Revolutionary War Book Review Bonanza

2^nd Friday so we’re back to history again, and it looks like this month you’re getting a book bonanza – next week I’ll post my review of The Fathers, which leaves me this week to toss out a handful of childrens’ history books we’ve enjoyed over the past month.

Despite our passion for medieval history, a certain mother has determined one must, nonetheless, study other eras. So our official topic for this school year is American History. We started out with reading about various renaissance-era European explorers; whipped out the timeline notebook and determined that Christopher Columbus followed right on the heels of Joan of Arc. I think in the usual method of studying history in American schools, we tend to lose some of that sense of continuity: Chris C. belongs firmly to the course called American History, St. Joan belongs to another course in a different year, called European History or Medieval History or some other thing, and we never quite grasp that the events of the Hundred Years’ War would have been part of the renaissance explorers’ heritage, much the way the legacy World War II is still felt today.

Anyhow, we’ve since slipped into the colonial era, and I’ve got three nice books concerning the Revolutionary War era to share with you this month:

Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride by Stephen Krensky, illustrated by Greg Harlin; the topic is exactly as it says. Harlin’s watercolors elegantly capture the mood of the night’s events – so brilliantly done I’d recommend this book to aspiring artists and photographers. I can’t do them justice, so just go look. The text is clear and effective – you learn the technical details of the ride, and also the real danger, urgency, and excitement – but spare enough that it won’t be overwhelming to a competent but young reader, or to the parent charged with the read-aloud. A map at the start of the book shows the route of the ride (you will need a larger US map of your own to put the location into context), and an epilogue summarizes in three paragraphs the rest of the Revolutionary War and it’s ultimate conclusion.

Can’t recommend this book enough – interesting to adults who never had a chance to learn more about this famous event, and engaging to children who like a little adventure with their history. Frankly, if I had a student of any age who was history-resistant, I’d put this book in front of him, and mine it for all it was worth.

By the Sword: A Young Man Meets the War by Selene Castrovilla, illustrated by Bill Farnsworth, tells the story of Benjamin Tallmadge’s first foray into battle in August 1776. This is a more demanding text than Paul Revere’s Ride, and focuses as much on Tallmadge’s inner life as a new recruit in the colonial army as with the outward adventure of the Battle of Long Island. The intentionally-hazy oil-painted illustrations support the feeling of inward reflection, and of a man looking back on a turning point in his youth.

[Does introspection make good history? At our house,  mothers were unanimously in favor of this exploration of the danger and emotional turmoil of warfare; a certain boy complained that the story ended just as it was getting to the good parts – I suppose he wanted to read the rest of war while he was at it.]

At the end of the book is a detailed timeline of Tallmadge’s life, a list of relevant historic sites to visit around modern-day New York City, a page in which the author explains how she researched her book and how she made certain literary decisions, and then a very detailed bibliography. There is also a brief note from the illustrator about his art research techniques, and from the typographer about the choice of fonts.  Good stuff — really helps the student catch on to the study of history.

I’d say this book is more appropriate for older children – third grade and up.  The level of detail and discussion of historical research could be helpful even for much older students, as this is the same kind of work that would go into better term papers for highschool and beyond — perhaps more effective than a lecture from the instructor, and would be a quick, easy read for the teen who must be plagued with this lesson.  (Okay, let’s be frank: your average college history TA would give anything to get to grade an undergraduate history paper as well-researched as what the author models here.)

Finally I wanted to mention Welcome to Felicity’s World, 1774: Growing Up in Colonial America. Written by Catherine Gourley, though you will be hard-pressed to find the author’s name in this publication, which is part of the “American Girl’s Collection” as something of an accessory to that popular childrens’ historical fiction series. Not a bad book though – there’s a reason the American Girls franchise has done so well. The concept is something like DK’s Eyewitness Series, exploring colonial life and the Revolutionary War through many illustrations, photographs, short captions, moving stories, and sometimes more detailed narrative explanations, all divided into topical sections and subsections. It therefore makes a good browsing book – you can pick it up anywhere and look through just the bits of special interest.

