Author: JenniferFitz

updated my homeschool blog link

Moved my homeschooling blog to a new location here on wordpress the other week.  Finally got the link updated today.

At the new location I’m also giving the blog a schedule.  I enjoy the way blogs lend themselves to sharing news & observations as they occur, but in practice, using the ‘spontaneous approach’ I always seem to end up composing posts in my head, but rarely getting them to you.   For better or for worse, the schedule here has been really helpful in getting me to actually write out more substantial posts than I would otherwise pretend I had time to write (you may be secretly wishing I wrote less substantial posts).

Anyhow, will try the same method for the homeschooling blog.  Three weeks out of four it will be miscellaneous homeschooling topics (about our school, about homeschooling in general, about what’s on our agenda); the other week is a ‘catholic’ topic.  As if I weren’t writing on enough catholic topics here.

Those tricky catholic topics, plus the education topics, means there’s a certain amount of overlap between the two blogs.  I do have logical plan for deciding what belongs on which blog, but at times it is a special kind of logic, not unlike the way I organize bookshelves, that is known to me alone.

In any case, if you haven’t found it yet, the new site is http://greencastlehomeschool.wordpress.com/ .  Enjoy.

A little satire for the season.

(FYI for curious readers, I’m an undecided voter at this time. That is, I of course cannot vote for Obama, no way no how until the democrats give up the abortion platform. But I’m not much of a Republican, either. I want to like the GOP, but it never seems to work out. As if puzzling out economic or environmental issues weren’t tricky enough, that whole war-n-torture thing just did me in.)

The living wage, health care costs, and structures of justice

When we talk about what a living wage should include, I think health care is the hardest to pin down. It’s fairly easy to know whether a person is clothed or has enough to eat. Housing is a bit more of a moving target – how much space does an individual *really need*?, we wonder; but still, “keeps me warm, dry, and safe” is a fairly straightforward criteria to assess.

Healthcare, though, is its own special world. Between the life-versus-death and quality-of-life type questions it poses, and the ever widening options for medical care, it is very hard to know and agree about what is the ‘right amount’ of health care. And if you don’t know how much your employees deserve, you can’t know whether you are compensating them adequately in this area.

Still, just because we aren’t ready to answer every question about health care doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to answer a few to get started. Doing so may, in turn, shed light on further questions.

The other week Darwin posted A Case Study on Costs and “Basic Health Care”, and I saved it in my bookmarks for linking here. If you haven’t read it, you need to go read it. If you already read it once, go back and read it again.

[BTW, having given birth four times in recent memory, I can vouch for the reality of the situation he describes — lest anyone dismiss this as an isolated or extreme example. No, this is the birthing business as usual, pretty much the new normal in the United States.]

Here’s a quote that summarizes:

As it stands, our medical system is built around the assumption that cost is no object. And doctors are very heavily penalized based on any “avoidable” injuries or deaths that occur on their watch. The result is that instead of providing good, high quality “basic” health care, and using extreme (and expensive) measures only when necessary, we often require extreme measures “just in case”. This makes it far, far more difficult to provide “basic” health care to all.

And here is what I want to say: Wake up Republicans! Health care reform is waiting for you! When I talked about ‘structures of justice’ this is exactly the kind of thing I meant. Do not labor under the illusion that a just society – one in which the poor are not trampled underfoot – is the sole province of the dreaded far left. There are good conservative solutions to these kinds of problems, and if we as a nation were to actually enact them, well, the left would have a lot less fodder for their tendency towards grand socialist fantasies.

The living wage is not a left- or right- wing ‘agenda’. It is a moral imperative. You cannot be a just person if your profit or your comfort depends on other people giving you their labor, and you not providing them the means to live in exchange. The good news is, that if we are willing to care about the people who are too sick or too in debt or working too long of hours to be actively engaged in the political process, we can come up with sensible, free-market-compatible ways to create a just society.

