mind when I saw the above book.  Well, I couldn't resist.

This got me started thinking, as I have been mulling over read alouds I'd like to focus on this coming academic year, that reading The Story of the Von Trapp Family Singers would make an excellent choice for us.  We'll be studying Modern/American history, so it will fit right in.  (other books I'm thinking of:  The Scarlet Pimpernel, Across Five Aprils, The Virginian).



We also have a Christmas CD of the Von Trapp Family Singers.  Beautiful.  Not at all like the movie, which had great musical style singing, but in reality the family was very much formally trained and could sing a Bach cantata with the best of them!

It's a little early to be thinking of Christmas , I guess.  Must be my longing for cooler weather!

Weekend K'nex

Josh got back from engineering camp Friday night.  Rick found a K'nex double ferris wheel kit they had never built together, so this is what they did this weekend:

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue - Book 35

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue; The Untold History of English, by John McWhorter is the next  book in my own personal rabbit trail into linguistics.  Here, McWhorter explores alternative theories of the development of English that are not popular with mainstream views, but which he thinks make a lot of sense.

McWhorter addresses several issues in this book, one of which is why English developed the 'meaningless do.'  English is the only modern language that sticks a 'do' in where none is needed.  Why do we say do instead of just why say we?  That's what other languages do!  McWhorter points out that this isn't some fluke thing that just happened, as most English linguists view it, but that this peculiarity slipped into the language from types of Celtic, namely Welsh and Cornish.    Other topics are why English uses the progressive 'ing' as in "I am going" instead of "I go" as present progressive.  He points out the difference in English between saying I go and I am going.  The first is used in a general, or habitual sense:  On Saturday mornings, I go to the store, for example.  But if someones asked me, "what are you doing right now?" I wouldn't answer:  I go to the store, as in other languages.  I would say:  I am going to the store.  This too is a hangover from Celtic languages.  McWhorter also explores the impact that Old Norse had on English, a gift from those marauding Vikings.

Because of this McWhorter goes into the theory of how grammar was effected by invaders and traveling hordes of tribes.  He doesn't only look at what happened in the case of English but travels all over the world to find similar developments in Africa, India and China.  When adult speakers who are in the minority take over a land and intermarry, they tended to learn the new vocabulary for the most part (with some of their native vocabulary getting mixed in) and plug the new words into their own language's grammatical structure.  So that a pidgeon language develops for the next generation who grows up hearing this type of English (in the case of our language) being spoken.

McWhorter also goes after the disproved but still popular notions developed by Safir and Whorf who, in their kind of PC overenthusiastic desire to paint the picture of the Noble Savage, attributed too much power to how language channels thoughts.  McWhorter very neatly knocks down this approach to language which is based, in part, on misunderstanding of the languages.  McWhorter points out that many linguists study English and European languages but are not so well versed in other languages like Celtic and its dialects or Hopi or Cree and so either dismiss the impact of the language as unimportant in the development of English (as in the case of Celtic) or romanticize the impact of the language as in the case of Native American tongues.

There's much more than this in this book.  McWhorter, with each premise he explores, and in an entertaining way, explains it and then carefully analyzes just what is wrong with it.  McWhorter is a wordsmith.  He writes so cleverly and enjoyably, in such a witty, conversational style which is often pleasantly self-deprecating.  He's a fun guy.  He manages to make all this technical stuff amusing and engaging.

I learned a lot from this book.  It gets two thumbs up from me!

If you want to read more 52 Books in 52 Weeks reviews, go here: .http://www.read52booksin52weeks.com/2011/07/bw-30-c-is-for-cara-black.html 

What we've been up to - 7/24/11

It has been a really busy week!  Highlights:

This was Becky's first week of music camp.  She loves it as usual.  The theme is New Orleans and she is learning a French song, some old jazz number and the box step.  She's also learning to play the trumpet and worked very hard this week and can now play a scale!

She also went to her Basketball game on Tuesday.  When she gets home after camp about 2 in the afternoon she decompresses by watching movies; either Harry Potter ones or Coraline; or she goes up to her room and reads, usually Harry Potter books or Coraline!

Sean started Jr. high work camp Wednesday evening.  Both his good friends are also attending.  It really is too much for him.  I'm glad it is only a 3.5 day thing.  It started Wed. night from 6:00 to 8:00.  Then on Thursday and Friday it ran from 8:30 a.m. to 8:00 pm.  And today it goes from 8:30 a.m. to the 5:30 vigil Mass with a barbecue for all the campers and families following that.  So that's what we are doing tonight.  He got to go swimming yesterday.  I think he's having a good time, for Sean, that is (whose natural state of being is curmudgeon!)

Josh completed his engineering camp at Catholic U.  Says it was great and of course thinks he wants to be an engineer now.  In the middle of the week he said he like bio-medical the most but right now he's saying civil engineering would be his preference.

