Say a prayer for Doug Wrenn, that writing this piece will help him to accept the forgiveness he’s already received.
Via After Abortion.
bearing blog
bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
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Is it absurd to approach the priest and ask for anonymous confession?
Commenter Patrick Laws asks a good question, apropos this post about face-to-face confessions, in which I noted that either priest or penitent has the right under canon law to insist on anonymous (behind the screen) confessions:
Does anyone else recognize the absurdity of the notion of a penitent approaching his priest and insisting on "anonymous" confession?
Depends how he approaches the priest. He might call anonymously for a confession by appointment and ask to meet the priest in the confessional rather than in the foyer, or in the office, or whatever.
Or someone — perhaps a woman or child — might insist on using the confessional rather than the priest’s office, not for anonymity, but because of feeling that it’s inappropriate or even risky to meet any man, priest or no, alone in his office.
Thirdly, some people feel more comfortable behind the screen. (Not that confession has to be comfortable — but some people have an easier time opening up and making a complete confession.) Even if the priest knows who you are, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask to use a confessional, assuming there’s one available. Anonymity isn’t the only reason for the screen — which is why I added "(behind the screen)" as a parenthesis to describe the kind of confession that either priest or penitent is allowed to seek.
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Spanish.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Spanish — teaching it to the kids, that is. There’s so much material available for Spanish speakers, and we live in a heavily Spanish-speaking part of town. It’s the obvious language to do, if we’re going to do a foreign language at all.
Problem: I don’t know Spanish.
I’d like to learn, though. I wonder if we could learn it together as a family?
I’m not happy with the "complete curricula" I’ve seen. Frankly, I’m spoiled. I studied French off and on in elementary school, took four years in high school, and got a minor in college. I had excellent teachers, and my high school education in French was very traditional and rigorous: lots of vocabulary drills, copywork, and translation; journal writing; classes taught mostly in French after the first year. I keep expecting to be able to find something out there for kids to learn Spanish that reminds me of what I had as a high school student (albeit written for a third- or fifth- grade level). Haven’t found it. I am really disappointed, so far, in what’s available for homeschoolers.
I was a bit tempted to pick up the classroom curriculum that’s used by our parish school, which does Spanish in grades K-6, for no other reason than that I know the other curricula they use are extremely high quality and tend to the classical/traditional style (Saxon Math, for instance, and the Faith and Life series of religion texts from Ignatius Press.) It’s Viva El Espanol, a McGraw-Hill series. Unfortunately, it appears to come with a bunch of classroomy educational crap, like an octopus puppet. Also the descriptions are full of edspeak, like "The Total Physical Response Storytelling (TPRS) technique is now a part of lessons!" Whatever that means. I don’t suppose I could get away with just using a textbook, or maybe a text plus a teachers’ edition.
I suppose I could start the way I started in French, with a boatload of vocabulary drills. I remember how helpful the vocabulary drill was back in high school — the eighth-grade "pre-French" year consisted of almost nothing but vocabulary drill and a little bit of conversational stuff. A bit tedious at times, but having all those vocabulary words at hand really helped when it was time to learn grammar in ninth grade. Technically, all I need for that is a good dictionary and a stack of 5 x 8 index cards — picture on the front, Spanish word on the back. I found this website that sells access, $30 for six months, to downloads of 2000 or so clip-art type flash cards. So for $30 plus the cost of printing and filing I could have a starter kit of 2000 vocabulary words. It’s hard to beat that. I tried — there’s lots of "English/Spanish" flash card sets out there, but just about all of them have English words on the front and Spanish on the back (no good for teaching nonreaders — and anyway, forces the learner to "translate" rather than to think in the new language) or English words on the back, Spanish words and pictures on the front.
So suppose we spend a couple of years just working on vocabulary. I bet the kids would enjoy learning the Spanish names for colors, animals, various verbs, conversational phrases, and so on. Maybe during that time a decent Spanish curriculum for homeschoolers will come along. In the meantime we can supplement with various videos, multimedia stuff, and the like. Still, I wish some publisher somewhere would read my mind and put together a program exactly like the one I imagine using in my head. I just finished phonics — I don’t want to design my own Spanish program unless I absolutely have to!
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Good Samaritans apparently don’t make it to the summit of Mt. Everest.
More than 40 climbers passed a dying man on Mount Everest last week. A few offered some assistance but all, essentially, left him to die.
David Sharp, 34, died while descending from the summit during a solo climb last week, apparently of oxygen deficiency.
More than 40 climbers are thought to have seen him as he lay dying, and almost all continued to the summit without offering assistance.
It’s a risky endeavor, no doubt. But that doesn’t excuse the ones who passed him.
New Zealander Mark Inglis, who became the first double amputee to reach the mountain’s summit on prosthetic legs, told Television New Zealand that his party stopped during its May 15 summit push and found Sharp close to death.
A member of the party tried to give Sharp oxygen and sent out a radio distress call before continuing to the summit, he said. …
Inglis said Sharp had no oxygen when he was found. He said there was virtually no hope that Sharp could have been carried to safety…His own party was able to render only limited assistance and had to put the safety of its own members first, Inglis said Wednesday.
Had to put the safety of its own members first eh? That might be plausible if you had been on your way down. Not so plausible when you’re still going up.
"I walked past David but only because there were far more experienced and effective people than myself to help him," Inglis said.
Who was he expecting to help him, the Mount Everest Ski Patrol?
A decent person, even knowing he couldn’t get David off the mountain, might have stayed at his side. At least then he wouldn’t have died alone.
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Communion, without wheat.
First Holy Communion for a little boy with celiac disease. Read it, and then wonder even more why some families would rather leave the Church because the Methodists (or whoever) offer them a rice wafer.
Not everyone is aware of this teaching, but we believe that the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ are fully present both in the consecrated host and in the chalice. Receiving from the chalice alone is, therefore, full reception of the sacrament, just as is receiving the host alone.
h/t MrsDarwin.
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Oldest living institution.
Yesterday a friend asked me, "Is it true what I heard the other day, that the Catholic Church is the oldest still-running human institution?" I said yes — yeah, there’s older religions, but you can’t say that any of them are institutions per se. If the Temple in Israel was still standing, you’d have one, but it’s not.
I thought of that today when Amy Welborn highlighted an article about the Didache, an important teaching document of the early Church. Some parts of this document might date to as early as 48 A. D. — the parts about liturgy — and most scholars date it between 60 AD and 110 AD. I wrote a post about it last year, when I was working through some of the early Church documents.
The entire Didache may be read here. It’s quite short. Among other things it presents a picture of liturgy in the early Church. An older Christian who was attending Masses and baptisms when the Didache was set down to describe them, might have been the child that Jesus drew onto his lap in the Gospel: after all, the latest estimated date of the Didache is only 71 years after the Crucifixion, and parts of it might only date to 19 years after the Crucifixion. That liturgy is still recognizable today in the Mass. We are today the same body who produced that document, and the style and the flavor is as present to me now as that I would sense in a pastoral letter promulgated yesterday.
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Unnecessary medical tests.
Kevin, M. D. writes about unnecessary medical testing. Via this week’s Grand Rounds, always a good read.
One of the links clicks through to an analysis of Dick Cheney’s annual exam — which of the listed tests are and aren’t evidence-based needs for routine preventive screening. I thought it was a well-crafted post. Part of the over-testing problem is created by the media’s renormalization of what tests ought to be done. And Dick Cheney’s annual exam got press. Another link from Kevin’s post goes to an article written by a doctor who was sued because he discussed the risks and benefits of a test with a patient. The plaintiff’s lawyer argued that the doc, then a resident, should not have given the patient the opportunity to exercise informed consent; i.e., that he should have just ordered the test without giving the patient the choice.
Doctors are not always the bad guys when it comes to the limitations of patient choice. Many of them must see every patient, or even every healthy individual who comes for a consultation, as a potential litigant. In a culture like this I can hardly blame them.
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After my walk to the wok, I caught some z’s in a cot.
The phonology update to my last post sent me to the Wikipedia article "Free Vowel," where I found a name for something I’ve been searching for.
A side effect of working simultaneously on reading programs for our respective children: My two friends and I have discovered that we all talk funny, at least to each other. "What do you mean you pronounce dour ‘dow-er?’ It’s ‘doo-er’! Look, I have a dictionary RIGHT HERE. Oh, what do you know, we’re both right." Probably this is compounded by the fact that I grew up in Ohio, Melissa grew up in Utah, and Hannah grew up in Texas (though you wouldn’t know it to hear her talk. Unless you can get her to pronounce dour for you, I suppose. Maybe it’s because she’s spent the last ten years married to a Tennessean half-Brit.)
