The Camera My Mother Gave Me
I am buying my childhood home. My mother has passed and my father has remarried a wonderful woman for whom he bought a new place, a place for them to make their own. It is good for him to leave walls saturated with memories of my mother and her influence, but I didn’t want the house my parents built in 1986 gone forever. My dad packed the things that were most important to him and is leaving behind things that were just filler (I’m getting a new comfy couch from my Bonus Mom I’m super excited about). My mom had a lot of filler.
Since I’m the book lady, he left me most of their books as well. I already have well over 5,000 volumes in my house (I quit counting long ago and just focus on making sure they all have a place to live) and I have four children that I will be moving into a home built for a family of four total (it’s the same size as my current home, but actually has one more room, there was a lot of wasted space in these 1995 builds). So as I go through books, determining what to keep and what to purge, I’m stumbling through decades of reading–my mother’s reading, and my own.
The Christian prairie romances went first. I’ve never been interested in that genre, but it was my mother’s primary reading (I added some to the church library and sent some to be sold at Good Oil Days). I’ve gotten rid of most of the Christmas books, she loved anything Christmas. My church does a holiday market every year where they sell Christmas crafts, decor, and gifts to raise money for various things we cannot afford to do as a congregation. This last year we replaced the doors. The old building was desperate for functioning doors with no cracks or blemishes and the Christmas market afforded us beautiful, but simple, wooden doors to invite the public into our home away from home. My mother would be pleased that she contributed to that. I’m excited to keep the antiques, they aren’t valuable but they are titles we will read and share with our children. There’s a set of Mark Twain I remember well that I’ll “inherit.”
With all this sorting and purging going on at my Dad’s house (soon to be my house), I’m sorting and purging from my own home as well. Books I loved in my twenties just don’t mean the same to me now that I am a mother of four. When we first moved to this house my goal was to make sure there were never stacks of books anywhere (I failed), that every book had its own place on the shelf (I failed big time). I spent the last four years donating anything I read that I had no intention of reading again, mostly books I had acquired for free or cheap over the years that upon finally reading didn’t live up to my latest standards. But now, I’m getting rid of books I loved and just don’t need or want lying around for children to encounter.
So this week I donated The Camera My Mother Gave Me and Girl, Interrupted (and four bags of other things I can’t recall). I loved Girl, Interrupted when I first read it. I think I was nineteen at the time. Susanna Kaysen fascinated me with her angst, her institutionalization, her ambivalence, and finally her resolve… to not be crazy. I respected her final conclusion. At forty-one, I just don’t need that affirmation from her anymore… that we can be surrounded by insanity and decide to not allow ourselves to go insane (mental illness is real, but there are also some who drive themselves nuts out of selfishness and conceit, or giving in to their environment).
Later, when I was running the sociology section at Half Price Books, I stumbled across The Camera My Mother Gave Me. It is a bizarre memoir about Kaysen’s vagina. I was shocked, baffled, and completely riveted by the book. I remember being appalled that I couldn’t put it down. I probably would have kept it forever and maybe read it again years from now because I don’t remember much of it, but I don’t want my sons plucking it off the shelf as emerging readers. It would make an interesting story for a stand-up comedy routine–or their future therapist–so off to the Friends of the Library it went.
I have donated nearly 1,000 volumes every time I have moved. Often it’s a simple Marie Kondo moment, happily removing piles of things accumulated that I’m now happy to give away. This move hits different. Instead of just not wasting some box or storage space, I’m more focused on refining my library. I am actively curating a specific environment to nurture my children.
What books do you enjoy that you still choose not to keep?
Morning Times with a Morning Basket
I’m in a lot of homeschool mom groups on Facebook. Lately there have been a lot of questions regarding “morning baskets,” popularized, I think, by Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers accounts I think most people have baskets full of ice breaker style worksheets for their kids to grab and go when they are otherwise busy with stuff. But our Morning Baskets have been a little different, organically grown over the years as a Morning Time over breakfast where we, as a family, wake up together. It includes our Scripture Memory Box (an idea I got from a Sonja Shafer YouTube video about four or five years ago. Our “basket” includes a poetry recitation, a hymn study, Thomas Aquinas’s Student’s Prayer (thanks to Kate Alva of The Atrium). The point is not what it is in our basket, however, it’s about the journey we took to get there.
First, I read Habits of the Household by Earley, which I read in 2022. My second child was one year old and I did a re-dive into parenting and homeschooling research to make sure that I wasn’t bringing old bad habits to a new childhood and that I was creating the family culture I desired now that I had more than one kid and stable household. I found Earley’s book very affirming as I was already doing a lot of what he recommended, but I wanted to add more and really dive into the idea of liturgies. Earley’s book and listening to the Literary Life Podcast led me to Morning Time: A Liturgy of Love by Cindy Rollins.