This is most definitely a girl’s book, but subtly so – Mr. Boy has been reading it enthusiastically, and so far does not seem to have noticed the feminine bent. Maybe some month when I’m scrapping for a history topic I’ll walk you through the differences between girl-books and boy-books in more detail, to show you how it’s done; for now I’ll just say that it nicely combines social history with the usual names-‘n-dates type outline of a traditional textbook. Good reliable backbone for an elementary-years history program, and probably fairly easy to get hold of, since it is part of such a well-known brandline.  Felicity lives in Williamsburg, VA, by the way, for those who are looking for a text to coordinate with a field trip.

cleaning house

Mine, that is.  Am going to scale back computer time in order to do so.  Therefore, if you see me at your blog, kindly tell me to get back to work.  Or at least to go play with my kids or something.  Will still be checking e-mail, and posting here and at the castle.

Wealth, Abstraction, and the Too-Vivid Imagination

An internet friend asks: Why do I find this economics stuff so confusing?

I could only guess, but knowing her to be an intelligent, financially-responsible type of person, as well as the mother of four children, my thoughts immediately went to potty training.

Potty training? Here’s why:

One of the famous potty-training motivation techniques is the Sticker Chart. We used a sticker chart once, and it was spectactularly unsucessful, but other people find the stickers quite helpful. You put up a calendar-type chart, and each time the child uses the potty, you put a sticker on the chart. If yours is a child who is highly motivated by the earning of stickers, this can be just the thing to motivate the ready-but-reluctant preschooler to make the move into world of No More Diapers.

What does this have to do with the ecomony? (Sorry, no it isn’t the potential for toilet humor.) It is this: The stickers provide a record of your childs’ potty-training accomplishments. More stickers on the chart is evidence of more sucessful trips to the bathroom. Nice little visual indicator to see how the whole program is progressing.

Economics is like this. Instead of sticker charts, we used things like “GDP” to represent national wealth production or “the Unemployment Rate” to represent how many people are looking for work.  [We call these types of calculations ‘economic indicators’.  Just like the number of stickers on the chart is an ‘indicator’ of how potty training is coming along.] It should all be pretty simple. You have to learn a little more than Shiny Star = Pants Clean and Dry, but the concept is the same. Most people understand the real-world concepts behind unemployment or GDP, so learning the technical terms and how they are calculated is not all that hard. If you’re a person who can balance your own checkbook (my friend is such a person) you can learn economics. Given a good instructor, anyway. (I was blessed with a handful of these.)

But the trouble is this: Sometimes economic-policy talk degenerates into sticker management. Rather than focusing on “is my child making progress in using the potty”, we work on managing the indicator – how many stickers are on the chart? How can I get more stickers up? If I can just get a few more stickers up, that means I’m closer to Diaper Emancipation, right? Maybe I should start giving more stickers per trip to the potty, that’ll help my chart fill up faster . . .

Think I’m kidding?  I once read an actual economics professor (remaining nameless to protect the guilty) state something along the lines of, “Hurricane Katrina will result in increased wealth because of all the proceeds from insurance companies and the employment due to rebuilding.” That’s right. Money is changing hands, which increases GDP, and unemployment will be helped by all the new jobs in construction, therefore, we as a nation are richer because the gulf coast was just destroyed? No no no. The hurricane *destroyed* wealth. The fact that we’re going to replace a portion of what was lost does not make us wealthier.

Put concretely: I had six apples. Five were destroyed. I picked two more off my tree. So I’m richer than before, because I just earned two apples? No. I’m still three apples poorer than when I began. Looking at income alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

***

We get into economic trouble, whether in our personal life or as a nation, when we lose track of our economic reality. When we get too focused on managing a calculation, and too little on the facts behind that calculation.

The mortgage crisis, and the resulting credit crisis, are a classic example of imaginations run wild followed by sober reality. I [the hypothetical homebuyer] imagined I could afford a house, because I qualified for some kind of loan and was, at the time, capable of making the payments. My lender imagined I could afford the house for the same reasons. We used the fact that we were able to make up a financial instrument – a calculation – that ‘proved it’ to us. Perhaps we persuaded ourselves that rising housing costs were based on some inherent increase in the value of homes, rather than a temporary surge in demand over supply, and used the ‘promise’ of a continued rise to justify excessive borrowing.

And then reality struck. Now we have a ‘credit crisis’, in which lenders are doing crazy stuff like saying that if can’t you afford to pay for a particular car, perhaps you should buy a less expensive one. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that about 64% of car loans are being approved as of Sept. 20^th. Down significantly from an 83% approval rate a year earlier – but knowing what we know about American’s spending and lending habits a year earlier, one has to wonder if maybe it is simply lenders catching on to the financial reality a little bit more quickly than borrowers?

I’m not saying there is no crisis whatsoever. The normal thing for humans to do in the face of disaster is to over-compensate. After a fire, we become hyper-vigilante about fire safety. After a car wreck, we become excessively cautious drivers. After a credit fiasco, we become overly cautious about lending. (And we ought to become more cautious about borrowing as well.) The potential for a real downward economic spiral is certainly there.

But we kid ourselves if we think that we, as a nation, ought to try to manipulate the markets in order to return to the old ‘normal’. Because the old normal was built on imagination, not reality. Large amounts of debt are a sign that we are pretending to have wealth we simply don’t posess. We were pretending, as a nation, to be richer than we were. In potty-training speak, we were handing out too many stickers. We are not significantly poorer now than we were a few months ago – but our numbers look quite a lot worse, because they are now closer to reality.

I don’t think nothing should be done. We are in the post-traumatic-stress phase of an economic eye-opener, and we need to make sure that we, as a nation, don’t curl up into an economic corner become completely dysfunctional. We do need to make sure that those who are most vulnerable economically can ride out the wave of post-crisis panic without suffering physical harm (hunger, lack of medical care, sleeping out-of-doors, etc.).

As I write this, the bailout just passed the House. I’m afraid at this time the best I can manage is a gape-mouthed, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money.’ (Same reaction I’ve been having for the past week or so – apparently I’m consistent this way.) But I will say: Inasmuch as the bailout is based on trying to bring the American economy to a viable, stable, realistic level of activity, it has the potential to be helpful. To the extent that the bailout is designed to make things look good, to build up a ‘confidence’ in the economy that is really foolish bravado, it will only be a very expensive way of putting ourselves back into trouble.

[BTW, I promised my friend I would try to fish out a really good library book that teaches Econ 101 in a readable, understandable manner. If I find it I will post it here.]

bailout commentary

This friday we’re up for an economics post again, and what timing.  I’ll sit on my hands until then, because I don’t have anything to say (yet) on the bailout that isn’t being said better elsewhere.  To summarize: I am a Jim Curley dittohead.  (Reading from Oct 1 down – not linked to any one post, because he has a handful of them.)

A Patron Saint for Lousy Teachers

School is back in session now, and no doubt many students across the country are discovering what my 5^th graders learned when I first began teaching religious ed several years ago: their teacher is not all that skilled.

However much it may or may not be successful in practice, there is good reason that professional teachers take all those courses in a classroom management and teaching techniques – teaching to a large group is a real skill, not nearly as forgiving as the one-on-one of tutoring or homeschooling.  A love for the students, knowledge of subject, a passion for teaching, these are necessary.  But even with these essentials, given a dozen or two tired, restless kids, each coming to the subject with an entirely different knowledge base, the devoted but inexperienced teacher can still crash and burn.

I eventually got the hang of the classroom setting, and by the end of the year had at least one student who liked me. (I found this out through the grapevine – my particular students were not the type to hand out compliments too liberally.) Meanwhile, I had instructed my students from the very beginning that for their own sakes they ought to consider praying for me, and an internet friend and experienced teacher recommended I take up a devotion to St. John Bosco. Duly noted.