PSA: Text Size

I hate it when internet text is too small to read easily, and sometimes it seems like this blog is one of the offenders.  If you share that opinion, know that if you use Mozilla Firefox you can hit “ctrl +” (the control button and the plus button at the same time) to increase the text size.  Hit “ctrl-” to make the text smaller.

Sadly, my version of Internet Explorer is not so handy — when I tried increasing text size, it only enlarged the headings and titles, not the body text.  Good news is that Mozilla Firefox has been a great program and I highly recommend it.  I think you can download it here.

Lake Woebegone schools?

Picked up a book called Time to Learn by Christopher Gabrielli and Warren Goldstein; 264 pages of cheerleading for extended school hours. Here’s an interesting statistic from their introduction:

More than 60 percent of Americans (as measured by a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll) give the entire school system grades of C, D, or F. On the other hand, when it comes to their own community schools, or the schools their children attend, the grades improve markedly. Roughly half the respondents give their community schools an A or B, and 70 percent give the school their oldest child attends an A or B. We seem, in other words, to be convinced that the system as a whole is mediocre, while at the very same time we believe that the schools closest to us are just fine. Both cannot be true. We appear to have taken up residence in a town like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Woebegone, but one where all the schools are above average.

Gabrielli and Goldstien conclude that the parents are simply deluded. The *think* their children attend good schools, but in fact they do not. (And if only you do what the authors suggest, that will all be fixed. A topic I might look at next month.) Today I’d like to toss out an alternate theory for these apparently contradictory results.

***

When I was in college I lucked into an awesome course. Award-winning professor teaching a class that was highly recommended by the students who had taken it, and which promised to be the kind of thing you would be glad, decades later, that you had studied. I can remember sitting in class thinking to myself, “this is a really good class”. And knowing that if only I could be bothered to pay attention to the lecture and then actually do the homework, I would learn a ton.

Naturally, slack student that I was, I did not do this. I did the bare minimum to skate through the course, and frankly I even misestimated that minimum, and thus did more poorly than even I had hoped. If you used my knowledge coming out of that class as a guage of how good the course was, you would be very sorely mistaken. My conclusion: You cannot judge that quality of the teaching soley by the achievements of the students.

I can fully imagine that many parents who give their children’s schools high marks know this too well. The teacher is wonderful, if only you could convince your child to actually do the homework. There’s a fabulous school library, too bad your kid never wants to check any books out of it. And so forth. You can lead the kids to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.

So that’s one element of my theory: The parents can see that their children attend good schools – they are being asked to rate the school itself, not to rate how much their children actually bother to learn at the place.

The second part of my theory is this: Quality of education varies within schools. Again, this is not a big secret. There can be really good teachers and really lousy teachers working in the same building. If your child is able to get into the better classes, you’ll have a better impression of the quality of the schools. Sometimes this is even very explicit: a certain sub-population of students participate in a special program (honors, magnet school, resource room, bi-lingual classroom, etc) that gets all the best the school has to offer. Parents of the program may not even know that kids outside the special program aren’t getting as much attention or as good of teaching, and will rate the school highly based on their own experiences.

And thirdly, it all depends on what you want. Does your idea of a ‘top notch sports program’ mean that most varsity players will go to college on athletic scholarships? Or does it mean that 90% percent of the students are involved in an intra-mural sport? Asked to rate your own school on a given subject, you might give it a high grade because you know that an excellent specialty program is available for those who qualify; but you might in turn give a poor grade to other schools, because all you see is the statistics on the general student population.

And that leads to a final, a very likely, cause of the disconnect: We don’t actually know what happens at all the other schools. We can see the statistics on student performance, school violence, drop-out rates and so forth. We might see a newspaper article featuring students or alumni of other schools. If these give an ugly picture, we conclude those other schools aren’t doing so well. Our own school, in contrast, we know very well. We can give a more nuanced evaluation, one that distinguishes the efforts of the teachers and the administration from the results of the students, and that balances strengths and weaknesses in giving an overall judgement.