What I learned from those books is that starting the day with scripture and a morning prayer isn’t just my ideal, my kids thrive with it. I learned that my sudoku and logic puzzle routine could be substituted with other things from their education, taking something off their afternoon plate, as the season requires: diagramming a sentence, balancing a chemical equation, factoring a trinomial. Balancing a chemical equation every morning together as a family when my oldest was between 6th and 7th grades set her up to do high school Chemistry in 8th grade (with a high school aged friend of hers) with a lot less tears than I expected. Warming up to difficult subjects in bite sized pieces over breakfast just seems to be the most efficient way to tackle the idea that we can, in fact, learn to do hard things.
Over the years, our morning times have included Plutarch, various nature readings (like Gilbert White and Sam Keen), and the Ambleside Online Hymns and Folksongs. It has included the United States citizenship test (as recommended by Cindy Rollins) in seasonal cycles. It has always included the Catechism from the Truth & Grace Memory Books (that I bought while visiting a church led by Voddie Baucham. We have always included Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but after following Cindy Rollins, I was encouraged to add The Faerie Queene, previously I had planned to assign it in the upper high school years–I’m glad I didn’t wait. We enjoyed Dante’s Divine Comedy, as an extended basket time, in car rides on the way to choir. As I have had more children it has become something that goes until we have an activity that requires us to leave the house or the youngest children depart to play outside as their attention spans drop off.
No matter what you include in your basket time, if you’re overwhelmed in your homeschool or your parenting this is a guaranteed way to simplify it. Bring back the cozy, bring back core truths and beauty to your mornings. Adding these bits into the start of your day truly do take things off your plate at the end of your day. (Or if your kids are in public school, adding these enrichment activities to your evenings can bring back the togetherness you long for in your family and supplement their life at school.)
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Timothy and the Dragon Defenders, Part One
A Short Story from the Archives of A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
Timothy McCracken was having a hard time. He was supposed to be sleeping, but instead of counting sheep, he was counting the taps he heard coming from the basement across the hall. Timothy’s bedroom was downstairs near the kitchen, apart from his siblings and parents who slept on the second story of the house. This suited him fine because it meant he didn’t share a room with his brother Dean, who snored like a freight train. It was also great when he wanted peanut butter sandwiches at midnight, but not so much when the dog whined at the rustling noises coming from the basement.
What was down there besides Mom’s canning jars and Christmas decorations? Did the house have mice? Were ghosts walking around in old shoes discarded in the donate bin? One could never tell after the sun went down and the moon cast shadows through the window.
He pulled his feet from under under his flannel sheets, his yellow gym shorts reflected neon stripes from the moonlight. As soon as his feet hit the cool, wooden floors, he heard a crash from below. Instinctively, he rushed to the sound, accustomed to rescuing younger siblings from their messes and broken things. The crashing of his mother’s preserve jars rang in his ears as he crossed the hall to the basement and took the stairs two at a time. He stopped abruptly at the last step, worried his bare feet might catch glass.
Curling his toes around the edge of the landing, he paused a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. As he stood there, the scent of cinnamon and peaches wafted against his nose, goosebumps pimpled his arms from the cold, but a breath of hot air pressed against his forehead.
“What?”
Slowly, his pupils caught up to the rest of his body and revealed large nostrils flaring in front of him. Purple scales pulsed as the warmth puffed against Timothy’s face. The beast turned and scurried behind the shelves of Mrs. McCracken’s jars, tongue lapping three of them in one gulp, glass and all. TImothy heard a belch and caught a whiff of strawberry currant jam.
“You like Mom’s jam?” he asked the beast, stepping closer. Surely it was safe to follow it, this must be a dream. After all, dragons aren’t real.
In a flash of light, the creature was nearly gone, a tail slithering out a door Timothy had never seen before. The door was heavy and wooden, thicker and shorter than any other in the house. The knob was made of tarnished silver. A bit of light glowed from behind the door–enough so Timothy could see that the knob was spherical and engraved to look like a globe, but with land masses he did not recognize.
As he reached for the knob, heat radiated from behind the threshold and in an instant, Timothy was no longer in his Mom’s basement.
[Come back next week to see where Timothy has found himself!]
