Forty Days of Funny

If you are feeling especially penitential, Father James Martin has Forty Days of Funny on his youtube channel.  You can watch him tell a bad joke about nuns, priests, etc. every day for Lent!  It's groan-inducing and hysterical at the same time!

Here's day one.

The Power of Love

I heard the most heart wrenching true story today.  Someone I know slightly is a Palestinian Christian.  The city where she was born was at that time in Jordan but is now part of Israel.  She went on a trip to the Holy Land and while there she met some nuns.  These nuns do something amazing.  They take in the illegitimate children born of rape.  The rape victims are young unmarried Muslim women.  Usually they have been raped by some family member and find themselves pregnant.  If this is found out, they will be killed.  There is no recourse against the man who raped them.  They are trapped.  But somehow these four Catholic nuns have gotten out the word that they will help.  The girls go to them and the nuns connect them to doctors and nurses who'll take of them.  Because of the Muslim garb, the pregnancy is kept hidden until the 7th month and then a doctor performs a c-section on them.  The girls have to go home the same day, they can not stay overnight in the hospital.  All this is done in secret.  The babies are then cared for by these nuns.  For some reason, and I didn't get the detail, the nuns are allowed to raise them until they are six or seven.  These children have no official birth certificates.  They have no family name.  Their last name is always Creche.  When they reach the age of six or seven they are taken from the nuns and put into an official orphanage.  The nuns are forbidden from teaching the Christian Faith and, of course,  they can not teach the Muslim faith.  So the nuns try to be Christ for these children through their actions.  They love, cuddle, bath, rock, feed, play with, comfort, guide, and care for these children by silently witnessing their own relationship to Christ and by trying to love these children unconditionally, like Jesus would.

When the first child they took in turned 18 years old, he had to go out and find a job to support himself.  It was very hard to find a job because of his lack of family name or connection, but he finally found employment.  He took his very first paycheck back to the nuns who raised him from birth to age six and give it all to them.

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, the truth;
Where there is doubt, the faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Time is rushing by

How can it be March 11th already?  I haven't been able to blog because I haven't been feeling well.  Had an IBS flare up and multiple migraines.  And even on days when I am not sick-sick, I am running at half speed.  I am busy trying to catch up with all I didn't get done on my sick days.

I am feeling better today though.  Hopefully today will be a good day.

So far on my Lenten resolves, I've been good at the avoiding junk/convenience food.  I think right before Lent I overindulged and that is what set off my flare up/migraines.  So I'd have to be watching my food anyway.  I have also been good at not getting on facebook for more than 10 minutes a day.  I thought that would clear up a lot of wasted idle time, but because of the headaches I haven't been able to use that free time productively.

Praying first thing in the a.m. has proved to be hard, surprisingly.  I think that's because I've been feeling so lousy in the morning, I am just dragging myself around trying to get Sean off to school that I don't even think about prayer.  And I can't read the book I am supposed to be using for my meditation because my eyes don't work so well when I have a migraine and the book is an old yellowed paperback.  I have to have a very bright light shining on it to be able to not strain my eyes and, well, that hurts my head!  So I've been reading the book in little moments when I think about it, here and there.  I decided that going to Universalis is best for me though (when I can face the light of the computer screen), for days when my head hurts, I'll just try to say the rosary.  I need a plan A and a plan B.

I picked Josh up on Friday (I was feeling ok that day) from college.  He's home now on break.  Hannah has a friend from UD staying with us.  She got in last night.  Today is Aunt Jackie's birthday.  I am going to bring her a bouquet of flowers.  William comes home for spring break on Saturday, so he'll just see Josh for one day.

The wedding plans are moving along nicely.  Hannah and Peter have been meeting with the priest who'll officiate.  She bought a wedding dress!  She's also put a deposit down on a place for the reception.  She's enjoying herself.

Anyway, life is busy, busy, busy.  At some point I'll post my book reviews.  I couldn't even get to that on Sunday.

This is disjointed and may not even make sense, but that is the way I am rolling these days.

Lenten Resolves

Happy Mardi Gras!

Though frankly, I never really focus on Mardi Gras.  I am much more focused on tomorrow and Ash Wednesday.