I think that Gabrielli and Goldstein present some good ideas in favor of the extended school day, though I have several reservations about making it a universal practice. But I think the accusation that parents are simply incapable of knowing that whether their children are currently offered a good education is both patronizing, and based on a very narrow interpretation of the statistics they offer.

[Funny contrast: When given objective data on the results of homeschooling students, I think people get too good of an impression. If you compared homeschoolers only to children of parents who were actively interested in education, enjoyed learning, spent significant time with their children, and supervised the children’s educational efforts to ensure homework was done, tests studied for, and classes chosen carefully, I bet the results between public-, private-, and home- schooled children would be very similar. Despite what the statistics might lead you to believe, homeschooling will not turn your child into a genius. Good form of education? Yes. But no alchemy in it.]

3rd Friday – Book Review

Note before I begin:  Two things always seem to happen to me when I visit Las Vegas:  1) My baggage arrives on a different plane than I do, and 2) I end up borrowing a computer that causes strange formatting issues on my blog.  The first is resolved now, but the 2nd I’m not so sure about.  If this post is difficult to read, my apologies, and if need be I’ll try to fix it when I get home.

 

***

 

Daily Life in Medieval Europe, Jeffery L. Singman (Greenwood Press, 1999)

Daily Life in Chaucer’s England, Jeffery L. Singman and Will McLean (Greenwood Press, 1995)

Daily Life in Elizabethan England, Jeffery L. Singman (Greenwood Press, 1995)

 

Summary: These are some of the better history books I’ve seen.  They may or may not be what you are looking for, but if you are interested in the topics they cover, I think they do a great job.  I can’t say there was never a single sentence that made me pause and go ‘hmmn’, but I don’t have any of the reservations I have about other very helpful but still flawed works on the same era.

***

The SuperHusband brought two of these three home from our local library for me last fall. I was skeptical (judging the book by the cover and all that), but eventually boredom got the best of me and I cracked one open. Pleasant surprise.  [The three are part of a larger series, but I haven’t read any of the other titles in the series, which are by other authors.]  I made myself read the entirety of Medieval Europe last fall so that I could write a proper review; I think I read all of Elizabethan as well, or at least the bulk of it; Chaucer’s England I picked up the a few weeks ago when I went to fetch the others in order to prepare this post, and have skimmed it to see what’s there, but have only read snatches of it in any detail. I lump them together because they are all by the same author, and are very similar to each other in the kinds of information and comments they contain, and are all of similarly good quality.

 

As the titles indicate, these books deal with what ordinary life was like in the indicated time periods; if you want detailed accounts of kings, bishops, and battles, you’ll need to find some other book – though these do each open with a brief overview the history of the period, to help put the bulk of the book into context. In contrast, if you always wanted to know about how much it would cost* to buy a quart of ale in 16th century England, or maybe you have some spare honeycombs sitting around and were looking for a nice medieval mead recipe to use them up, these books can help.

 

The goal of the series is to provide an entry-level to intermediate resource, but which is more substantial than most beginner’s histories. At this is fully succeeds. Something like this would be a good choice before trying to get into A Day in a Medieval City (which I reviewed last month). The reading level is adult, but not overwhelmingly complex or technical – a high school student shouldn’t have any difficulty with the books, and would probably really enjoy picking one out to read as part of a European History course.

 

I expect that younger students who are strong readers and highly interested in the subject would also find them accessible, and it is fairly easy to skip to the sections of high interest for those who don’t want to read the whole book. That said, parental guidance is always recommended – I can’t recall anything particularly objectionable, but I’m fairly sure I ran across some adultish topics, though if your children are already immersed in contemporary American pop culture (mine are not) I bet you’ll never bat an eyelash.  If nothing else the discussion of religion is one where parents may want to provide some perspective.