Colonel Shaw
I’ve been spying these daily writing prompts in the corner of my dashboard the last few days, wondering if they were something I would ever care to utilize. This evening as I was considering what to post for tomorrow, I saw “Have you ever performed on a stage?” and immediately had a flashback to 1995 and my performance as Colonel Shaw in the play Glory. I’m assuming it was severely abridged for fifth graders. I do know it was shortly after we had read the book Shades of Gray by Carolyn Reeder. I remember my costume smelled funny. I do not recall where that costume was acquired or where it went when I was done wearing it. I think it was meant to teach us an important part of history, but I was not thinking about Lincoln’s War Between the States when I was barking out my Colonel Shaw lines, I was thinking about how I was the shortest girl in the class playing a man in charge of stuff. For the record, I’m a terrible actress and I have no idea how or why I was awarded this role in whatever fifth grade extravaganza was occurring.
Fifth grade was an awkward time when the man I thought would be my favorite teacher ever got deported–to Canada–for an expired Visa, and in return we got the “new” lady. She hated me, got in arguments with my mom, and I still (in my 40s) think she was a moron. Time did not grant me more grace for her, although I do credit her for having Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Field’s Hitty, Her First Hundred Years in her classroom library. Both of which I loved. She’s also the teacher who read Bridge to Terabithia out loud every afternoon until she had her entire class bawling. So, she was either awesome for introducing us to a great book, or a little sadistic for emotionally traumatizing us all. Who knows?
My track record with teachers wasn’t great. In sixth grade I got an amazing GT language arts teacher I will adore forever and we got her again for seventh grade GT, and then she died. Once again, our class got the “new” lady. A fresh out of college gal the boys tormented by just calling her Wendy. She looked like Wendy from Peter Pan, her name was Wendy for real, I still don’t remember her last name because no one ever respected her enough to use it. She lived in my neighborhood with her parents, talked about her boyfriend (who couldn’t spell) a lot, and in hindsight I wonder how any twenty-two year olds enter their classrooms for their first year without having a panic attack. I think that was the year I played a dead girl in theatre and laughed through the entire play. My theatre teacher told me she loved me, but she didn’t want me on her stage again. We laughed. We hugged. When I was in Oklahoma! in high school, I was a chorus girl who happily sat in the barn close to the shotgun mic. I’m not a great dancer either, but I love to sing. Too bad Colonel Shaw didn’t have any singing lines. I’d definitely watch Glory as a Broadway musical, they could still use Matthew Broderick and everything.
Beauty in the Math
As a homeschool mom, I’ve been teaching math every day since 2017 when my oldest officially started first grade. We did Math-U-See Alpha through Pre-Algebra with steady diligence. When we finished the curriculum for the school year, we often used another to review. For years we had colorful, used copies of Singapore (1A-6B) to ensure there were no gaps in our learning. It wasn’t necessary, we just liked it. My oldest also loved reading Life of Fred books for fun until about a year ago when she grew as impatient with them as I have always been. We feel they make great supplements if your kid is into them, but they aren’t really a complete curriculum. (My husband and I honestly don’t understand how anyone learns anything from them at all.) With all this math drilling, I have always passionately felt like I needed to have books that kept that spark–the love of the beauty of math–alive in our home. It’s easy to get lost in crunching numbers and forget that it’s fun to play with numbers, to entertain ideas, and to marvel at the patterns.
Books that have helped me maintain that in the younger years were things like Swirl by Swirl, Blockhead, the Sir Cumference series, The Lion’s Share, and many more. I collect math picture books and biographies of mathematicians for kids like Michael Phelps collects Olympic medals. I love them and I love reading them to my kids. We enjoy Penrose the Cat and Bedtime Math: A Fun Excuse to Stay Up Late. I have a more MathStart picture books than I can count. Not really, Anno taught us to count pretty high. But as my oldest got older, I realized I needed to have more than just picture books to keep that love for math alive.
We started in middle school with books on fractals. She had already read Mysterious Patterns: Finding Fractals in Nature by Sarah C. Campbell, but we needed more. A friend recommended Lisle’s Fractals: The Secret Code of Creation and we ate that up. It’s so beautiful. I even bought and read Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature from the 70’s, for my own personal amusement.
Then I became even more devoted to being purposeful in adding math books to our history and science reading. Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife was a fun one, and I recommend it for 7th and 8th graders tackling Algebra I for the first time. Learning about the beginnings of things, when the world wasn’t quite sure what to make of a concept, is always exciting. Adding living books to a student’s math studies is what I think is greatly missing from the public school system’s approach to math education in the upper grades. As a society we’re helping elementary students get excited with great picture books like The Boy Who Loved Math and then we leave them hanging once they hit Algebra. Books like Derbyshire’s Unknown Quantity aren’t being touched until college, if at all.