(My long-distance mentor also gave me some very helpful teaching tips.  Thank you Pam.)

***

There is, however, a much more obscure saint that I think is worth considering as an additional aid for those of us who really need an extra measure of divine assistance in this department.

Back in August I was a bit surprised in my reading (Butler’s Lives again) when I came across the story of St. Cassian of Imola. [Date unknown, but thought to have really existed all the same. If you google him, you’ll find accounts offering a wide variety of possible dates. Traditional Feast day is August 13^th.] I tend to think of saints as being competent in whatever it is they undertake; it appears from the legend that although this St. Cassian was quite good about the business of being martyred, he was not so sucessful in his career as a school teacher:

A violent persecution being raised against the church, he was taken up and interrogated by the governor of the province. As he refused to sacrifice to the gods, the barbarous judge, learning of what profession he was, commanded that his own scholars should stab him to death with their iron pens. He was exposed naked in the midst of two hundred boys, ‘by whom” says the Roman martyrology, “he had made himself disliked by teaching them.”

The narrative continues, of course, with a graphic description of saint’s martyrdom – fodder for your next horror film or halloween costume.

There is reason to beleive the account of St. Cassian’s death is legendary, but not to worry: regardless of the historical facts, we can be can be content to observe that St. Cassian was associated with the story for some good reason, perhaps as a hint to us that his eternity is available for the coming to the aid of beleagured educators.

Good news! (cross-posted)

The book came.  Woohoo!  It looks readable.  Fun.  Appropriate for junior readers like myself.  As Mr. Boy observes, “It is thinner than the other book [Jesus of Nazareth]”.  Exactly the kind of book I really really love.  I’ll try to get the review up for the 3rd Friday of October on this blog, because it is very appropriate reading going into All Saints.

Bleg: Reputable Catholic Vendors

Project going on at the homeschooling blog.  I will have a link to it from this sidebar once it goes up. (End of October.)  Please share your recommendations over there.  I am going to keep this post stuck to the top for now, so it is easy to find.  Thanks for your help!

Update from this morning’s complaint – resolved

OH look, good news: McCain Suspends Campaign to Help With Bailout

Link provided by an internet friend, who also posted Obama’s response, but that was in a video format that I’m not much on linking.  But you can go find it.

Hurray for senators who do what senators are supposed to do.  And here’s to hoping that what they decide to do is sensible.  For example if the solution were compatible with *either candidate’s* economic platform, it probably would make more sense than the ‘Hey let’s make the taxpayers buy all those bad mortgages’ method.

(Or maybe we need to keep working on this concept.  Could we develop a law where elected officials are required to buy all our bad investments at what price we need to stay solvent?  Wow, this could keep the economy rolling and solve the retirement/social security problem all at once. )

Okay, okay, I know there are logical reasons why people think it is important to bail out the mortgage loan industry.  I am not persuaded of those reasons, but I’ll quit making fun.  I do realize the buyout-rescue impulse is based on genuine concern for the liquidity of the financial markets and all that.  Important stuff.  St. Matthew pray for us.

Candidates likely ‘no-shows’ in bailout vote

So I don’t usually blog much politics, because I don’t follow the news that closely.  But this, wow.  Even I am not this out of touch.   We have two *senators* running for president, both on a platform of reform and change. Both talking about the great things they’re going to do for the economy.  And they might not even show up to *vote* on the #1 biggest economic issue we are facing today?

Take a look at their campaign websites ( http://www.johnmccain.com/ and http://www.barackobama.com/index.php ).  Not a word (as of this writing) about the mortgage loan crisis.  Or if it’s there, it is mighty hidden.

Where’s the leadership, gentlemen?  You say that as president you can work with Congress to get things done?  Prove it.   You say you care about the ordinary taxpayer and you mean to change business-as-usual in Washington?  Show us.  Have you not noticed that both your proposed economic plans will be completely sunk if this bailout goes through?  What’s your *new* plan?  How are you gonna lower taxes, Mr. McCain, with this kind of bill on the rolls?  Where, exactly, are the funds for big economic plans going to come from, Mr. Obama, if we are busy sending all our spare pennies to big investment firms?

