A caveat

I do see Ms. Chua's point that "nothing is fun until you're good at it."

I was thinking about this sentence from my last post this morning, and I realize that it's not quite true. Or at least, you don't have to be the "best," or even all that good, at something to enjoy it. You just have to have a little bit of success.

Why did I think of this? Because I realized the example I was thinking of when I wrote my post was skiing. And I'm not a good skier; I simply have enough experience now to enjoy it. It's nice not to get so nervous anymore when I start down a trail, but no one had to override my preferences to get me started learning to ski. Likewise with many of my academic activities when I was young. Who starts out as a good reader, or a good beginning Italian speaker? Sometimes you are inspired and you want to do something badly enough to keep going even if it's not easy. CZ was like that with violin.

I suppose the type of "fun" you got out of an activity might change as one got better and better at it, so that there was more subtlety to it, but still, you can enjoy things that you're not very good at, as long as you have a humble, realistic assessment of your abilities.

See, this is why I don't think I should post "opinion" type pieces when I don't have time to think them through. Sometimes they're not quite done!

It's not either/or, but both!

Cindy at Ordo Amoris is holding a book club discussion for Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. I'm not at all confident that I'm going to be able to participate regularly or thoroughly, but I did figure I could type out a quick response to the first section.

The first section (not one of the ten ways yet, so I won't call it a chapter) is called "Why Truth Is Your Enemy: Or Gradgrind Without the Facts." I think the subtitle is a good summary, once you understand what it means.

Gradgrind was the utilitarian schoolmaster in Dickens' novel Hard Times. He drilled his students in rote methods, but missed teaching the essence. In an early chapter, he praises the student Bitzer's definition of a horse as, "Quadruped. Gramnivorus. Forty teeth, namely..." (You get the idea.) Meanwhile, there's a circus performer in the room who has "failed" the assignment, but she knows horses backwards and forwards, literally. Dickens wanted to show us that the Gradgrinds of his day (there really were such people in Dickens' time) missed something important about the nature of education.

Meanwhile, yesterday at skiing I heard some women discussing a hot (at the moment) WSJ article called "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." And today I saw that Cindy linked to the article, so I read it. I have many caveats about the article, especially that I think it's a publicity stunt, but I do know mothers who use the sorts of hard-nosed tactics Ms. Chua mentions. One could say, with some qualifications, that the Chinese mother (at least as defined by Ms. Chua), takes the Gradgrind approach: What counts is what's measurable, what's on the test. Creativity doesn't matter so much. Asking why something is on the test doesn't matter either. These are sidetracks that get in the way of success. Both the "Chinese mother" and Gradgrind are exaggerations, but useful ones in that they illuminate certain logical conclusions.

Our society is in a reaction to Gradgrind, even though it's a schizophrenic reaction. Today's "Western" parents are concerned with protecting their children's intellectual confidence. We don't tend to contradict our children. We don't tend to teach facts or memorization. We'd rather think we and our children are creative geniuses who don't have to memorize or work hard, but conquer the world through "critical thinking." (I put this in quotes because I think there is such a thing, but many exercises by the name don't really teach it.) Given the fear-based, teach-to-the-test pressure of high stakes tests, I really can sympathize with this reaction, but I think it goes too far. It often dispenses with facts altogether. We end up with the worst of both worlds, what Esolen calls "Gradgrind without the facts." Taken to this extreme, we end up with kids who neither understand the earthy essence of a horse, nor know how to describe one through definitional analysis.

What I'd like to propose, and what Esolen does propose, is going beyond the facts. Sometimes I am not so sure in my personal homeschooling journey which needs to come first, the work or the creative inspiration. In truth, I think we all go back and forth. But I'd let intrinsic motivation take a bigger part than either Gradgrind or Ms. Chua would (seriously or not) advocate.

I do see Ms. Chua's point that "nothing is fun until you're good at it." Some "Western" parents act as though they have no choice what their kids do, even if it hurts the kid in the long run. Sometimes you do have to lay down the law with a small child on matters behavioral and academic. But you can lay down the law in small doses, and (though it takes effort, and sometimes lots of effort) you can do it without the parental temper tantrums and guilt trips that Ms. Chua describes herself as having. A parent's job is to be a boundary, but a calm, kind one. And you don't have to emphasize success at all costs, or comparative success.

I also see Esolen's point that skills are tools. Much of twentieth and twenty-first century culture is a reaction to too much rote emphasis, but I think we are rediscovering belatedly (now that we've destroyed so much cultural capital) there is a place for skilled beauty. Cooking, carpentry, sports, academics, and yes, many of the arts, are richer if carried out with finely-honed mental and physical habits. In fact, many of my favorite activities are those that combine creativity with skill.