Just this week we finished A History of Pi. Beckmann’s writing isn’t as thrilling as Siefe’s, and he often goes on tangents about governments he doesn’t like, showing some interesting biases that made my 9th grader roll her eyes, but I’ll still take his passionate sometimes wrong hot takes over a boring textbook that never mentions the history of 3.14 and how it came to be what it is today.
Once you dive into the world of living math books, it’s actually more difficult to find someone dispassionate about their topic. Francis Su in Mathematics for Human Flourishing also has several political asides while arguing for math bringing virtue to those who study it. While it wasn’t my favorite of the math books I’ve read and I won’t be assigning it, it helped me identify and articulate some of my goals as a math teacher.
What math or math history books have you read that have inspired you as a teacher or student? Books that made the beauty of math shine for you?
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The Mad Women of the Moors
Re-experiencing The Brontë Sisters, Part One
In 2024 I read Brontë’s Agnes Grey alongside the Literary Life Podcast. I hadn’t read a Brontë novel in years, more than a decade I believe. Though I greatly appreciate the Brontës, I’ve always been more of a Jane Austen girl. It’s a rare reader who loves both equally, I find. The Brontës wrote Gothic revival tales with a flare for romanticism (romanticism the movement, not romanticism featuring a meet-cute and happily ever after), whereas Jane Austen wrote satire. The Brontës make me sad and despair for humanity while Jane Austen makes me laugh at society’s nonsense. All four women had much to say about the world around them, they just said it very differently.
Agnes Grey, written by the youngest Brontë, Anne, is not the most riveting of classic works and I suspect it wouldn’t still be in print if Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre weren’t currently so popular. I love to pair reading experiences, rabbit trail from one book to another, an exercise of associative reading, so I plucked a book I already had on my shelf and read it as well.
The book was The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell, a contemporary literary mystery with the meet-cute kind of romance thrown in. The book follows fictional character Samantha Whipple through Oxford as the author fan-girls over Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In a season when I am aggressively purging subpar books from my collection (we have over 5,000 volumes–I stopped counting long ago–and have legitimately run out of space) The Madwoman Upstairs is one I have chosen to keep, for now. I think my oldest might enjoy it after studying a Brontë book or two, it’s an easy breezy weekend novel.
That time might be coming soon as the trailers for this new Wuthering Heights movie blasts across the internet, appalling most readers I know. Teaching Wuthering Heights just moved up my to-do list as I counter parent pop culture, so that when my teen encounters the story for the first time it is not at the hands of the debaucherous movie industry who is advertising what looks like a Fifty-Shades version of what they are calling the “greatest love story ever told.” I thought it was a cautionary tale of what happens to humanity when we give into the monster of sin instead of slaying it. On a supernatural level, Wuthering Heights brings me back to Beowulf (I might be broken, because everything brings me back to Beowulf, it’s a favorite) and the torment of the wild (sin nature and Satan… Heathcliff has that whole Esau archetype going for him that reminds me of Grendel). On a psychological level, Cathy and Heathcliff remind me that sin nature is to be quashed lest we wander the moors ever after as lost souls unable to reach heaven. Apparently, that is not the popular reading, and Hollywood has turned it into some steamy lip biting panty dropper. Gross. But, I haven’t read the book in a coon’s age, and it’s possible I read it poorly and just saw the message I wanted to see.
Alice Hoffman said, “Read Wuthering Heights when you’re 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero; when you’re 30, he’s a monster; at 50 you see he’s just human.” When I was in my teens, I definitely read him as a tempting monster. I know I read Jane Eyre and Tenant of Wildfell Hall in my twenties, but I cannot recall if I re-read Emily’s work when I first read her sisters’ and stumbled across Gaskell’s biography. I’m 41 now and I’m curious to know how I read Heathcliff today.
English author Jeanette Winterson wrote on her website in 2011:
I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed, Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched by Cathy’s death-wish (Why did you betray your own heart?). Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child I understood his humiliations, his ardour, and his capacity to injure. I also learned the lesson of the novel that property is power. It seemed to me that if you want to fall in love you had better have a house. Whatever Emily Bronte was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel of all for love and the world well lost. Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right. Therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (and that is part of her plan but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Much later when her daughter marries Heathcliff’s horrible son Linton he gleefully claims that all her property is now his – and when he usefully dies, all that was hers passes to Heathcliff. Heathcliff himself starts with nothing—and so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom belonging to the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin. What’s love got to do with it? (All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story).