 

What I really love about these books is the respect with which they describe and speculate about the people living in medieval and renaissance Europe. The author comes from a living-history background, and I think this really shows through – people of the past are treated as ordinary people quite like ourselves. The three d’s of the gossip-method history writing – dumb, depraved, and disgusting – are refreshingly absent, and without succumbing to the opposite error of combining nostalgia and amnesia to gloss over the difficult realities of the time period.

 

Another strength is the avoidance of gross generalizations. Medieval Europe, the title most likely to succumb to that temptation, limits itself to the high middle ages – approximately 1100 to 1300 – and to northwestern Europe. In each of the chapters devoted to village, city, monastic and castle life, a specific location (one for which ample documentation is available) is chosen and examined in detail. Rather than pretending that you could possibly explain two hundred years and four countries worth of monastic life in a single chapter, for example, the book gives you a detailed look inside Cluny, thus giving you a general idea of what a monk’s life might have been by showing just how it was in that particular time and place.

 

All three books are geared towards helping the re-creationist get started. There are specific instructions for making clothing, as well period songs with sheet music, descriptions of how to play period games, specific recipes culled from historical sources, and so forth.   For that reason these books would make an excellent resource for planning a themed party, educational event, or costuming and set ideas for a play (or story) set in the relevant era.  Obviously Chaucer’s England is just begging to be read by anyone studying The Cantebury Tales, and Elizabethan England would likewise be a natural accompaniment to a study of Shakespeare.

 

Some differences between Medieval Europe and Chaucer’s England, in case you are wondering which title will better fit your needs:  As I mentioned above, the former covers the period from 1100 to 1300, whereas the latter focuses on the second half of the 14thcentury.  Also, as one could guess from the titles, Europe covers a slightly broader geographic era than England.  In addition to the study of Cluny, the chapter on town life uses Paris (mining the data from the 1292 tax assessments for evidence) as its sample city.  The sections on castle and village life are based on locations in England.  Chaucer’s England leans very strongly in the direction of aid to the aspiring re-creationist; it lacks these detailed studies of archeological sites as found in Medieval Europe, but seems to have more material on clothing, music, games, and so forth.

 

*Answer: about a half-penny.

 

2nd Friday – History

It’s time to put together my 08-09 curricula for the kids, and in doing that I made my annual visit to the education section of my local public library (the 370’s per Dewey Decimal, FYI) to borrow a couple books I always find helpful in that process.

While there I came upon Educating Deaf Students: From Research to Practice (Marschark, Lang & Albertini; Oxford University Press, 2002), and of course I had to take it home, because, well, it looked interesting. Not a topic I have any real pressing need to master, any more than one needs to master, say, knitting, or Latin, but a subject about which I know very little and think it would be neat to learn a little more. As it happens I’m only on page 31 and holding, so I can’t tell you whether the book is any good, though it looks promising.

I’ve never seen the topic of educating deaf people show up in a regular history book, so I wanted to share a few interesting bits from this book:

“Saint Augustine’s descriptions of a conversation between hearing and deaf persons suggest that such communication [via a form of sign language] was commonplace. This may indicated that converastion among deaf people in late ancient Roman society was not only familiar, but that deaf people were not as isolated as some have surmised.” (p. 18)

“In the late 1400’s, Agricola described a deaf person who had been taught to read and write.” (p.19)

The book goes on to list four distinguished renaissance artists, one of whom studied history and the scriptures in a monastary, and was known to have communicated using signs with his parish priest, who had no difficulty understanding. And then we learn about the work of the spanish benedictine monk, Pedro Ponce de Leon:

“It was in 1578 that Ponce de Leon described how he had taught the congenitally deaf sons of great lords and other notables to read and write, attain a knowledge of Latin and Greek, study natural philosophy (science) and history, and to pray. Ponce de Leon’s students included the deaf brothers Pedro and Francisco de Velasco, and the congenitally deaf Fray Gaspar, who later became a priest.” (p. 20)

The history continues into the modern era (shifting to England and then the United States), for those who are interested in learning more.