Esolen makes perhaps his best the point of the chapter under the section headed "Memory, What Memory?" He gives an anecdote about a farm boy in Saskatchewan who used to recite Paradise Lost as he plowed the fields. He then imagines a bureaucrat coming up to the boy, with the intention of arguing the boy out of his freedom. The boy, in turn, forms a moral response by remembering,

"So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear;

Farewell remorse, all good to me is lost;

Evil be thou my good: by thee at least

Divided empire with Heav'n's King I hold

By thee, and more than half perhaps shall reign,

As man ere long, and this new world shall know."

This is a student prepared to defend his liberty with a deep and calm confidence, because he has a true liberal arts education.

The extreme position that we have to have either facts or boundless individual freedom makes one of two errors: That a boy would memorize Milton only to make a good grade on a test and get into an Ivy League school, without stopping to think about what Milton has to say about liberty, or he disdains to memorize Milton at all, or even to read him, in which case the default is that he memorizes trivial bits of pop cultural trivia which, without his understanding why, signal his place as a cog in the wheel of the larger society. Either way, the student misses the larger, liberating point of education.

Esolen ends this section with the lyrics of a Rice-a-Roni commercial, while elsewhere John Taylor Gatto makes the same point by telling us that modern schools teach us that the difference between Coke and Pepsi is a subject worth arguing about (actually, my daughter's peers like to argue Mac vs. PC instead). The point is that we all talk about, learn about, worship, and even memorize something--it's just a matter of what.

One of the the more poignant versions of this Gradgrind-without-the-facts phenomenon I have seen was in a CVS pharmacy in Manhattan. The girl behind the counter who was checking me out was, as usual, having a conversation with her co-workers instead of paying attention to what she was doing at the register. Indeed, the job is rather boring, and I'm not sure I could resist zoning out sometimes myself. But the whole time she was checking me out, she was also reciting the lyrics to "Meet the Flintstones," in their entirety, to her friend. Even before reading Esolen, I couldn't help but think, "What if she had memorized Milton instead?"

This question had less to do with the so-called "Chinese" definition of success as defined by a Yale professor, even at that time, than it had to do with liberal education. Plowing is hard work, and possibly boring too, but who would you rather be, the boy in Saskatchewan or the girl in CVS?

A belated Christmas report

Yes, it's way after Christmas now, but I thought a late report was better than ignoring the Christmas season entirely. In fact, the lateness is typical of this year, in which I just posted my last Christmas cards day before yesterday! (The first I've sent in three years.)

This Christmas trip to Georgia was remarkable because it was the first time I'd ever seen snow on Christmas day. (This is because, even though we've lived in New York for over a decade, we've never spent Christmas in the city.) We were opening presents at my inlaws' house on Christmas morning when I noticed the first flakes. As soon as we'd finished with the presents, all the cousins ran outside to play in it.

The Christmas snow was a sticky snow, the only sort we ever have in Georgia, because for snow to occur there, it almost has to be too warm for it. But it's great for building! CZ and her cousins built a small snowman in the afternoon, but they only really got up to speed towards dusk when they started a huge igloo. This was impressive considering that the total snowfall was about 4".

At one point, CZ and her thirteen-year-old cousin M., a boy who is going through the extreme growth stage, tried in vain to move a huge snow block towards the igloo. CZ hacked at it with a pickaxe to try to reduce its weight, but they still couldn't pick it up. Then along comes M.'s eleven-year-old sister E., who easily rolls the now roundish block into place. Chalk up one for E.'s common sense!

The next day, I found these footprints on the upstairs deck. I immediately suspected who had made them, and I was right, it was she-who-wants-to-be-Nordic. I'll leave you to decide how much common sense is displayed in this photo.

Needless to say, the dogs were greatly amused by both the snow and the igloo. I watched the lab puppy jump exuberantly onto the frozen pond and crash right through. It didn't seem to faze her; she just jumped out and shook off a lot of cold water. I moved away just in time.

Here's Bob reporting on snowfall totals in New York via Blackberry, and relating how glad I should be not to be heading to Jamaica Bay on the A-Train.

This Christmas was also notable for being able to visit with a lot of Bob's cousins whom we hadn't seen in years. That's always fun, too. We used to do a lot of things with them, so we didn't want to lose touch just because we live in a different state now.

And whenever we weren't doing anything else in particular, we played games of Taboo, Apples to Apples, and Buzzword next to the almost continual fire Bob's parents had going in the kitchen/sitting room. No one in the family plays these games quite as they are intended, but we all think it's more fun that way. Apples to Apples sets up the most absurdities, especially when certain people judge.

I'll end with some photos of things that just seem particularly winter-in-Georgia to me. I don't expect anyone else to understand why they're special to me; they're just things that I miss, and that I don't see in New York. The last photo is of the afternoon sun streaming into the bedroom that we use at Bob's parents. It still has our old bed and framed picture in it. Neither bed nor picture made the move up thirteen years ago, because we slept on a sofabed for our first seven years in New York, and after that it was too much trouble to ship things up. The picture says, 'There's no place like home."

Our next stop, Athens, has a very different sort pictures, so I'll put them in another post.

Booklist for 2010

After the year ends, I like to take stock of the books I've read and think about which kinds were most worthwhile and which kinds I should probably read fewer of. I like to remember these books, just as I like to remember a good evening with friends. Because a good author is a kind of friend.

I didn't read as much this year as during the last several years. I'm pretty sure that there were two reasons: 1) I travelled a lot more, including three plane trips since October, and 2) This was the year that I started looking into colleges, and that is a very time-consuming activity. You'll notice that I haven't posted as much on this blog as usual, either. The causes are the same, no doubt.

Now, onto the books! This year sort of had a theme--ancient Roman history. The interest in Roman history started because I was researching for CZ's homeschooling this year, but it also had something to do with our trips to Italy. I wanted to understand any ruins we might see, and be able to explain something about them to CZ. While reading about Rome itself, I also got interested in the history of early Christianity and its relation to the later Roman Empire. I'm still reading about that. And I discovered that I liked the author Robert Louis Wilken, who apparently researched himself into belief, if I am reading correctly.

I found out from Susan Wise Bauer that you did not want to be next in line for a throne in the ancient world. Herod's Massacre of the Innocents was very much in character for his day.

On the lighter side, I read three Malcolm Gladwell books and two books by Anne Fadiman. The Gladwell books, frankly, ran together, but I got his main idea that one should look closely at a trend, because its causes may not be what you think (and several months after reading them, I'm wondering if they were really what he thinks, either). Outliers was the most memorable of the three books I read by Gladwell, but I also remember the anecdote about the Scots-Irish culture of honor being transported to the Appalachians, perhaps because I am probably at least partly from that background myself. Bob bought the book Albion's Seed, from which Gladwell took his chapter on Appalachian codes of honor.

The Fadiman books were just delightful. I don't care what Anne Fadiman writes about, I just like the way she describes things! But it helps that much of what she writes about has to do with books and words. I loved the essay, in Ex Libris, about long words that have gone out of use, and her game of surveying friends to see if they know them.

I found out through biography that Jonathan Edwards was a much different sort of man than I'd thought--very emotional in his faith, persecuted in his own day for his strong principles, and not the stiff Puritan often portrayed in American history classes. Yes, he is stern, but it's a sternness that arises out of passionate love.

Palace Walk, about an Egyptian Muslim family just before WWI, stood out as a fictional jewel in the middle of a largely non-fiction year. I might like to read the other two books in the trilogy.

I laughed all the way through An Italian Education, written by an Englishman (Tim Parks) who is married to an Italian and has raised his children (by now) in Verona. I had detected some of the curious Italian emphases he describes during my own two trips to Italy this year. Of course, he could have a similar heyday with Americans, and probably would if the field weren't so crowded with books already. My favorite scene was the one in which a German-speaking woman seals his identification with Italy by scolding him for irresponsibility (he's really just horribly sleep-deprived). But I was rather disappointed that the book ended at the beach in Pescara instead of in Verona. Perhaps Parks had to travel a bit to get the national character just right, but I left Parks' Italy feeling as though I had been watching one of those endless bikini shows on Univision.

When I look back over the reading year, my two most memorable books, I think, were Livy's The Early History of Rome, and Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. They are very different sort of books, and Esolen may be included partly because his is the last book I read this year, so it's still fresh.

The Early History of Rome was probably the most difficult book I read last year, not because of the sentence structure, but just because so many Romans shared the same few names! There was a continual parade of heroes and villains (though almost all were at least somewhat mixed in character) in this 400 year history, and I was constantly looking back to keep them all straight. But since I read it during a year in which I spent a lot of time in Italy, and I even read it partly in Italy (following the advice of Anne Fadiman that one should read in situ), it helped me understand what I was seeing, and helped me to connect Italy past and present. Early Rome was not the decadent place that later emperors like Nero ruled over, but it is also very different from the idealized image of the Republic that inspired the Founding Fathers and even a sculpture of George Washington in a toga. It's a sign of the book's value that I still remember exactly where I was (on a bus on Fifth Avenue, about to cross the park), when I read the arguments for and against opening the office of consul to plebians.

Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child is a new book, which I had pre-ordered because I like Esolen's posts on Mere Comments, and because the topic looked interesting. At first, it looks as though the book is going to be yet another one of those what's-wrong-with-modernity screeds that criticizes the status quo without saying contributing anything positive. The title is negative, and Esolen uses a lot of Lewis quotes, both of which are standard fare these days. Esolen even a Screwtape-like say-the-opposite-of-what-you-mean device that gets confusing at times because he seems to forget about it for pages at a stretch.

BUT--somehow in Esolen's able hands, the book emerges not as a strung together, poorly-reasoned rehash of Lewis anecdotes, Chestertonian paradox, and modernity-bashing, but as something positive and brightly inspiring. Esolen is a professor and translator of Dante, so his use of medieval poetry is especially effective. He doesn't just use Lewis's words, but captures a similar sense of longing. What do we have in our bland, flat, modern world that compares with the Brightest Heaven of Invention? Even the uneven Screwtape device ends up being effective, because it gives Esolen a chance to wax poetically on what he thinks used to be, and could be still, right with the world. Through it he shows that the problem with modernity isn't inherent in chronology or even in reform; the problem is lack of moral imagination. Today's anything-goes creativity is a poor substitute. Thus he reopens the window to the best of what the medieval world had to offer, without necessarily saying we have to go back to its (stereotyped) faults as well.

It probably helped that I was reading Esolen at my in-laws' home over Christmas. I'd look up from a chapter about letting boys play outside on their own, and about letting them be boys, and I'd see my thirteen-year-old nephew building a snow fort. He didn't have any other boys around that day (only his sister and CZ), but still, the kids were out for hours without regard for cold or dark, having a blast. A few days later I visited a friend whose seven-year-old son gets to roam around in the woods and spend "shop nights" with some other boys and a generous neighbor. Few boys get to have the sort of childhood that Esolen describes anymore, but our visit to Georgia seemed a demonstration that, even in an imperfect world, there are still opportunities for the sort of freedom that builds imagination.

Here's the full list for 2010:

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie

Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry

Night, Elie Wiesel

Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Robert Louis Wilken

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

Palace Walk, Naguib Mafouz

The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography, Iain H. Murray

Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman

The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Plutarch

At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman

A Student's Guide to the Classics, Bruce Thornton (2nd reading)

Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children

The Early History of Rome, Livy

The History of the Ancient World, Susan Wise Bauer

Cities of God, Rodney Stark

The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (3rd reading)

The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education, Maya Frost

An Italian Education, Tim Parks

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen

The perils of cooking off the cuff

The end of the CSA season is full of crucifers--cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts--and root vegetables, especially carrots and beets.

For weeks, when I was too busy to shop and cook deliberately, I kept seeing yummy-looking kielbasa sausage in the farmers' markets, and thinking, "I remember my mom making kielbasa with sauerkraut. That sounds cozy. The first thing I'm going to do when I get some time to cook is make kielbasa with sauerkraut."

So while math class was going on in our home last Tuesday, I found a recipe for sauerkraut in The Art of Simple Food and started a batch. Making sauerkraut didn't turn out to be nearly as hard as I thought it would be. You chop up cabbage and work salt into it with your fingers until it starts to release its liquid. (It says 3.5 tsp. for a whole cabbage. I used a half. You can put in a teaspoon of caraway seeds, too.) Then put the cabbage a non-reacting 2 qt. container. It's supposed to create enough liquid to cover itself, but if it doesn't you add brine made from 1 c. filtered water and 1 T. salt., and then put a weight in the top of the container to keep the cabbage submerged. And then you cover it with a dishtowel leave it for a week or more. I used some glass storage jars that I usually keep hot cereal in for the container, and for the weight I used a water bottle. After a couple of days, I had nice purple water spilling over the top of my container!

Then I went to both local farmers' markets to look for the kielbasa. No one had it. Finally I figured out where I had seen it, but it was all gone. They promised a "date with the pig" later in the winter. But now I had sauerkraut started! No kielbasa at Whole Foods, either. Two days later, I found some at a local gourmet market.

So then I asked my mom for the recipe, only to find that she had no recollection of it whatsoever! (Obviously it was not a treasured family tradition, except with me.) But by this time I was committed, so I found a nice Choucroute recipe in the NY Times. I didn't necessarily want all the meat this recipe called for, but the base looked delicious!