I've got so many little things I want give up or changes I want to make during Lent.  Probably I am being overambitious, but Lent is a very good time for me to do stuff like this.  Much better than New Years.  I always have a dearth of energy or resolve in the deep dark winter months of January and February.  Whereas when Lent comes along, the spiritual aspect of it gives me more spine, so to speak, when it comes to doing hard things.  And also, Easter and spring is at the end of it; light at the end of the dark tunnel.

First - pray and do a few minutes of spiritual reading before I even check email every morning.  I go through fits where I do this and then I fall away and just spend my time on line or planning lessons.  So I must start each day with prayer!

Second - restrict my time on facebook to just 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes in the evening.  The exception to this is participating in a Catholic book study in a private group there.

Third - I am giving up junk food and convenience foods.  If I buy anything at the store it has to be of five ingredients or less (according to the 100 Days of Real Food blog standards).  No more carry out pizza once a week; no more eating Chick fil a coming back from Becky's voice lesson every Tuesday.  No more driving through McDonald's and getting a caramel sundae when I have to wait for Sean at his therapist's appointment.  Bad, bad habits!  Instead I am going to carry healthy snacks in the car so that I have something good to munch on when I get hungry.  And I have to plan out and cook good food for the whole week.  I do plan to allow for bagels on Saturday morning and of course Sunday's breakfast out is still okay.  But that's it!

Fourth - stop wasting so much food!  I hope this will naturally occur as I become more intentional about cooking and stop relying on carry out.

Fifth - give to the poor the money saved 1) by cooking at home, 2) by staying away from fast food, and 3) by not letting food go to waste.

Update!

I forgot a 6th thing I wanted to do!  I want to participate in the 40 Bags in 40 Days challenge hosted by White House, Black Shutters.  I love the handy dandy progress sheet you can print off from the site.  I am putting it up on my fridge right now!

7 Posts in 7 Days (Latin Version) Antique Latin Textbooks

My love of old books and my nerdy fascination with Latin textbooks intersects in these two books.  My sister, Terri, going through boxes of stuff after our father died, found this falling part Latin book that apparently my great aunt Jenn used back in 1893.  She gave it me, being the good sister she is.

Aunt Jenn's name and date:  Jennie Anstead, Dec. 28, 1893.  Apparently, back in high school she was Jenny but my father never called her anything but Aunt Jenn.  

The book is in very poor condition. I found what must have been used as a bookmark in it.  It had discolored the pages it had been tucked between. The writing across the top there says Kensington Ave.

A sample of what the text inside looks like.  This is the page on learning common irregular verbs.

Here they are learning to read a little bit of Caesar.

The second book belonged to Aunt Jackie.  This one is called First Latin Lessons and it is by Scott and Horn, the same two names that appear on the Using Latin textbook my daughter used.  That one dated from the late 1950s I believe.  This one, below, has as its latest copyright, 1928.

This textbook from 1928 is in excellent condition.

I think the differences in the two texts are telling.  The older one is slimmer with no pictures.  I think printing and binding were expensive.  But in 1928, perhaps right before the big crash, money can be spent on things like colored plates of illustrations.  Also, this book has more than just the very basics.  It contains things like the nursery rhyme Little Jack Horner written in Latin, and little plays based on The Odyssey, to help the students practice their Latin.

The book has many of these charming plates, most in color but some in black and white.

The text also has photos and some black and white sketches.

Here we see Jackie's tiny, precise writing as she learned her interrogative pronouns.

A play about the cyclops from The Odyssey.

Compared to textbooks that are geared for public schools today, I find this one so much easier on the eyes.  Now the pages in a textbook are colored and broken up into blocks and very busy.  I think this one is a nice balance of text vs. illustrations and blocked off asides.  

And this concludes my 7 Posts for 7 Days.  I have so much more I could say, but I'll stop now.  Restraint here is probably a good thing!  But it has been fun indulging in this obscure little fascination of mine.