Will has been getting everything in order (slowly) to attend Berklee.  We have to have everything in by August 1st, so he's working on doctors appts and such.  Will's also been practicing with his new band.  They are doing a fundraiser block party tonight.  I wonder about attendance since it has been 100 degrees here for 3 days.  Horrible, horrible weather.

Hannah continues to work at the NRLC.  She had to go to NIH in Bethesda again to do medical research.  She's gone to two happy hours (one for UD students which turned out to be for not only UD,  but Ave Maria, Christendom and Stuebenville students as well).  Tonight she's going to the block party and tomorrow she's supposed to go kayaking with a bunch of folks from work.

I have been really busy with our new Aquinas Learning Center that we are trying to set up.  And also myself and two other moms are in the process of setting up a new 4H Teen Service Club.  So that's been taking up my time, along with taking care of my aunt.

And, not to leave out my beloved husband, he had an interesting pro bono case which really had him troubled but he wound up not taking it on after all because it was determined that his client needs a guardian ad litem instead of a lawyer.

And now I'm off to my Weight Watchers meeting.  I started up again last weekend.  Didn't really do well this first week back, but I did get into the habit of recording all my food intake, which is a step in the right direction!

Summer Camp Strewing

One way we strew during the summer is attending summer camps.  I love that there are so many opportunities in my area.  My kids get a taste of school, that is getting up each morning and having to show up at a certain place at a certain time to do some focused activity.

Throughout the years we've done:

• Vacation Bible School (as attendees and when the kids get older, as helpers or leaders)
• Workcamps - our parish has a week long away workcamp for high schoolers and a local shorter camp for junior high kids.  Fabulous, hands on learning experience and opportunity to serve the less fortunate.
• Art camps (we've done various ones over the years.  Always a good time!)
• Horse riding camps (only once.  One kid liked it, the other didn't)
• Sports camps (every sport camp has been a failure.  My kids learn that they are not jocks!)
• Drama camps (mixed reviews)
• Computer camps (mixed reviews)
• Music camps (my youngest loves her music camp;  This is her 4th summer attending the same 3 week long music camp.  It is pricey, but well worth it.)
• Dance camps - (fun!)
• Gymnastics camps - (my kids seemed to like these but they never asked to return to them, so maybe not)
• Latin camp - I actually hosted a beginning Latin camp last year.  It was fun, but I didn't have the ambition or energy to repeat it again this year!

And right now my 16 yo is at a week long engineering camp at a local university where he will live in a dorm room and learn about the different types of engineering jobs:  mechanical, biomedical, civil, electrical, etc.  It looks like a great program where he'll learn a ton.  I felt kind of bad leaving him there.  He doesn't know a soul, and he is the quiet type and doesn't usually initiate conversations, so of course this will be a learning experience on the socialization front as well as the engineering one!  Everybody seemed to be really friendly and wonderful.  So hopefully, he'll get over feeling awkward and have a great time.

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson - Book 34

This book was actually a reread.  I think I read it about five years ago.  I was inspired to reread it after I saw it listed in the bibliography of the History of the English Language Teaching Co. Course I just finished watching.

Bill Bryson is brilliant.  He is so smart and so funny and so engaging.  The book is chock full of interesting facts about English and how it got to what it is today.  Bryson had me snorting and guffawing throughout (even the second time around!). He also had me exclaiming over all sorts of quirks of the English language that one doesn't think about it or even notice as a native speaker. And I will never listen to Lucy in the Sky by the Beatles the same way again!

So this book gets two thumbs from me.  If you want to laugh a lot and learn a lot at the same time, this is your book!

I also really want to read Made in America by Bryson as well.

For more book reviews see 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Please Help Angela Faddis

http://catholicmom.com/2011/07/14/support-angela-faddis-a-catholic-mom-fighting-for-her-life/

Yesterday was my baby's 10th birthday!

I now have no children in the single digits.  Sob.

She wanted a very quiet day.  She spent the morning watching 2nd Harry Potter movie.  One of her girlfriends called her in the late a.m. and she spent a long time chatting on the phone with her.  She hung out with her brothers the rest of the day, until in the late afternoon she went to her little homeschool basketball game.

I wish I was not such a terrible picture taker!

Anyway, after basketball we had a family supper of fried chicken and Caesar salad (her faves) and then we gave her her presents.  She had mostly picked out stuff from the Hearthsong catalog, having to do with space.  She got one of those light up planetariums and a kind of funky moon nightlight you put up on your wall that mimics the phases of the moon.  She also got a stuffed elephant from Will (the other siblings just wished her happy birthday and were nice to her all day!).  We gave her a set of the 4 Rebecca Caudill series from Bethlehem Books.  She was very happy with all her presents.