Melissa and I argued for a while about whether the vowel sounds in hot and in law were two different phonemes — that is, whether to teach them as two different sounds — or whether they were really the same phoneme, /o/. She said they were the same. I insisted that they were different and that treating them the same must be some weird regionalism unique to Utah and Minnesota: "I sleep in a cot. I caught a fish. Look, THEY ARE DIFFERENT WORDS AND THEY SOUND DIFFERENT. TOTALLY DIFFERENT." She would say patiently, "I can see that your lips are moving differently but they are the same." Finally we went to the dictionary, which proved to my astonishment that cot and caught are, in "standard" English, homonyms. Apparently I am actually a Southerner or Cockney or some such.
But look! In the Wikipedia article on free vowels, the list of free vowels includes both sounds:
/(phonological symbol)/ as in paw (doesn’t occur in varieties with the low back merger).
/(different phonological symbol)/ as in bra
What’s this about the low back merger? Wikipedia to the rescue again. It turns out that my observation about "cot" and "caught" has been made before (by non-rank amateurs!):
The cot-caught merger (also known as the low back merger) is a phonemic merger, a sound change, that occurs in some varieties of English. The merger occurs in some accents of Scottish English (Wells 1982, 400) and to some extent in Mid Ulster English (Wells 1982, 443), but is best known as a phenomenon of many varieties of North American English.
The sound change causes the vowel in words like cot, rock, and doll to be pronounced the same as the vowel in the words caught, talk, law, and small, so that for example cot and caught become homophones, and the two vowel classes become merged as a single phoneme. …The presence of the merger and its absence are both found in many different regions of the continent, and in both urban and rural environments.
And there’s a map! Indicating that, in fact, the cot-caught merger is rampant in a broad swath of the western U. S. that includes (aha!) Utah and parts of Minnesota. My speech happens to be untainted by this particular deviancy. (I grew up in Southwestern Ohio, an area "where speakers are transitional and inconsistent" w.r.t. the cot-caught merger.) I shall redefine the norm as MINE. It’s closer to the Queen’s English!
I’ve also been searching for evidence that wok and walk are not homophones. Melissa makes fun of me for insisting that the /l/ is pronounced, or at least that it affects the preceding vowel. The best I could find is this post at Dooce, and I’m not sure if it buttresses my phonemic theories that it involves an argument between two people raised in Utah.
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A little more than a year.
That’s how long I’ve been teaching Oscar to read. I didn’t realize it until my friend asked me a couple of days ago, after Oscar read one of his Bob Books to her:
Polly was a jolly bird.
"Hello, Polly," said Jon. "Hello, Polly," said Dolly.
Polly flapped. Polly bobbed.
Polly flew to Dolly. Polly sat on Dolly.
Jon and Dolly went to a shop. The shop had lolly-pops.
Jon had six pennies. Dolly had ten pennies.
Jon and Dolly got lolly-pops.
"Umm, umm, umm!" said Jon. "Yum, yum, yum!" said Dolly.
Polly wants a lolly-pop.
"O.K., Polly," said Dolly. "O.K., Polly," said Jon.
The end.
He read it flawlessly — not too surprising to me, since he’s been working on that one all week — but she had a point. He’s come pretty far in a year! And so have I. It seems like we’ve been doing reading forever. Maybe, she suggested, because there are just so many details to cover. And because my friends and I developed the "curriculum" essentially on our own (most of the groundwork being laid by the one with the oldest child), comparing notes about what worked and what didn’t.
I still remember sitting down with Oscar — he was about four and a half years old — and introducing the very first spellings: m for /m/ and a for /a/ — that is, the so-called "short A sound." (Who came up with the idea of calling vowels "short" and "long," incidentally? Any vowel can last as long as you have breath). I used Montessori-style "sandpaper letters" — kind of like these, except I made my own from textured paper and cardstock — to introduce the phonemes and the spellings. That first day I showed him the first word, too: am.
The next day I added the spellings s for /s/ and o for /o/, and showed him the words mass, mom, and sam. Each day we added one or two more spellings, and a few more words became available. We practiced tracing the sandpaper letters, writing the spellings with a finger in a tray of salt, and flashcard-type drills. I knew that many kids get the names of letters and the sounds they spell mixed up, so I never mentioned the names of the letters (more on that in this post).