As I begin my journey of rediscovery, I find I agree that it is a story of loss. I also think it is a story of revenge, and possibly a story of ghosts… I’ll get back to you in Part Two of this blog series.
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Burgess, Beatrix, and Our Favorite Bear
One thing I didn’t expect to be doing in my forties was re-reading all the books of early childhood. I was a mom of only one for nearly eleven years and thought surely I wouldn’t revisit Thornton Burgess, Beatrix Potter, and Winnie-the-Pooh until I was a grandmother. But then I had three more babies.
I started reading Thornton Burgess out loud to my oldest and two of my niblings when there was a family crisis and I absorbed a niece and a nephew into my household for two months while my second child was two months old. Thornton Burgess always brings calm to an afternoon when you need it. He’s gentle, like Mr. Rogers, and tells you all about the animals the way Bob Ross tells you all about painting. During this season of chaos, we read The Big Book of Burgess, the pale green front board and back board matched my bedroom walls and put us all in a soothing nap-like mood. We usually read over elevenses or afternoon tea, the sunlight from my east facing living room windows often cascading over my shoulders while the baby kicked in the bouncer and the older kids settled in to watch the oak tree’s leaves dance across the area rug and faux hardwood flooring. What I learned then while the fifth graders sat restfully (the only time of day they were restful) and listened, is that I would never stop reading Burgess ever again. Never. Now, we always have a Burgess book going. I read bits of the Adventures of… series to my toddler, Lightfoot the Deer and Bowser the Hound when I had a teenager, a preschooler, and a toddler, and even now with a highschooler, preschooler, toddler, and newborn, we are reading Blacky the Crow. Burgess writes delightful little chapter books every age can enjoy, but…
Beatrix Potter’s work are picture books. I definitely didn’t expect to be reading The Tales of Peter Rabbit nearly every day for another decade. Even more, I didn’t expect to not get tired of them. Jeremy Fisher doesn’t stop being exciting, if anything I think he’s more exciting now that I have a little boy obsessed with fishing. Two Bad Mice is especially amusing with two precocious little human partners in crime scurrying about my home.
Last, I’ll never forget the first time I picked up the Winnie-the-Pooh collection to read to my second born. He was pudgy and snuggly and the lamplight was low and my voice fell into the patterns that my oldest calls my Winnie-the-Pooh voice and I thought, “Oh I get to do this again. How lovely.” The book smells like vanilla and baby powder, the spine reassuring in my palm. Winnie-the-Pooh of the Hundred Acre Wood, floating up to steal honey like a rain cloud really never gets old. It might be my favorite bedtime book.
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Totalitarian Caste Systems in Dystopian Fantasy
A Guest Blog Post by: A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
Totalitarianism is a system of government that is headed by an absolute dictator who supports themselves with some kind of violent force. In a totalitarian country there is no freedom of the people. One example of totalitarianism can be found in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. The Final Empire is headed by the Lord Ruler, who uses emotional manipulation against the populous. They are required to believe only what the Steel Ministry tells them and treat the Lord Ruler as god. The Final Empire is also a caste system. A caste system is a system of government in which people are divided into sections based on race and or job description. The Final Empire is not an exact Caste System sine the Garrison and a few merchants come from the Skaa population.
A better example of a Totalitarian Caste System is Suzanne Collins’s series Hunger Games. In Hunger Games President Snow represents the the absolute ruler and the Hunger Games themselves serve as the violent force. The caste system in Panam is much stricter than the one in the Final Empire. The people are confined to geographically separated districts that are each in charge of one resource that is distributed across the whole country, such as coal lumber, and technology. District Thirteen is the rebel district, their Mistborn counterparts would be the thieving crews. In both dystopian societies the government mostly ignored the rebels, avoiding conflict and keeping the peace. Up until the nineteen forties India was a real life example of a totalitarian caste system. The noblemen and Garrison plus the District two and the capital are equal to the Kshatriyas. Likewise the Chandles are similar to the thieving crews or district thirteen.
Totalitarian caste systems are terrible for everyone except the people on top. Even now as a democracy India is a miserable place still scarred by its past government. On the flip side, the opposite of a totalitarian caste system would be a world with no ruler or government system at all. You may note that in the United States religious freedom only goes as far as it can without infringing on other peoples’ rights. Or it was supposed to anyway. Both extremes are bad. People need guidance, not total dominance. Rules, not oppression.