Then we went out for ice cream at Baskin and Robbins.  And that was Becky's 10th birthday.

Sean's Curriculum

Well, I did it.  I ordered all the stuff I've been exploring for Sean.  We are going way more schoolish with him next year because:

1.  He got lost and bored this year without more structure
2.  He realized he actually likes doing 'school.'  He enjoyed studying math and Latin as long as it wasn't too much.
3.  Next year, he'll be dragged to Josh and my Latin class twice a week, needing something quiet to do during that time and he'll also be dragged to Becky's all day co-op where he'll need something quiet to do for 6.5 hours.

Ours doesn't actually look like this.  We are using a hand me down 2nd ed.

All indicators seemed to point to being more schooly.  So we were already planning on doing Religion for Confirmation Prep. math and Latin:

Religion - Youcat with Mom plus any other books, movies, etc that we find that furthers his study.

Math - Saxon 8/7.  I also got him the DIVE cd so he can use my laptop with earphones instead of relying on my to read the lessons with him.
Latin - Latin for Children B with DVD

Stuff we've added:

Doing formal science - Rainbow Science looks good.  A friend of mine uses this curriculum and raved about it.  It looks solid and not dumbed down but is written directly to the student.  We are going to do our labs on Friday mornings.  I love that it comes with a kit for all the experiments.  The only thing you have to buy separately is distilled water.  Josh will be taking a Chemistry class next year and Becky will be studying Chemistry in her co-op, so the fact that the first year of this curriculum studies Chemistry and Physics, is a good fit for us.  We all be experiencing the same thing at the same time.  To get myself prepped for this I'm going to read the Tiner book The World of Chemistry.

I love this book!

Doing formal Language Arts - before this, Sean did copy work from either a handwriting book or from Writing with Ease and then occasionally I would assign/strongly encourage  toread a particular book.  But I've decided that he really is a wordsmith in the raw and maybe this is a good time to help him delve deeper with things like vocabulary and grammar.  I got the Michael Clay Thompson language arts program from Royal Fireworks Press.  We received it yesterday.  It looks absolutely phenomenal.  Better than any other program I've ever used/looked at.  I'm thinking we'll start off with Poetry and Humanity for the fall semester and then do Essay Voyage for the winter/spring.  And he can work on Word within the Word (vocabulary and roots) and Magic Lens (grammar) throughout the year.  Very challenging and thought provoking stuff presented so differently from any other program I've seen.  I'm pretty much bowled over by it!

Doing formal Logic - I ordered two texts from Angelicum, Harry Stottlemeier (just the student book; the TM was incredibly expensive!) and I also ordered their Critical Thinking books and lesson plans.  Sean has been interested in that Critical Thinking book for a while.

We may do some formal book studies - I'm planning on Journey to the Center of the Earth, Comedy of Errors and The Screwtape Letters.  I was inspired by the Angelicum list.  We might listen to these on audio together or read aloud or read  independently.  I haven't thought it through.  I think I'll take my cues from

Sean.



History is going to be informal.  We are going to do This Week in History.  I found out about this from the Thomas Jefferson Education site. We are going to watch movies based in history as well as Professor Carol's Exploring America's Musical Heritage during movie night.  Also he'll be around listening in on Becky's history stuff with her co-op.

Sundry Sunday Things

I didn't finish a book this week.  I was too busy watching this!  I finished and thought it was really interesting.  You do have to be a mite wary when watching this around young children.  Every once in a while the professor mentions something to do with sexuality.  It is a college level course and none of it is inappropriate at that level, but it could be confusing for younger kids.  I liked the professor a lot, even though at times I thought he got a little carried away with trying to run out a metaphor as far as he could stretch it.  Sometimes it seemed a bit strained and overblown to me, but on the whole I really enjoyed spending time and learning at the knee (hey in Old and Middle English you'd pronounce that K!) of Dr. Lerer.

http://www.teachingheart.net/minioffice.html

I just stumbled on a new idea (for me, anyway) that I am thinking of using next year with my daughter (and maybe my son, if he wants to).  Here's a link to a blog that describes what she did for her 5th grader.  Since Aquinas Learning involves memory work, I really like the idea of putting a map of the U.S. (she'll be memorizing the states and capitals), diagram of an atom and a simplified periodic table (she'll be studying chemistry), and we can put the Latin and Greek prayers she'll be memorizing along with the Greek alphabet.  I think she'll like making one of these things.  This past year on her own initiative she made a lapbook on St. Elizabeth of Hungary.  She dressed up as St. Elizabeth for our homeschool group's All Saints Day Party.  I had spent October reading the Vision book out loud to her.  I had mentioned lapbooks to her before enthusiastically.  I thought she'd like them because she is so artsy/craftsy, but then I never followed through, because, alas, I am NOT artsy/craftsy.  So she took the bull by the horns and did it herself!  So I think the idea of a mini-office will really appeal to her.