I wish bits of information like this were included in more general-purpose works of history. I do realize, of course, that editors have a need to pare down and pick and choose what makes the final cut in a history text. On the other hand, I think these little reports really add to our understanding of life in ancient Rome or renaissance Europe.

***

Curiously, the authors observed about the middle ages: ” . . . we find little biographical informtion that might help us understand how deaf people lived. It seems likely, however, that the Dark Ages were especially dark for deaf persons.” (p. 18)

I’m not entirely convinced myself of that conclusion — what evidence the authors offer supports the ‘little information’ assertion and not the ‘especially dark’ assumption. I tend to be more optimistic than not, I suppose because of the reports from the eras immediately before and after. But since neither of us have any information, there’s no telling what the real story is.

To Each According to His Need?

1st Friday, so we’re back to economics, and continuing with the living wage series. To see the whole series, click on the ‘living wage’ category in the sidebar.

***

Today I want to tackle what I think is one of the thorniest of catechism’s bits about the living wage. Let’s just jump right into it:

“In determining fair pay both the needs and the contributions of each person must be taken into account.” CCC 2434.

The catechism goes on to list what kind of needs we are talking about:

“Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level . . .”

Put these two together, and we come to a very counter-cultural conclusion: A just wage is not simply ‘equal pay for equal work’ or ‘how much your work adds to the bottom line’. Workers’ wages should also take into account how much the workers need to support their dependents. The thorny bit: the worker’s need is going to vary according to family size.

Let the objections begin . . .

A common one goes something like this: “But what about the single mother of twelve who is unable to do anything more skilled than bag groceries, and she lives in southern California? You mean I have to pay her six figures to do a minimum wage job or else I’m going to hell??”

And then there is the more personal: “That’s not fair! Why should the programmer in the next cube, who has the same degree as me and does the exact same work, get paid more than me just because he has a wife and three kids to support, and I’m still a bachelor?”

The first objection refers to an extraordinary case; like all extraordinary cases, it distracts us from the vast teritorries of normal family situations, which is where our attention really ought to lie. We can’t possibly know how to deal with exceptions to the rule, unless we know how to apply the rule to the situations for which it was made. The second objection invites us to remember some of the perfectly reasonable ways employers already solve this problem, without needing church or state to tell them they must. We’ll look at each point in turn.

1. How this all works in the ordinary cases.

Under ordinary circumstances, workers tend to increase in productivity over time. As it happens, people also tend to gather more responsibility in their private life over time as well. A teenager may not have very many work skills, but he typically doesn’t have any dependents, either.

With more experience and education, the worker’s ability to contribute to the profitability of a business increases. In a justly-ordered economy, it is reasonable to assume that a man in his twenties has acquired enough work skills to be able to support a small family. By the time he has a larger, more expensive family, he ought to also have acquired more skills and experience that make his contribution to the business that much more valuable.

It should be noted that the increase in usefulness to the business over time is not only due to collecting additional technical skills. A factory-line worker may be doing the same type of work after so many years on the job, but with experience can be counted on to train other workers, deal with problems in the equipment, be respsonsible for leading a team or for developing ways to improve production, and so forth. There is much more to widget-making than completing the one-week widget-machine operation course. It is reasonable for employers to pay workers higher pay as they grow in experience, even if they continue to do the same general type of ‘low skill’ work.

Likewise, workers changing industries, or returning to paid work after a long absence to care for family members, are not teenagers again. Though they may not be able to contribute as much to the business (or not in the same way) as someone who has built up a repertoire of industry-specific technical skills, under normal circumstances they should not be considered ‘entry-level’ workers. Employers are right to recongize the skills that come with maturity and years of experience handling responsibility, and to compensate the newly-hired older workers accordingly.

In summary: The normal model for the human lifecycle is harmonious with the church’s teaching on just wages.

So what to do with the exceptional cases? You have to treat exceptions to the rule as the exceptions that they are. The solution is often going to fall outside of the realm of just wage rates. But most people shouldn’t fall into the ‘exception’ category. It is normal for adults to get married and have children – being able to support a large family should not be a privilege for the upper middle class. It is normal for workers and their family members to have health problems, even to die – providing for medical care and life insurance should not be considered above and beyond the just wage. Which leads us to the other point I’m going to address today.

2. Fair solutions to the ‘unfairness’ problem.

My point in this section is simple: We already have, within the american economic tradition, a means of providing a just wage to workers that takes into account individuals’ varying needs. By paying workers a base wage based on the specific job, and then offering additional benefits (medical insurance, dental coverage, etc) that scale up according the number of dependents, companies manage to strike a balance between equal work for equal pay versus taking into account the needs of the worker.

It is a model that expands well. According to local needs, this approach could also be used to include benefits such as school tuition for dependents, a housing allowance that depends on family size, and so forth.

This is isn’t the only possible solution, but it is one. I mention it both because it is a viable tool, and because I want to emphasize that the whole notion of ‘taking into account the needs of the worker’ is not some foreign idea being foisted upon us; it is a concept that makes enough intuitive sense that we already do it despite ourselves.

***

Next week’s planned topic is a bit of a history-book rant. I promise not to make too many of these, but it’s just so hard to resist when someone tosses out an argument as if begging me to scoop it up and chuck it back. (In this case the work came from fellow amateurs at history, though professionals in their regular fields of expertise.) And if I do go that route, my goal is to follow it on the 3rd Friday with a book review of a history book that I actually like, a lot, just to prove to you that I’m not grumpy about everything all the time. Plus it’s a good book.

Surprising Foreign Language Helps

4th Friday, so it’s an education-related topic. I originally started this article for my homeschooling blog, but never got around to finishing it. I’m putting it here because I think that plenty of non-homeschooling (and non-any-kind-of-schooling) readers may be interested as well. So many reasons to want or need to learn a foreign language.

***

In teaching the kids French, and in toying around with assorted languages on my own (I’m purely a hobbyist: I love to study languages, but I am only competent in the two), I’ve stumbled on a handful of little language-learning helps that don’t get much press. I wanted to share them, in the hopes that they could be of use to others.

1. The Joys of Bad Latin Last summer when I first began my long slow effort to learn Latin, I picked up a copy of a Latina Christiana CD at a used book fair. It was a bit surreal, hearing Latin spoken in a light southern accent. I imagine a meticulous homeschooling mother living in the suburbs Charleston, sitting in her tidy living room and calling out vocabulary words. Fitting, of course, for ecclesiastical Latin, the epitome of second languages – it’s supposed to be used by foreigners, why try to hide your inner barbarian?

I agree, of course, that a language program ought to include instruction on the correct (native) pronunciation; but there are times when it is helpful to hear that foreign language spoken by someone with *your* accent. The reason is that your ear identifies the sounds better. If you are having trouble hearing where one word ends and another begins, or telling whether that was an “r” or an “l” in the middle of that word, this method helps. Especially so in cases when reading the language is difficult, such as for young children.

With my kids I usually give them the normal (native) pronunciation of the word first. If they look at me funny and repeat back something horribly off-base, I give them the word again with a solid american accent, so they can clearly differentiate each sound. We go back to the native pronunciation once they have a better idea what they are trying to say.

2. Bad English: More Useful than You Knew Now it is painful to hear a language mangled. Even more importantly, learning good pronunciation and intonation is essential if you want people to actually understand you. So the second helpful technique is the exact opposite of the first: Listen to your own language (probably English, if you are reading this) spoken by someone who has a heavy accent in the foreign language you are trying to learn. [Ahem: you want a real fluent speaker of the language, not your dearly beloved doing a bad stage accent.] This trains your ear to be able to distinguish the sounds of the foreign language, and gives you a feel for the pace and intonation of the language. You can start learning the sound of the foreign language as spoken fluently, long before you are able to understand whole conversations. Bonus: What trains your ear trains your mouth, as well.

A series that does this is the Bonjour Les Amis videos for children. Not a perfect program, and the style of presentation would be frustrating to some types of learners — but its great strength is that the narrator speaks his English in a powerfully-Parisian accent. A good choice for accent-training as a supplement to whatever else you are using. Presumably the Hola Amigos series does the same, but I have not yet checked them out (our local public library carries both).

[Keep in mind that if you are trying to a learn a language spoken by residents of your own town, you can probably find real live people who would like to practice their English with you. Not that spending an hour with a DVD is somehow inferior to spending an hour with a real person . . . ]

3. Partial Immersion Around here a popular source homeschool-inferiority-complex are the outstanding academic programs available at some of our public schools. Several of our elementary schools have started early-years foreign-language-immersion programs. The children spend half their school day learning entirely in the second langauge. (The program begins in kindergarten – good timing, since recall that back in the day children used to only go to kindegarten half a day, anyway. So no real loss of academic time, by my reckoning.)

Immersion is a very effective way — I would say, the most effective way — to gain fluency in a foreign language. (You still need to study grammar if you wish to be literate, same as a native speaker). To that end, sometimes you read that families learning a second language ought to have a “French night” or “Spanish night” when only the new language can be spoken.

It’s a lovely idea, except you end up saying, “Paul, I present my friend Stephanie. Would you like a blue pencil? Where is the train to Lyons?” Fine things to say, but what you really wanted was the French for, “No you may not put ketchup in your sister’s water glass, even if she did tell you it is her favorite drink.” (And even if *you* knew the french, your young bartender would swear he heard you say, “yes, go ahead.”)

A more realistic method for those of us who can’t pull off total-immersion is foreign-language wading. Use the language, and use it all the time, but combine it with your own. As in, “Non, you may not put le ketchup in your soeur‘s water glass, even if she did tell you it was her boisson preferée.” Gradually it will contain more foreign vocabulary and syntax, but even at the beginning you can practice using what little you have learned. My kids have learned 98% of what they know from this approach.* (Though Mr. Boy is about to start a regular grammar book, now that he’s able to work from a textbook on his own.)

–> Another advantage to this method over total-immersion is that everyone can participate, even if there are widely-varying skill levels. People who don’t know how to ask for the train to Lyons can still get in a mention about the blue pencil from time to time. (“Please take my crayon bleu out of your mouth.”) Perfectly acceptable to use a word in the foreign language, pause to translate if your listener doesn’t get it, and then keep moving.

So you don’t think I made up this last approach myself: A program that effectively uses partial-immersion is the 10 Minutes a Day series, which are geared towards preparation for tourist travel. If you need to know how to ask directions and buy lunch, this is your course. Lightweight and compact, too. I have some of the older editions, so I can’t tell you how good the CD’s are – back in the day we just used the children’s-encyclopedia-style pronunciation guides in the text, and that got us close enough.

***

So there you have it, three handy techniques that may be helpful in your foreign language learning efforts. Next week we’re back to economics, continuing with the living wage series. Probable topic will be one of those “They can’t really mean that!” bits of the catechism — you know, the ones that make you think the pope must be a communist or something. (Hint: he isn’t.) TBD, though, as my nieces arrive from out of town on Tuesday, and you never know what will happen from there.

*Combined with method #2, my daughter has also learned how to fake the French language, causing her great-grandparents to be inappropriately impressed with her language skills. But I promise grandma, I am teaching her *real* French, too.

Book Review: A Day in a Medieval City

A Day in a Medieval City, Chiara Frugoni

University of Chicago Press, 2005 ISBN: 0-226-26634-6

(Originally published as Storia di un gionro in una citta medievale, Laterza, 1997)

Chiara Frugoni is a professor of medival history at the University of Rome, and this book builds on articles written by her father, Arsenio Frugoni, who died in 1970 and who was also, in his time, a professor of medieval history at the University of Rome.