Hard Roads to Cultural Literacy
In May of 2019, I read a book called Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail by Keith Heyer Meldahl. I remember it being riveting. When I logged it on Goodreads all I wrote was, “Excellent and fascinating.” I was dating my now husband at the time and I remember sharing with him sections I thought he would enjoy, as we both like geology and one of our dates was to the HMNS gemstone exhibit. At one point I laughed out loud at something clever Meldahl wrote (I don’t recall what it was) and my husband commented that it is a rare geology book that causes one to laugh in pleasure.
Naturally, I thought this would make excellent assigned reading for my homeschooled highschooler. But one chapter into it she was struggling. It wasn’t the reading level, she has a collegiate reading level and has had one for a few years now. I was certain it couldn’t be the science as she had been perusing geology books since childhood and had done a whole geology curriculum with a friend as part of their own little science club they created. Nerds. I went over the science with her and she kept reading. It became less of a struggle, but she is not laughing out loud with pleasure from her geology book.
Then I started reading Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch and things became clearer. In Cultural Literacy Hirsch talks about a study done on the results of seven year olds who took a reading assessment test. In the test the children were asked to read a story about a spider. The children who had more prior knowledge about spiders scored higher on the reading comprehension questions about the story (which did not require special knowledge about spiders) than those who did not know much about spiders.
I shared this with my oldest daughter, as we often study together while the younger kids are playing. We discussed it and determined that it makes sense to not get hung up on something being mentioned in passing because you already know a lot on a topic and can picture it in your mind with little effort, but to struggle to retain what something is about if it mentions a lot of things you’re trying to picture because you’re not as familiar with them. Perhaps it is easier to envision Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web if as a child you also have watched a real spider build its web, perhaps it is easier to remember the story if you’ve seen or read about how baby spiders hatch. Or, if you’ve had Charlotte’s Web read to you as a child, maybe a technical book on pig husbandry would be easier to retain as an adult. Hirsch includes an example of college students reading a paragraph about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and struggling because they had no prior knowledge of who they were and how they related to the Civil War (shocking because these were college students out of Virginia).
I was reminded about a public schooled girl I was working with who had failed her reading portion on her standardized tests. Her phonics were impeccable, but where she struggled was comprehension. When I worked with her, almost every time she struggled to read something it was because she had never heard the word. She didn’t have the vocabulary to support her phonics skills. I advised the family to listen to audiobooks, read stories together at night, talk to each other more, look words up in the dictionary. Children learn the meanings of words by hearing them, then when they see them on paper for the first time while sounding it out… they have a picture in their mind of what that word means, feels like, or how it can be used in different sentences. Kids should always have access to stories above their reading level, so that they can learn grammar structures and vocabulary words organically. Hirsch drives home the idea that you can know how to read and still be illiterate if you don’t know anything about what you’re reading.
I told my daughter how this was interesting to me because my husband had said he thought she didn’t know enough geology to read Hard Road West smoothly, even though I thought it was a very approachable book and that she had a strong foundation in geology. She and I laughed over the time a volunteer at the museum asked her what a specific rock smelled like and the big reveal fell flat when she answered, “Sulfur.” Poor guy deflated and said, “Yes, it’s Sulfur. You must be homeschooled.” Apparently the public school kids her age on field trips liked to shout “Farts!” She was about seven at the time and it is one of her favorite museum memories. (I’m not going to lie, even if I knew it was sulfur at seven, I’d probably have shouted “Farts!” too, but I went to public school.)
“So, why, if you’ve read all the same geology books we read as children, is this geology book difficult? Because I genuinely don’t think it would have been difficult for me at fifteen.” That is when she confessed that the geology books we owned and had spent hours reading… she hadn’t actually been reading them: “I was looking at the pretty rocks. I could tell you the page numbers where all my favorite rocks are, all the prettiest ones, I didn’t read all the stuff…” We genuinely laughed together, two wildly different personalities approaching children’s geology books in wildly different ways. As Charlotte Mason said, “Children are born persons.” But for every moment, like this geology one where she struggles because maybe she didn’t pay as much attention to what was put before her in the past, she has so many where she shines. She catches every Shakespeare reference. Every time. (Hirsch writes a bit about how Shakespeare allusions used to be quite common in all kinds of writing, including business memos, but as of the publication of his book in 1987, that was no longer the case.)
Hirsch’s argument for cultural literacy was never meant to be for homeschool parents to refine the presentation of their educational feasts, his goal is educational reform in the public sector. There is extensive discussion in his book about the struggle to properly regulate education in that if you mandate that schools teach at least two Shakespeare plays there will always be arguments about which two should be selected and that no two districts will choose the same two, therefore knowing who Shakespeare is might be universal, but catching Shakespeare references will vary. (I vote for all the Shakespeare. Every play! All the sonnets!) But I did feel like Hirsch’s essay very much affirmed the education I am providing. Maybe my oldest gets a little bogged down in this particular geology book, but to be fair, it could easily be assigned in a college course, most high school students wouldn’t be reading it between their Homer and Geometry lessons. The paragraph that boggled the minds of the Virginian community college students in the 1980s didn’t phase her, and for that I have hope.