I absolutely love this youtube video.  It has been running through my head all week!  Check out this blog where he writes out the litany for you.

Happy Sunday!

Computer Programming Resources-for Seano

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/newtojava/young-developers-jsp-136992.html

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Programming-Greenfoot-Object-Oriented-Simulations/dp/0136037534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310130160&sr=8-1

http://wiki.yoyogames.com/index.php/Main_Page

http://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Computer-Programming-Beginners/dp/1933988495/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1310058038&sr=8-4

https://www.homeschoolbuyersco-op.org/index.php?option=com_hsbc_epp_order&Itemid=1006&c=1

What I did today

Today seemed like a long, dreary, drifty day.  Don't like those kind of days!   So let me list here what I actually did get accomplished instead of what didn't happen:

1.  Watched two more lectures in my History of English lecture series.  Learned about Noam Chomsky.  Have heard about him for years but never really knew who he was.  Interesting.  Only one more lecture to go and I'm done with the series.

2.  Hired a guy to weed my garden.  My garden had gotten completely out of hand.  My arm has been hurting me lately and I've started seeing a chiropracter.  Every time I'd look at the garden and see all the work that needed to be done I felt defeated and unable to deal with it.  So a guy knocked at my door looking for work and I hired him, even though I have able bodied teens who SHOULD do the work.  But they hate it as much as I do. . . . Anyway, this guy was great.  He's coming back tomorrow to finish the job.  He even trimmed the trees and cleaned out the gutters!

3.  Read more of The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

4. Took Josh shopping.  Got him a suit and new pants, shirts and shoes and ties.  Bought Rick a couple ties also.

5.  Did a lot of thinking and planning about Sean.  Decided that he needed more structure and challenge.  Typed up a potential schedule for him for next fall.  Showed it to him.  He read it all and then said it sounded good!

6.  Got Sean and Josh to put their clothes away.  Been nagging them for days.

7.  Got rid of 64 books yesterday, so what did I do?  Bought more books while at the mall.  Got another Bryson, a book called The Founding Brothers which I overheard two friends of mine raving about and got a book by John McWorter on English.  Also bought a paperback verision of To Kill a Mockingbird.

8.  Cleaned the kitchen and got the trash out.  Getting the trash out was a big deal because 1) we'd missed the 4th of July pick up so our trash bins were completely full.  And 2) I had cleaned out Becky's room and had 4 bags of trash just from there.

9.  Rick finally sent the email to Berklee dealing with our little problem of lack of state documentation.  Hopefully things will be resolved.

10.  We started listening to Story of the World Volume II during dinner.  Listened to Intro and then most of Ch. 1.

11.  Read a chapter of David Copperfield

12. Rafael (or is it Raphael??  Keep forgetting!) went into DC today with Rick and Hannah.  He took in more of the American History Museum and then the Art museums and bought lots of little presents for his family. Came home and played more wii.  He is very happy to spend his time on the wii or watching movies.  He said he dioesn't watch many movies in Austria because where he lives there just aren't any theaters close to him.  So far he's watched Phantom of the Opera, March of the Penguins and A Beautiful Mind.  He's also watching a lot of Monk which apparently is popular in Austria!

Happy 4th!

Becky with her friend

Here comes Becky and the American Heritage Girls!

Moonwalking with Einstein - Book 33

Last year, my then 18 year old son recommended this book to me.  He'd learned about memory techniques when enrolled with CollegePlus! and it had fascinated him.  Somehow he stumbled onto this book and enjoyed it so much, he raved about it.  So I put it in my to read pile and finally got down to it a couple weeks ago.

Moonwalking with Einstein; The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer is a very interesting and entertaining read.  Foer was a young 25 year old journalist, living in his parents' basement trying to forge a career.  He got himself assigned to cover the U.S. Memory Championship up in New York and was thus introduced to the crazy, geeky, and at times, hysterically funny world of competitive memorizing.

Not only does Foer do a wonderful job of explaining what memory has meant to mankind through the ages, he goes into the world of science and how memory is studied and analyzed by neurologists and psychologists.  I found the part at end of the book about 'idiot savants' extremely interesting.   But Foer does more than just report, he actually spends the year training to compete in the U.S. Memory Championship and he volunteers to be a guinea pig for a scientist at the University of Florida who is studying memory.

Foer is a classy, smart, talented guy.  I liked him and thoroughly enjoyed spending the year with him as he trained and explored the idea of memory.  One caution:  in order to memorize things quickly, the memorizer is encouraged to think up memorable images; and what makes images memorable is often lurid or shocking.  Foer usually doesn't go into too much detail but occasionally I really would rather NOT have been let in on some of his images.  But to tell the truth they were often amusing as well as disgusting.  

So two thumbs up for Moonwalking with Einstein!

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