I remember that it took quite a long time before Oscar made the connection between phonemes and words. He would dutifully "read" a series of discrete phonemes from a paper: I would show him sat and he would say "sss. aaa. t." But he was completely unable to hear the word "sat" in that string of noises. Day after day I’d say "Slide them together: sat." Day after day he could not understand what I meant. I tried word-building: having him listen for the sounds in sat and put the letter tiles a, s, t in the correct order. That was frustrating for both of us. Then one day, he simply got it. He understood what I meant by "slide them together into a word." I don’t know what happened inside his brain, but that was the missing piece.
After that, we could go much more quickly. After the single-letter spellings were mastered, I added some digraphs. I remember that the first one was er for /er/. Lots of words there. Then sh for /sh/. The first so-called "long vowel" was ai for /ae/— even though he’d had the single letter a for quite a long time, I always had it spell /a/ as in hat. I guess if there was any theory behind it all, it was "Avoid breaking the bad news — that English spellings are complicated and often ambiguous — until it’s absolutely necessary." I didn’t want him to have to grasp how difficult reading can be until he had plenty of experience successfully reading lots of words.
There were some discoveries along the way. I thought that, to keep it interesting, I’d have to give him sentences and stories early on. But that was just frustrating — it was too hard for him to keep a whole sentence in mind while he was struggling to decode one word at a time. What a relief it was to abandon the sentences and stories in favor of simple lists of words (especially since my approach precluded using common "sight words" — it’s hard to compose good sentences without "the" or "some" or "you!") I tried to choose words that I knew would please him. ("Daddy! Daddy! I can read jigsaw!") Occasionally I’d challenge his memory with two-word compounds like pop can. Only after he got much faster at reading individual words did I start with sentences and stories.
Once I’d introduced one spelling each for nearly all the English phonemes — forty-two or so — I delivered "bad news" that most of them could, in fact, be spelled several different ways. And then I embarked on many weeks of introducing the more common spellings of forty different phonemes, the forty spellings in somewhat random order. I tried to stay ahead of where he was. Just this morning I finished writing the last ten lessons, covering the sounds /v/ as in van, /zh/ as in measure, /ch/ as in pitch, /z/ as in closet, /ee/as in taxi. We should be done with them by the end of next week.
And then… no more formal reading lessons, except maybe as needed to reinforce one concept or another, or to point out a potentially helpful pattern that we haven’t done yet. (For example, I haven’t yet found a good time to teach the so-called "magic e" or "silent e", you know, the one that "turns cap into cape, tap into tape" — there never seemed a point when it would be more helpful than confusing — consider the words love, come, have, some, give, live, above, granite, were, and many others. Can it really be a "rule" when there are so damn many exceptions? And yet, it is a common enough pattern that he should learn it eventually.)
Nothing but making sure he spends plenty of time each day reading. And I’m so looking forward to that. Teaching reading has been interesting, if intense. Milo’s three years younger. I figure that Oscar will be just about ready to take off on his own when it’s time to start Milo on /a/ and /m/. I wonder if it will be boring the second time around?
UPDATE FOR PHONOLOGY NERDS. Jamie of Selkie points me to the Wikipedia "Vowel" article re: "long" and "short" vowels, and writes: "A phonetician calls them tense/lax vowels, and tense vowels typically last longer than lax vowels." (That’s so in some languages, including RP English, according to the "Tenseness" Wikipedia article — is it so in American English dialects?) Anyway, the article says that the terms "tense" and "lax" for this distinction don’t have any basis in reality either: "This opposition has traditionally been thought to be a result of greater muscular tension, though phonetic experiments have repeatedly failed to show this."
This article indicates a preference for the terms "free vowel" and "checked vowel" — a meaningful distinction as only free vowels "may stand in a stressed open syllable with no following consonant." (No word ends in /i/ as in hit, for example.) But the "long/short" distinction doesn’t correspond exactly to "free/checked" categories: the so-called "short o" sound is free and can appear at the end of words (bra), while the rest of the "short vowel sounds" are checked. I maintain that this long/short thing doesn’t correspond to reality enough to be useful, even if it’s "traditional."
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Another carnival.
I haven’t made a habit of reading the Carnival of Homeschooling, but I’m planning to start. The 20th CoHSing is up here.
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Dealing with work/life balance BEFORE the mid-life crisis.
Mark and I brought lasagna (two of them actually) yesterday to a friend’s house — she’s got a sprained ankle, and her husband’s on a weeklong business trip. We sat around the dinner table musing about the men’s travel schedules, how it can be hard taking care of two or three children when Daddy’s out of town, but still — how fortunate we are, even with the occasional trip out of town. The jobs are interesting and not very stressful. They pay well. They are in a city we’re all happy to inhabit. Both men can choose to leave for home on almost any weekday if something comes up at home. And day after day they can leave it all behind at five o’clock.
It didn’t have to be that way, even given the specific that they’re chemical engineers — Mark with a B. S., our friend’s husband with a Ph. D., and a third friend’s husband (also a ChE) with his master’s degree. Pay’s generally pretty good (not always extravagant relative to the local cost-of-living —ask anyone in the Bay Area), but there’s no shortage of aggravating, dead-end, time-sucking ChE jobs. Plenty others require enormous amounts of travel: consulting’s the classic example, but Mark pointed out that many Minneapolis-based engineers at his company have to travel upwards of 100 days/year to one outlying plant or another. And plant-engineering jobs are often found in small towns in the middle of nowhere, where The Plant is the only significant industry.
This is something I didn’t realize fully until I was a junior or senior in engineering school. Most of the engineers I know agree that the universities should have done a better job getting across the point that, while there are many "good engineering jobs" (in the sense that they pay well and can be relatively secure), finding one that is lifestyle-compatible can be a real challenge.
The notion of consider the kind of daily life you would like to lead is absent from professional career planning as any of us experienced it. Not in college, not in high school, not back in grade school when we were drawing pictures of What We Will Be When We Grow Up. Sure, there’s advice to consider the kind of work you want to do. But the notion of choosing a career path that is well-matched to the kind of life you want to lead outside work is completely foreign. Yes, we should have considered that. Yes, it’s ultimately our own responsibility. But schools at all levels bear some responsibility, too.
What’s missing from the "You can be whatever you dream of being!" message (besides a heavy dose of skill-and-ability-based reality) is the fact of life that whenever you make a choice, doors don’t just open — they close, too. It’s not that you can’t ever go back if you make a misstep, but certain steps make backtracking tough, or expensive, or not worth it, or unethical.
Things turned out differently for me than I thought possible. I’m married, home with two children and one on the way, homeschooling, with no plans to return to the workforce within x years. I like where I am, but I might also have liked to — hell, I might have had to — work part-time or from home. Putting it bluntly: If I’d foreseen wanting to raise children, I’d have structured my education differently. Even engineering grad school had options, options I didn’t take, that in hindsight would have served our family better.
We owe it to our sons and daughters to put all academic work and career planning firmly in the context of their vocation — to married, consecrated, or priestly life. Most will marry. This means more than reminding a daughter of the duties of home, even though it’s likely that as mother she’ll be the one whose "market activities" are sharply curtailed during the childrearing years. It also means reminding a son to plan, financially and socially, for a long period of bringing in most of the family’s support. Sure, there are creative ways that the market work/family support can be split up differently among family members. Encouraging that kind of creativity — while stressing that meeting children’s needs is the first priority that all work must serve — multiplies opportunities for everyone, new ways to serve families.
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Poor Amy Welborn.
For professional reasons, or maybe just blogging reasons, she had to go see The Da Vinci Code. I liked #7 and #8 of her enumerated impressions:
7) Jesus was "merely" mortal, but we all need to go kneel at Mary Magdalene’s tomb. Because she’s the wife of Jesus. Who was merely mortal. And she was bearing his baby. So we should go kneel at her tomb. Because she was married to Jesus. Who was merely mortal. But…
8) WHERE IS MARY MAGDALENE’S TOMB? WE’VE GOT TO RACE AROUND EUROPE, KILL PEOPLE, RACK OUR BRAINS TO FIGURE OUT STUPID PUZZLES, STAND AROUND IN RESTROOMS AND VILLAS TALKING FOR HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS ABOUT WHERE IN THE WORLD MARY MAGDALENE’S RELICS ARE. WHY HAS THE CHURCH HIDDEN THEM? WHY DON’T THEY WANT US TO REVERENCE HER? WHERE IN THE WORLD IS THE SUPER-SECRET SPOT WHERE PILGRIMS CAN FLOCK TO HONOR HER?
Yes — this is one of the things that I found so laughable about DVC (yes, I have read it, and no, I have much better things to do with my time & money than seeing the movie) — this idea that the Church suppressed/demonized Mary Magdalene. She’s a saint, people. I have personally worshipped in a cathedral named after Mary Magdalene. Doesn’t anyone fact-check anything anymore?
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