Additional affirmation came when I realized I had owned other books by Hirsch in the past. He’s the one that wrote the series Everything Your ___Grader Needs to Know. My first two years of formal homeschooling (first and second grade), I had read those books out loud the last month of the traditional school year to see if we were covering everything. What I learned was reading those books out loud was a waste of time because a classical Charlotte Mason education is thorough and she not only knew what she needed, but she knew richer versions than the sad paragraphs presented. That was the final nail in the coffin on us ever relying on textbooks. Cultural literacy can be gained from textbooks, but it’s boring and far less effective. The better road to true literacy, in my opinion, is living books. I donated Hirsch’s other books, but I’m keeping Cultural Literacy.
One whole day after finishing Cultural Literacy, I went to our local library to donate a bag of books I was purging from my collection. There on the shelf next to the library bookstore register was E. D. Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a compilation of all the things the average American graduate should know, for $2. Of course I bought it.
“Also unrealistic is the pragmatist emphasis on individuality, at least as the idea has been institutionalized. The best teaching does accommodate itself to individual differences in temperament, but a child’s temperament does not come freighted with content. To learn a culture is natural to human beings. Children can express individuality only in relation to the traditions of their society, which they have to learn. The greatest human individuality is developed in response to a tradition, not in response to disorderly uncertain, and fragmented education. Americans in their teens and twenties who were brought up under individualistic theories are not less conventional than their predecessors, only less literate, less able to express their individuality.” – E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, pg. 126.
Getting to Know Charlotte
A Homeschool Life…
When I was first sold on homeschooling, I was smitten with the classical model. I learned later that most “classical” models being advertised in the United States are actually “neo-classical” in practice. They have taken an essay written by Dorothy L. Sayers on the Trivium and pigeon-holed it into something it wasn’t exactly meant to be. The neo-classical model sort of married the United States educational “ideal” and pushes intense academia early, limits the elementary school years to a lot of memorization (the grammar stage), and taken to the extreme (like anything taken to an extreme), steals joy from students and teachers alike.
If you have followed my blog for the last fifteen years, you might remember me “homeschooling” my toddler. (FYI, pre-school is just parenting, not homeschooling. It’s literally PRE school.) Pressured by a narcissistic ex who demanded that my then three year old be able to read already (it’s not developmentally appropriate to force formal reading lessons on children under six), be able to copy out poems (it’s not developmentally appropriate to force small children to write, look up x-rays of their hand bones), and wanted her to be trained as some government super spy assassin (I am a third degree black belt in Kung Fu, but some people have watched too many movies and have no sense of reality and I used to be married to “some people”). Homeschool regret #1: giving into the pressure of my ex to do formal reading lessons because she was bright and could do it and I was hyperlexic and was reading at age three despite knowing that educational studies have long stated that formal lessons shouldn’t begin until six. Homeschool regret #2: ever handing her a worksheet in kindergarten, which wasn’t often, but still…
The things I am proud of, however, is that despite all this pressure, we always focused on living books above all else and I encouraged verbal narrations for years. I do not regret the neo-classical homeschool co-ops we joined (and left), they held an important role in our lives at the time and I met some cherished and beloved friends there even if I was regularly told: you’re not very classical, you’re too Charlotte Mason. The first time I heard that, I started doing some research…
I learned that Charlotte Mason was very classical, and what calls itself classical these days just isn’t. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, what matters is that I still very much subscribe to both tactics of education and as my oldest is now in highschool and I have three more children with one creeping up on kindergarten (FYI: kindergarten is also PRE- school), I’ve been doing even more reading and research and want to share my favorite resources… the ones I don’t regret.
First: if you’re new to homeschooling or not loving your current homeschool rhythm, this is my favorite link to send parents: The Five Flavors of Homeschooling. I like to share this link so much, I have gotten restricted on Facebook as a potential scammer, despite not having violated the group rules in any of the places I posted it. Knowing your “flavor” can save you a lot of money on homeschool pursuits, and I definitely feel like (having been a single homeschool mom who wasn’t receiving child support that was owed) Charlotte Mason and Unit Studies are the easiest to accomplish for FREE.