The book begins with an introduction consisting of Arsenio Frugoni’s original work, which vividly captures the feeling of life in an eleventh or twelfth century Italian city, as well a brief perspective on how it reached its medieval form. Chiara Frugoni adds seven chapters that explore various themes ( “Inside the City” “Childhood Learning”, etc.) in more detail. It seems to me she draws the majority of her examples from the late medieval period (14th and 15th centuries).

The book is written for adults, both in reading level and content, but is very approachable for the hobbyist-historian. Someone who has never studied medieval history at all might be more comfortable reading some more introductory works first, and going to this one as a sort of ‘intermediate’ level text. Detailed endnotes add another layer of depth.

This is a book I can’t help but like, despite several reservations I’ll mention below. The vividness of detail is positively delightful, and with little to none of the gee-whiz snappiness that plagues many popular works on medieval history. For example there is an exploration of the role pigs played in the city (as garbage collectors), including period accounts of pig-related incidents. If you are looking for illustrations of medieval dress and furnishings, there are 153 images available for your perusal.

The most compelling feature of the book is this enormous collection of (period) illustrations it contains, and the explanations that go with them. A typical medieval history book might have a caption that gives the title, author, date and place of creation. Chiara Frugoni puts detailed descriptions in the text of the book, often describing a work panel by panel, to help draw the eye to details the reader would otherwise overlook or perhaps not comprehend at all.

[A note of caution: the illustrations include all aspects of medieval life. Including, say, the torture and execution of captured enemies. Not for the faint of heart. On the other hand, haven’t you always wanted to see a little toilet-related artwork, and the discover the story that goes with?]

One of the weaknesses of the book, though an understandable one, is that it flits back and forth through a broad time frame, even within paragraphs. Topics are arranged by theme (medicine, education, religious belief, etc), and often the entire medieval period is treated in the aggregate. It is helpful to have studied the timeline of medieval history elsewhere, so that you can parse apart references that mix and match centuries.

This is probably one of the first works on specifically Italian medieval history that I’ve read, and I think I probably missed a few jumps between cities as well. I liked the work because it dealt with a region I hadn’t previously studied (most lay-accessible english-language books on medieval “Europe” tend to focus on England), but as a result, I really didn’t have the capacity to know just how alike or different, say, Venice and Milan might have been at the time, and whether an anecdote from one city reliably shed light on the other.

Last in my list of complaints, there were moments when I thought the generalizations needed a little more documentation. For example, at one point the author writes in a passage on women reading, “They used reading stands made for the men of the house (it is difficult to imagine that they were built to meet the particular needs of women)”. Now this may be entirely true, and yet it is a terribly bold statement to make – here we are looking at illustration after illustration of women reading, and we are to believe that in this time and place men didn’t give their wives gifts related to their daily activities? It may well be the case, but any time you accuse whole gender of utter selfishness towards their own family members*, it would seem appropriate to present a bit of evidence.

Likewise there were times when I wanted a little more context for a quotation. I found myself wondering, Is this preacher condemning something that is widely practiced, or is he largely “preaching to the choir”? Is his opinion widely held in the church, or was his sermon preserved because of its unusual nature? I also wish the references to witchcraft had been footnoted – so many excellent footnotes elsewhere had me spoiled, I suppose.

And I think these last examples sum up my mixed feelings towards the work as a whole. It’s a beautiful book, a splendid look into a region that isn’t as well known to English-speaking readers, full of detail after vivid detail about medieval life. But it is a book you would want to read with a bit of salt handy – hold onto the treasure trove of illustrations and anecdotes, but be prepared to want to question some of the interpretation.

|

|

*In our home the accusation tends to be kind of the reverse. “Oh honey, how thoughtful! A reading stand? For me? It’s just what you’ve always wanted!”