My Own Thoughts

Joe Huffman was fired from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for… What? Did they tell him? They indicated it was his blog. They said that he had posted about classified information. Joe Huffman is a computer security expert. He had told them they had a problem with their security. They didn’t fix it. So during the [...]

My beloved husband took up running on his 40th birthday, blast him!, and now I am running as well. There are several reasons for this. One, of course, is health. Everyone should be as healthy as they can. If you are healthy, you have a greater chance of living long and being healthy. A second [...]

I would like to go out this year and see these. The best meteor showers will probably happen on August 11 to 13, Bown said. “You have to be patient,” Bown said. “It varies from year to year. There might be a meteor every minute; there might be one every five minutes or, on a [...]

I was reading on some blog, sorry can’t remember which one right now, that 30% of Japanese and 60% of Americans think there will be a WWIII. Then I went to Knowledge is Power and found a poll. The question is: Do you think we are already in the midst of WWIII? 172 yeses to [...]

-1700? Phoenician Puzzle Jugs in Cyprus. (That is 1700 BC.) from Vitamin Q on Wed, July 13: “Singmaster’s Voice.” For my second novel: So Dielli could be asked to solve one in Nakhaman’s home.

This post tells of Captain Brian Chontosh who recieved the Navy Cross for getting his Marines out of trouble. You won’t see it in the media. But it will, as the post says, Make You Proud.

Instapundit has an entry on the theft and burning of a family’s American flags after the funeral of the family member they lost in Iraq. God, bring the perpetrator to justice and give them a full understanding of what they have done. Give peace to the family whose soldier’s service has been mocked. Update: The [...]

Our VBS theme this year is “the Lord’s Army.” Instead of doing lots of tiny art projects, we are creating stationery for the soldiers. We take card stock, fold it in half. The older kids make thumbprint pictures, with cute sayings on them. The younger kids use stamps. Each of the kids has their name [...]

According to Blackfive, who I have always found to be reliable, Pennsylvania’s Lt Gov showed up at a slain soldier’s funeral, handed out her business card, and said, “…Our government is against this war.” What? Was she thinking at all? Michelle Malkin has a round up of comments on the blogosphere on the topic.

One thing I was thinking today was that a fun class for the older kids would be an autobiography class. What if I found and read to them sections out of autobiographies? And we shared our own experiences out loud? Then, as homework, they would write a portion of their autobiography. Each week we would [...]

One thing that is missing in the modern education system is the recitation. Besides the multiplication tables and our “facts,” not much is memorized as a lesson. We may “learn” a song, but we don’t recite it. One of the best ways to enrich our interior thoughts is by memorization. “Committed to Memory” is a [...]

Online Poetry Classroom is a great resource for teaching poetry. This page offers 341 poems that teachers or others have recommended. At a quick perusal, I would say that half are more recent and half are classic. Some of the classics are clearly Christian. That’s good since many education sites do not include such literature [...]

Barbara Feinberg wrote an excellent article on the problem novel and what is wrong with it. There were some good quotes. “I get a heartache in my stomach.” That was a little girl’s response to these novels which end horribly. 40% of the Newberry Medal winners in the last 1o years have been these kinds [...]

But the fact remains that a greater effect in education is obtained by reading to a child a well-known poem than a little-known poem.Part of the reason for this is the simple fact of the knowledge being shared, The vision held by MatthewArnold in the nineteenth century—that universal knowledge of poetry would take the place [...]

What Children’s Poetry is For by J. Bottum is a four page PDF which discusses what poetry to use with children and what to avoid. It also tells you a great deal about some poems that I didn’t know. For example: Similarly,when A.A.Milne,the early 20th-century author of Winnie-the-Pooh,writes: James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree [...]

The quote below on dropping classics is exactly what I was looking for. But it is no longer available at the site, because they don’t keep them up. I would love to read the whole article, but the search engine won’t look for it by name. And when I found it, it would cost me [...]

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.” – Socrates I knew I liked reading for a reason.

“How Do You Make Children Articulate? It’s a Long Story…” describes an attempt at two British primary schools to teach children excellent langauge usage. The schools are ending each school day with one minute of classical music followed by a reading from The Wind in the Willows, or The Arabian Nights, or Aesop’s Fables. “Language [...]

Are Americans getting dumbed down books? It seems obvious when you look at some of the works in the following quote. Is children’s literature being dumbed down? The answer isn’t always clear, but the evidence that something is happening lies on store shelves around the country. “They have these My First Little House on the [...]

What can a parent, who wants their child to read and to read good literature, do? • Research children’s books as you would a car. Teach children to qualify entertainment as they would food. • Don’t stop reading aloud to your kids. “Many parents stop reading out loud to their child the year (he or [...]