We're a Canadian family of five, farming and home schooling. I'm nowhere near as regular a blogger as I used to be, and tend not to blog as much about our home schooling efforts as I used to.
"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live."
James T. Adams
Family, books, food, organic farming, classical home education, books, gardening, journeys, music, books, thoughts, movies, and books.
Davy is in seventh grade, Daniel in eighth grade, and Laura in tenth grade
Email: farmschool at hmsinet dot com
"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead."
Clarence Day
"Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing."
Cicero
"Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend."
Sir Francis Bacon, "Essays"
"The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."
Gilbert Highet, "The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning"
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
Walter Wriston
"I'd like to give you a piece of my mind."
"Oh, I couldn't take the last piece."
Ginger Rogers to Frances Mercer in "Vivacious Lady" (1938)
"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
Booker T. Washington
"Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
Attributed to Groucho Marx in "The Groucho Letters" by Arthur Sheekman
"If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
"If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, we feel all our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."
Jean Hagen as "Lina Lamont" in "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)
Copyright © 2005-2012
Please do not use any of my words or my personal photographs without my express permission.
Do you know about Penn Sound?
Here is the link: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
I think you will love it – there are over 1500 individual poems – all in mp3 format – the site is dedicated both the distribution (for free) and preservation (there’s stuff from the 1930s!) of recorded poetry. Best of all, you don’t have to listen to a whole 30 minute reading, you can download individual poems.
School is starting and field trips to the apple orchards will commence. This poem was inspired by my very old but still very productive apple tree out back here and its fells. “Apple jack” harks back to frontier day and so do cider presses, but the insects who live and die on and in the apple are as old as they are, millions of years. These little creatures live on apple fells the way we live on planet earth:
Apple Jack
Fallen apples bruise, the better for those
Who prey on such, such fallen fells
As these which lay around my apple trees
Awaiting the invasion of the ants.
Chance is, I like them too, and munch on one
While gazing on this fallen feast, this manna
From the sky. There is a kind of insect
Not an ant, but one that bores inside it–
Bit by bit it bores, the apple worm whose
Life begins and ends in apples pending,
Whose fall bequeaths it new beginnings there
Beneath on earth where crushed-in apples lay;
Pray my ending ends so well as these did,
Harboring hopes of home within their rotting flesh,
Fresh food for future generations; hope my
Bruising somehow breeds a new condition,
Rendition of my being. Like rotten apples
Wormy to the core, let me be pressed out
With a turning vise, squeezed of every drop;
Wind up at last a swig of apple jack.
Hi there. Thought you might enjoy this: http://jkfowler.com/2009/11/09/sense/. Cheers, JK.