7 Posts in 7 Days (The Latin Version) Pedagogy

I've just been doing a little bit of study on the different ways Latin is taught.  I personally am most familiar with the grammar approach, which I think is the traditional way and the way most homeschoolers learn Latin.  In the homeschool Latin class that I took for 3 years, the magistra combined a pure grammatical text with Hans Orberg's Lingua Latina.  I thought that Orberg's approach was the 'reading method' but apparently it is called the direct method.  That is, no translations.  You figure out what the words mean and the grammatical constructions from context,  illustrations and patterns written in the margins.  It is actually a really fun way to learn Latin.  Apparently the reading method is the kind that books like Ecce Romani and Cambridge Latin use.  And again, those are fun ways to learn too.  I don't yet grasp what the TPRS method is.  But I am just beginning my own pedagogical study.

My impression is that the tried and true grammatical approach, even though it is sometimes dry, probably has the highest rate of success.  And I think it speaks more to the purpose of why most students nowadays want to learn Latin.  Learning Latin this way goes right to the heart of grammar, of how language is constructed.  This is the element that helps with learning all other languages.  Also, the grammatical approach seems to emphasize learning derivatives, which is helpful in expanding one's vocabulary, especially for things like the SAT or for building particular knowledge of specialized vocabularies in science.  Also, learning Latin this way lets you practice very logical thinking.  Whenever you translate a Latin sentence you have to use critical thinking skills.  I think this is another reason educated people in the past seemed so smart.  They had honed the habit of very exact thinking by doing their Latin translations.

I think back in the day when more people in the Church and in Academia spoke Latin, everyone had the experience of grinding through that Latin grammar as children.  Now though that the Classical studies departments have shrunk and people kind of put Latin in the closet in the Roman Catholic Church for the past couple of generations, the reading or direct method became more popular.  You really had to simulate Latin as a more 'living' language because you really couldn't find very many pockets of people who engaged in as in the days past.  That's my theory of why these newer methods arose.

Anyway, here is a wonderful website that explains the different pedagogies.

The more well know textbooks that use the grammatical method that I have used are:

Wheelock's - this is the most popular textbook out there I think.  It is college level.  Years ago when I decided I wanted to learn Latin I joined an on line group of people who were all going to self-study using Wheelock's as the text.  The plan was to do a chapter a week and meet to discuss all the exercises and see what we got right and what we got wrong.  Well, I only made it through the first two chapters.  I discovered that everybody else in the group was fluent in at least one other language other than English, already, and several knew various different languages.  Some were even language teachers.  I recall that one person was a Spanish teacher at a school.  Also, these folks were either retired and had lots of time on their hands or they had a real facility with languages.  I, on the other,hand, was completely ignorant and was in the process of having babies, taking care of toddlers and homeschooling young children.  I didn't have the time, mental capability or the energy to work through a college level text on my own like that at that speed.

But that said, I was proud to own Wheelock's.  Sometimes I would take it out and thumb through it and think:  some day!  Now that I am doing Studium Latinae, I do regularly dip into Wheelock's and at a very slow pace have been working through some of the exercises and translations.  Wheelock's is very well organized but it goes fast!

Henle's Latin:  One semester we decided to try Henle's Latin with my oldest son.  Henle is a Catholic Latin text for high schoolers.  We either used the Mother of Divine Grace syllabus or the Memoria Press one.  One goes much faster than the other.  I now can't remember if we chose the slower one because it suited us better or the faster one because if you go too slow in Latin it is just boring and you don't get any true sense of accomplishment.  But we burned out after a semester.  My son just wasn't into it at that point.  Though later when we started taking classes, he did get into Latin and enjoyed it.

There's a lot of good things to say about Henle.  For one thing it is a nice old Catholic text.  I love that aspect of it.  Also, Father Henle must have been such a grammar guru.  The best thing about the series is his grammar reference book that spells out all the Latin rules.  This is so very helpful.  And he really brilliantly presents and makes easier a lot of confusing grammatical things.  For instance, he came up with a brilliant way to figure out how to tell if a 3rd declension word is masculine, feminine or neuter.  He's just really good at clarifying grammatical concepts.  The thing that I think is a little frustrating about Henle is that he really pushes the grammar aspect and I think too drastically limits the vocabulary so that you work a long time doing many exercises with the same words over and over again - for months.  And then you still can't read much Latin at all.  So that's a drawback.

Using Latin - this is an out of print text that my daughter used when she took Latin in 6th, 7th and 8th grades.  This was also an old high school textbook.  It is very well laid out.  This is the book that introduced me to the idea of declensions and the ablative case.  Woo Hoo!  Heady stuff!  Tried and true but sadly out of print.

There's another popular text out there that a lot of people used and enjoyed.  Jenney's First Year Latin.  I am curious about this one, but, alas, have no experience with it.

Anyway, enough about these traditional Latin texts.  Another interesting website that I stumbled upon is this one.

A new phenomenon that learning Latin as a living language has inspired is the Immersive Latin Camp.  These are often summer camps for students.  These are becoming more and more popular it seems to me.  Here's an article in Slate magazine (of all places) about one person's experience in one of these camps.

Around here, Christendom College occasionally hosts a summer camp for an immersion Latin experience.  It looks like the one though was in 2012.

And I just found about this fun sounding camp for kids in 1st through 7th grade.

Here's another program where you go to Rome and spend the summer learning Latin!  Wouldn't that be cool?

I am realizing that 7 Posts are not enough for me to talk about learning Latin.  And I am not even a Latin scholar.  Truly I missed my calling as a Latin nerd.

7 Posts in 7 Days (The Latin Version) - Latin for Children

My journey through learning Latin as a homeschooling mom got a lot easier after I started taking classes with my older sons.  Well, actually it was hard work studying Latin for my tired, peri-menopausal brain.  It definitely gave me a new appreciation for how hard we expect our kids to work all the time.  I think every parent should have to go learn something new so they can truly empathize with their own kids' schooling.  We forget a lot about how hard it really is.  We tend to romanticize it or gloss over the drudgery part of it.

But things got easier in the sense that I had a mentor systematically teaching me the language. Then a new challenge arose.  My youngest son, Sean, was a different kind of learner - even more different than my already different other children.  He, of all my kids, struggled the most and even though he is very bright, it is hard to figure a way in for him.  He was pretty unschooled because he had a habit of going on intense jags where he'd teach himself something to an amazing level.  And this learning would have a wonderful ripple effect into other areas of learning.   But he struggled with reading, he struggled with writing and he struggled with focus.  He painfully struggled.  Yet, I wanted to gently introduce him to Latin, but how?

Enter Latin for Children.  I had heard about it, but mostly that people complained that there were a lot of typos.  This was when it first came out.  But I bought it right after they'd fixed all that stuff.  What really worked for Sean were the videos.  I would just stick the dvd in and we'd watch the kids on the video chanting the paradigms and making silly hand gestures for the vocabulary.  Dr. Perrin would teach a little bit of grammar in his gentle, humorous way, and then would come some funny little puppet show or little video clip - just in there to keep things fun and light.  Sean enjoyed it so much.   Often that's all we did, watch the video.  We'd watch and re-watch and it stuck!  We had the workbook too but we went through that very slowly.  Sometimes Sean would do the writing, sometimes I'd do the writing, sometimes we'd take turns, sometimes we'd just do thing orally or we'd write the answers up on the whiteboard easel.  We switched things up in that respect to avoid Sean building up dread of having to write in the workbook.  I think it took about two years to get through the first workbook - we went at Sean's pace.  And we got through the first 1/2 of the second book before circumstances switched us to Studium Latinae and then Ecce Romani.  And now he's in 9th grade working through the Cambridge Latin books.

If you want a fun, no prep Latin program with an audio-visual element - and this part, to me, is the key to the whole program, check out Latin for Children.  They also have an on line site where the kids can play games to reinforce vocabulary, etc, called Headland Adventures.

I really appreciate the products and folks at Classical Academic Press.  I met Dr. Christopher Perrin at the Circe Conference this past summer.  I doubt he remembers me but I heard his talk on St. John's College as well as some panel discussions he was in.  He is wonderful!  So much Godly wisdom.

So if you have a kid with LDs, or you just want a fun Latin program that does the teaching for you, check out Latin for Children.  You won't regret it.