oh there is plaster everywhere

2006-01-26 - 11:57 a.m.

It is entirely possible that I am losing my mind, although I have to say it's fairly painless.

Poor N and her terrible history class. I'd actually like to go sit in on it. I was helping her study last night and it all seemed perfectly innocuous to me -- how can you make the enclosure act and absolutism and the hollenzollerns and prince william of orange and napoleon and russia and the scorched-earth policy and the tennis court oath boring? It's not boring to me. Even reading the book is not boring. She mentioned the Enclosure Act to me and I started telling her what little I know about it (which believe me is not a lot) and she said "You should teach history. You're way better at this than Mr. C."

By which I mean to imply that he must be pretty boring to render this so uninteresting, and also to be worse at it than I am.

It's really too bad. Part of the problem may be that they just don't know enough. To me it's interesting because I know enough about literature that things fit together in interesting ways. But they don't, of course. She's supposed to memorize that Samuel Richardson wrote Pamela, but of course she's never read Pamela, which is a great book, so why should she care?

It's a real shame, though. My 10th grade history teacher was a woman named Miss Joyce. She'd been a nun, but left the convict and got married. Her husband worked for Pitney Bowes. She had no children, but encouraged us to have lots of children, because she said it was the children of educated and priviledged people like us who would do the most to solve the world's ills. We all loved her.

Anyway.

Meanwhile Maddy was suffering from an insane attempt to learn 'suffixes' and 'roots and stems.' It makes sense to me to read a lot, and to study languages, and to come to an understanding of roots and stems that way. It makes no sense to me to try to memorize them from a list. Harumph.

Anyway. What I meant to tell you was:

Regarding the house -- we've got drawings. Now I think we have to make little cardboard furniture replicas and see where the hell we're going to put everything. Also, the foundation man is coming next week, and after he's done we can start putting things back together.

Also, I had to take the car in this morning, which meant that after dropping it off I had to take public transit to work. How great was that! Minutes at a time to sit peacefully. I knit my sweater for the 10 minutes I was on the train. Then I walked to the bus stop and took the bus for another 10 minutes. It was great! I get to do it on the way back, too. Wow. Sitting doing nothing. Little walks in the fresh air. Ridiculous conversations to overhear. Small boys catching the bus to school. It was great. Probably cheaper than parking, too.

Hmmm.

Bye.

out of print - new releases

find me! - 2008-02-12
where I've gone - 2008-02-07
Where I've gone - 2008-02-05
where I've gone - 2008-02-01
New - 2008-02-01

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