If you were president, I would expect you to be busting your tail to get the *right* legislation through Congress.  Instead you tell me you are ‘monitoring the situation’, and that you’ll show up if the party really needs you?   Is it because you know, campaigning is just so much more taxing than actually running the country?  Because you’ll have so much more free time to take charge and take action once you are actually president?

I expect when it comes down to it, both candidates are cowards.  They know that one or the other is going to win the election, and that presidency is, in a close race, theirs to lose.  They know that if they take a stand now, make a bold move now, they might lose votes.   So they won’t.  They will both quietly pretend that nothing is really happening, and go shake hands and kiss babies and listen sympathetically to flood victims and working class voters tell their sorry tales.  (Why do I say this? Go look at their campaign sites.  This is the ‘news’ they have for us.)  It’s almost got the feel of a gentlemen’s agreement — they both are *equally capable* of using their position as senator to take some initiative . . . and they both do nothing.

One way or another, a month before the election, we get to see what these guys are made of.  We get to see the kind of leadership and decisive thinking they have to offer our nation in a moment of crisis.  And there it is: nothing.

Good news and bad news (cross-posted)

The good news is, I got accepted at the Catholic Company to be one of their reviewers. Yay! I love reviewing books.

More good news: They are still accepting reviewers.  That could be you.  Learn more at:

http://www.catholiccompany.com/content/Catholic-Product-Reviewer-Program.cfm

The bad news is, when I went to pick out my first book, I *thought* I was clicking on ‘product information’ when I saw a title called The Fathers.  Because I was thinking that of the choices available, the new teen novel sounded about my speed (I have teenaged godchildren.  I have to keep up with this stuff).  But I wanted to just take a look at this other interesting title before I made a final decision.  But I accidentally  made the final decision then and there.

Which means good news: I’m supposed to be getting a free copy of the holy father’s new book. (Oh yeah, *that* book about the Apolostic Fathers.   Oops.)

Bad news of course being that I am now required to *read the whole book*.  In order to review it.  Ack!  This is work!  I meant to do something fun!  By which I meant, something easy!

The good news is, it should be good for me.  Truth is, I did want to get the book.  I just couldn’t justify buying it until I finished Jesus of Nazareth, which is still sitting in my living room waiting for me to finish it.  Not dusty, I might add, because several other neglected books were sitting on top of it.

Not sure which blog I will put the review on yet.  We’ll see.

Good news for you: The Catholic Company ( http://www.catholiccompany.com/ ) is offering a free shipping coupon.  Here is the note for the announcement e-mail:

On a much happier note, we have a special offer this week for your blog readers.  We are offering free shipping from now until Midnight Sunday…on any size order.

If you think that this is something your readers would be interested in knowing about, then please spread the word.

1. Simply place an order. You can place this order through our website, by phone, by fax, or by mail.

2. Use this coupon code: BLOG

If you order online you will type in the coupon code during checkout. Simply type BLOG in the coupon code box located at the bottom of the payment page.

If you order by phone simply tell the coupon code BLOG to your customer service agent.

If you order by mail or fax simply include the coupon code BLOG on your order form.

*Terms and conditions: This offer cannot be combined with any other offers. Applies to U.S. delivery addresses only. Applies to standard shipping only. Cannot be used on orders already placed or on backorders. Offer expires at 12:00 midnight, Eastern Time on Sunday, September 28, 2008.

By the way, I am all about supporting your local catholic bookstore, if you have one.  So nobody go neglecting a real live starving bookstore owner on account of free shipping at an internet company.  (Even if they do send me a free book that will make me have to pay attention and think for a change.)  After all, your local shop doesn’t charge shipping ever, if you just go pick it up yourself.  But if you are an unlucky soul who *needs* to order online, there’s your coupon.