Which brings me to my next two resources: Ambleside Online (not an online school) and Well Educated Heart, two curricula that are totally FREE. Ambleside Online is named “online” so as to not confuse it with the Christian private school based on Charlotte Mason’s philosophy still operating in the UK. It’s a full “scope and sequence” and any time you can’t find a title for free or a price you can afford, you can usually access it on Project Gutenberg or substitute it with something suitable. The focus is having the students read real books and source documents, narrating those books, and embracing the idea that Education is the Science of Relations by making connections to things they have studied and the world around them. Well Educated Heart is very similar, but clusters the material into something like unit studies, despite Charlotte Mason discouraging unit studies (because she wanted the children to make the connection, not have the teacher present the ideas already connected). Well Educated Heart offers their curricula for free and the feature I like most is that the audio files are also available on their site for… wait for it… FREE.
But wait, what is narration? That brings me to my third resource that I like to send people: Episode 7 of Cindy Rollins’s podcast The New Mason Jar. I had already read Karen Glass’s book Know and Tell (as well as Charlotte Mason’s original Home Education series) when I stumbled across the podcast episode and I think the podcast is a more approachable way for people to access the road to narration because (Gasp!) a lot of people don’t want to read the books (it actually drives me nuts, but I kind of get it: people are busy, especially mothers). The beauty of pursuing the art of narration isn’t just in the brain development aspect (which is phenomenal), it’s also the price tag… narration is… you guessed it… FREE. No fancy writing programs, no workbooks checking reading comprehension, no drama. A verbal narration costs nothing but the work of a brain muscle and a listening ear plus time. As the students get older a composition book and pen will do the trick. Charlotte Mason educations are truly thorough and affordable. I still teach essay writing, Charlotte Mason purists say they don’t, but a narration is basically an expository essay written beautifully. I still don’t use curricula to teach essay writing, we use narrations and read a lot of well written essays (and sermons) and writing memoirs. My oldest loved Zen in the Art of Writing by Bradbury (after reading Fahrenheit 451) and Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Her seventh grade year also included Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Writing Life. I think the inspiration of her favorite authors talking about their writing lives was the most effective writing tutor I could have ever received.
Other things I’m pleased I did, but will definitely do more of with the younger ones:
- Fairy Tales: read all the fairy tales
- Music: classical music, folk songs, sea shanties, hymns… studying music throughout history and enjoying it in passing has done nothing but enrich our lives and our studies. My oldest plays the tin whistle, piano, clarinet, violin, and pretty much any instrument she can get her hands on. She also enjoyed two years of choir.
- Scripture Memory Box
- Poetry: we added a memory box just for poetry and the kids are loving it. Instead of being set up the way it is for the scripture memory box as described in the YouTube video I linked, it only has month tabs and we read a poem every day that month. This is in addition to the poetry we study for language arts.
- Picture Study: I want to be more intentional about this in the future, but currently we just decorate our home with real art. Paintings we find at Goodwill or garage sales plus a few John William Waterhouse prints I have always loved.
- Classical Conversations songs: they’re neo-classical, they’re expensive, but my goodness if you can find the CDs used somewhere or splurge on their overpriced app, the kids love and remember their awful songs! The Timeline song has been an atrocious gift that keeps on giving and I’m so happy it was and is a part of our lives.
This semester (Fall 2025), the oldest and I have been reading Charlotte Mason’s Ourselves. One of the fun things about homeschooling in the teen years is that as they grow and reason and read for themselves they really start to see the light regarding the choices you have made as a parent and educator over the years. Ourselves isn’t her favorite book, she didn’t catch right off the bat that Mason was alluding to Prudentius–She hasn’t read Prudentius. I’m 41 and have only read some of his work and The Fight for Mansoul just happened to be one of them because I’m a ‘buy all the Latin texts I can afford’ junkie.–But she is having thoughtful conversations with me about it and understands the value of it having been assigned. She can describe the Trivium and how it is needed when learning something new… you always start with the grammar stage (memorizing new facts, acquiring basic knowledge on a subject), move to a logic and dialectic stage (when you can understand and reason through the ideas presented in the subject at hand), and finally rest in a state of rhetoric (being able to express the ideas persuasively), and that these stages will be repeated throughout your whole life as you pursue new things to learn because education is a lifetime pursuit. It’s exciting to be here, even though she’s only in 9th grade, only fifteen years old, even though she wanted to start college courses several years ago and won’t be actually starting one until next semester, it is so exciting to be here and the teen years are absolutely my favorite… and I think Charlotte Mason (and more importantly God) has had a lot to do with that.
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Anakalian Whims 