Last night I tasted the sauerkraut. Not quite sour yet. But while looking for the kielbasa recipe, I had found the very same Ligurian walnut sauce I used to like so much when I stayed in Cortona 26 years ago. Only this recipe added broccoli rabe, which I happened to also have on hand. And about this time of year I really start craving dark greens, so why not? (Some stands are still selling greens, raised in a greenhouse, no doubt.)

Bob had another idea: He took the two cups of white wine I was saving for the kielbasa, and poured it to go with the farfalle and walnut sauce. After all, it did say "perfect for cream sauce and pasta" on the back.

(I'd insert a photo of the walnut sauce and pasta here, except that we ate it too fast, and besides, it looks just like the photo in the NY Times recipe, except that I used farfalle.)

This afternoon I finally read through the entire kielbasa recipe. Hmm, two hours was just too long to wait to start cooking after Bob came home with more wine, and I just didn't happen to feel like dashing out to the store to get some. So I substituted a dish that used carrots and beets instead. I've got pounds and pounds of beets and carrots, and more on the way tomorrow.

So, I still haven't made kielbasa with sauerkraut, but I guess that's what happens when you cook by the seat of your pants! But really, I wouldn't have it any other way, because I like cooking when everything comes together, seasonally, with what I've got on hand.

Maybe tomorrow.

***

December 18: We finally ate our sauerkraut and kielbasa, and though perhaps not quite worth all the fuss I put into it, it was quite good!

Basilica di S. Ambrogio

The facade of S. Ambrogio, as seen from its portico

This weekend when Bob was sending out follow-up e-mails for his business trip to Milan, we noticed that our inbox was filling up with "out of office autoreplies." Oh, yes! We'd forgotten, St. Ambrose's Day is this week.

St. Ambrose is the patron saint of Milan. His feast day is a major holiday, combined with the Immaculate Conception on the 8th. I have no idea how many of the Milanese go to church on these days, but no one is at work.

CZ and I were at the Basilica di S. Ambrogio just a couple of weeks ago during our trip, so I thought I'd post some photos of it in honor of this early Bishop of Milan who baptized St. Augustine.

These first two photos above are of 12th C. Lombard-style relief sculptures, the first on the doors to the basilica, and the second on the pulpit. The Lombard style is the sort of Celtic Romanesque style which seems to be characteristically Milanese. Lombard architecture is more "primitive" than the earlier Roman style, but it has a charm of its own. The church's facade (top of post) is also Lombard.

Most of these churches were actually first constructed in the 4th century (this one under the auspices of Ambrose himself), but only small parts of the original structures remain. And they used bits of the earlier Roman buildings as foundations. If you find all this jumble of construction and reconstruction a little hard to follow, so did I! If I counted right, there were at least six building phases going on in this one church. Even the altar above is made of bits saved from a roof collapse during the Lombard era.

The photos above are of medieval frescoes on a column inside the church, and of the mosaic in the apse. What you can't tell in the photos, of course, is that there was some lovely a capella singing going on in a mass behind and under the apse.

To the right, in the treasury, is an even older mosaic from the original 4th C. church. (Not pictured.) This older chapel is bracketed by an ornate Baroque foyer. Somehow, it works.

And this is just me outside in the portico, trying to figure out what all those signs say in Italian. I can't tell whether my confusion springs from the language or seeing so many different building phases at once. But I do know that Milan is very nice in the fall. Everything looks and feels quite different, and I find that Italian life has a cozy side. Or as they say, accogliente.

The light that shines in the darkness

This seems an appropriate way to start of the Christmas season: While we were visiting the church of S. Ambrogio in Milan, we came across this nativity scene in the church's treasury. It was made for Christmas of 1944 by Italian soldiers in a Nazi concentration camp. They worked in secret, using scraps of the men's clothing and anything else they could find. When they were liberated, they left behind the ox to commemorate those who died while in the camp. If you look closely, you'll see that the figures include a Franciscan friar, a hunter, soldiers, and a woman weaving--that is, people from all walks of life. (Sorry, my photo, taken in dim light, is a bit blurry.)

Though I haven't found anything about this story online, and I'm not sure of the circumstances that would have caused the soldiers to be imprisoned, there were certainly Italians, as there were Germans, who ran afoul of the Nazis. This scene reminds me of the complexity of human circumstances, and of the mixture that comprises men's hearts. What an appropriate place to find the Christ Child.

"The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it."