Weekly Book Post (Casual Vacancy, Talking Back to Facebook)

My TBR pile got a little out of control!  Sometimes all my holds from the library come in at once and I get .... this!

This week I read The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling.  I wouldn't have read it, based on reviews and the jacket description, if I wasn't curious because of the author.  It has to be hard to shift genres after you become so famous in one, and overall it's a fine piece of literature.  I don't really like this realistic "if you only knew what was going on behind all the closed doors and in everyone's heads" sorts of novels, in fact I find them sad and depressing in the way they point to all the misunderstandings and small human cruelties/tragedies, but I still found myself drawn to finish the book.  I know people who really like the book, and others who really dislike it, and now I'm saying "meh, it was OK" - mixed reviews all around.

I also read Talking Back to Facebook: the Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in a Digital Age.  This is a very current book, so it will probably be out-of-date soon as the technology and culture develop further, but for now it is a good overview for parents who are wondering if they should let their kids have facebook accounts or cellphones, surf YouTube videos or have computers in their bedrooms. The first part of the book is an overview of the "RAP" on digital media (relationships, addiction, privacy) and then the second half has specific recommendations by age of your child.

Now I need to get onto reading the rest of that big pile!

Gardening with and for Children

Ever since we moved, my daughter has been wanting "a magical fairy garden".  We didn't get it done last summer, so this year (our second in this new home) it was a priority.  I gave her seeds and statuary for her birthday in February, but it took our Mother's Day nursery trip to really make it all come together.




My son decided this was the place for his bunny statue he got for Easter last year, and he planted some lettuce seeds all around the rabbit.  We'll see if that works out or not, but it's a cool idea.




"George" the lawn gnome.




"Alann" the Fairy Queen (and owner of this garden).




A fun project, checked off the list.  Next up for kid's gardening plans is a "Jurassic Park" garden my son wants.  He already bought one plant for it, the "Dinosaur Plant" Gunnera Manicata.

10 years

My boy turns 10 years old today.  That's a decade of parenting gone by!

I had thought that I would be sad to not have any babies anymore, but I like these big kids.  He's wearing my shoes already, and measuring how much height he has to go before he's taller than mom.  He can do a lot on his own: stay at home alone for a bit, cook his own breakfast, read the directions for something without my help, etc.

The baby and toddler years were sweet, but 10 is good too.

Homeschool Field Trips: Nature Centers

I've been hearing about and seeing signs for this urban nature center in a nearby city, and last Friday it made the perfect stop after a work-related daytrip.  This nature center also featured a very cool playground surrounding an artificial pond, all made to be as natural as possible.  Super fun!

Don't Be Afraid to Innovate

We worry so much about finding the Perfect Solution, as if there is One Right Way to educate our children (or do anything else).  But this book I read last week and the this video I watched this morning pair together to remind me that innovation involves experimentation and FAILURE.  Fail early and often, but just keep trying new things!  We can't be afraid to fail, or there are so many things we will simply never try in the first place.



Quotes from A Simpler Way by Margaret J. Wheatley:

There is no such thing as survival of the fittest, only survival of the fit.  This means there is no one answer that is right, but many that might work.  Life explores all sorts of combinations, content to find anything that works.

We could give more support to our own experimentation if we focused on discovering pretty good solutions that worked for now.  With more to choose from, with more bidding for support as the ultimate right answer, we might feel less attached to them.  If these solutions did not require such enormous investments of resources, ego, and certainties, we could abandon them sooner if they stopped working.

So try something new.  And then stop it if it doesn't work.  If it does, great, but stay open to tweaking it again in the future.  This was the educational philosophy I was raised with: nothing works for every child, and nothing works forever.  So follow the lead of the child right in front of you, and do what is right for them, right now.  Be ready to change when that stops working.

Weekly Round-Up

I find so many interesting articles and ideas when I'm reading online, and I enjoy other weekly link lists a great deal, so I want to try it on my own blog, and put a list of links up once a week.  A curated list of what I've found of interest this week:

• Slate had the Case Against Grades this week.  They lower self-esteem, discourage creativity, and reinforce class-divides.  In a somewhat related post, they also reported on new studies that show that "Tiger Moms" don't result in superior achievement for their kids.
• Think Progress and other outlets discussed Elizabeth Smart's comments about abstinence-only sex education and how it contributes to silence among victims of sexual abuse.  This is another reason we need programs like OWL, which I discussed on my other blog recently.  
• Teaching Tolerance had a very moving essay about Supporting Different Beliefs and a college-professor's moment of self-awareness about needing to respect a student's right to pray for them.
• The Mom Pledge called on us all to stop the "Dear Mom/Dad" memes or rants on social media in which we go off on some random parent for their failures and instead realize no parent is perfect and try to support each other.
• Another good one from Teaching Tolerance: the Neuroscience of Call and Response
• I found myself in sympathy with Why I Made My Teen Go To Church
• And I was interested to see Psychology Today talk about A Nation of Wimps  while the UK's Guardian posted about Why Parents Should Leave Their Kids Alone

What have you found thought-provoking this week?

The Reading Life: The Year So Far

This is what I've read so far this year, not counting books I read to the kids:

1. Everyday Spiritual Practice by Scott Alexander
2. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
3. Youth Ministry Advising: A Complete Guide by the UUA
4.  Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season edited by Gary D Schmidt
5. Faith Without Certainty by Paul Rasor
6. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers by Friedrich Schleiermacher
7. Making the Manifesto: The Birth of Religious Humanism by Bill Schulz
8. Reason and Reverence: Religious Humanism for the 21st Century by William Murry
9. Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology by Monica Coleman
10. Religious Naturalism Today: the Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative by Jerome Stone
11. Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker
12. The Feminist Ethic of Risk by Sharon Welch
13. The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence by Jerome Stone
14. What Americans Really Believe by Rodney Stark
15. Varieties of African American Religious Experience by Anthony Pinn
16. Process Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead by Robert C. Mesle
17. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle
18.  The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
19.  We Have Been Believers by James H. Evans, Jr.
20. Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs by Ellen Galinsky
21. Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl by Susan Campbell
22. God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage by Gene Robinson
23. The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball
24. Letting Go: Transforming Congregations for Ministry by Roy Phillips
25. Theories of Development by William Crain
26. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff
27. Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy by Emily Bazelon
28. The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book by Wendy Welch
29. When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams