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One of the many beauties of home education is the time to read, and to share great books. When I bought John Eldredge’s Beautiful Outlaw for my son Benjamin, I wasn’t worried about his not reading it. Even if he didn’t read it, someone at our house would. This I knew from experience.
Not only did Benjamin read the book, and quote from it often, he urged me to read it. I don’t think I’m unique in liking to pick my own books, and being somewhat resistant when people insist I read something. But since Benjamin is not the insistent sort, and because I know John Eldredge can be trusted, I picked up the book.
I would breeze through it, job done. Wrong. I savored this book–reading a bit and smiling and stopping to consider. As I neared the book’s end, I slowed down. I didn’t want this journey with John Eldredge and Jesus to end.
What a privilege to, if you will, have a conversation with a free thinker. A radically Christian radical.
When a book speaks to an 18-year-old young man as well as to his mother, there’s something going on. When I love a book, yet can’t quite bring myself to part with it, there’s something going on. And when a book changes and clarifies my thinking in a way that electrifies my joy in Christ, well, I just have to rave.
They’re the books my junior high principal used to entice non-reading boys, and they worked like nothing else. They’re the books beginning with cliffhanger action, getting more exciting with each page, and ending satisfactorily every time (the boy and the girl have an understanding). They’re Jubal Sackett, Sitka, Last of the Breed, and Sackett. That’s right, they’re Louis L’Amour westerns (well, a few of his books, including Last of the Breed, aren’t westerns, but they’re still great books).
By “great” I mean, for starters, they have heroes worth remembering. I remember, for instance, the Sacketts. There are certain arroyos, canyons, and long vistas that take me back to a reading moment, and I say, “Look, I think Tell Sackett’s down there in that gulch.” And there’s no doubt he’s about to do the right thing. Not the easy thing, but the right thing.
So, no, these books aren’t Putlizer winners, they don’t have endorsements on the back telling us how “poignant” they are. We won’t impress our “intellectual” acquaintances by stacking them about our living room. And if we do try stacking them, they won’t remain stacked as do all the “right” books and the “must-reads”. Rather, they will be read!
Every freeschooled bookwyrm has turn-on books. Hannah, for instance, began her love affair with books by reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Secret Garden. Her only Louis L’Amour book was The Last of the Breed. Our other three bookwyrms have read, as have their parents, every Louis L’Amour (as far as we know) more than once. Of course, bookwyms read almost all genres–anything and everything worthwhile, and some books not so worthwhile.
“Not so worthwhile” includes many recommended books, best sellers, and “must-reads” which are missing at least one of those main ingredients–worthy characters, an interesting plot, and a satisfactory ending.
Let’s stop worrying about what other people say we “should” read and let’s please ourselves with books that deliver. Like say, a real romance. Say, maybe, a Louis L’Amour.
Other lovely tea cozy ideas include but are not limited to:: making breakfast special with tea, history teas, tea parties on a budget, literary teas, dress-up teas, teas on the balcony amid falling snow, slumber party teas, If-I-Could-Travel-Anywhere teas, Christmas teas, and tea parties for no particular reason (I think of these as conversation teas).
The only rule for a tea party is: Conversation must be kind and intelligent. Tea is a most excellent place to teach etiquette, and in fact when the kids were small I often brought a favorite etiquette book to our gatherings, Manners Matter by Hermine Hartley.
Now if you don’t have etiquette books, tea sets, knitted tea cozies, and a variety of gourmet teas, don’t be discouraged. Have a coffee cozy (I use swiss water decaf mostly when having coffee with kids), or serve milk and cookies and call it a milk. A milk? Maybe a milk cozy. If it’s cool outside, heat the milk and add honey and maybe some cinnamon and nutmeg.
There are endless possibilities, but the bottom line is simply this: always be on the lookout for a tea cozy opportunity. Bliss!
One day, a few years back, Seth and Rebekah asked to go to the creek and “do school later”. I said they could go, paper and pencil in hand, and to bring back something they’d written–a story, a thought, a drawing, poetry.
Here is Seth’s offering:
I have a cathedral of willows over my head
The sound of the creek in my ears,
A hoodie under my back.
I will try not to fall in the creek.
Ack!
All this comfort, all this wonder,
I’ve claimed a little nook.
Yet all the while I wish I’d brought a book.
Rebekah wrote me a love letter, and some of her thoughts, as well as this “Spring Poem”:
The creek laughs happily over stones
I hear birdsong and breezes.
But something else is talking –
Tis neither wind nor birdsong nor the creek.
Tis Spring.
Remember field trips–the best part of school? It didn’t matter where you went, just that you got to go outside!
Since the kids were small I have seized opportunities to go outside–school on a quilt in the back yard; school as we pulled the littlest child on the biggest quilt in the red wagon. We didn’t call it school as we ate dusty blackberries picked from the roadside to enjoy as we read Timothy Tattercoat by Maryel Chaney.
But oh, the lessons learned. Years later we didn’t call it school when we climbed and scooted and grunted our way to the top of the tallest rocks in the mountains behind our house, and stood reaching for the sky and talking of dreams.
I certainly don’t call it school when I demonstrate the ultimate in relaxation. Sometimes, no matter how enthralling the book I’ve chosen to read on my quilt atop an aspen leaf/pine needle carpet, I fall asleep in the sunrays shining through the trees. Whiling away afternoons celebrating the short but glorious Rocky Mountain summer is a lesson in, well, does it always have to be a lesson?
There is nothing difficult about any of this “schooling” – watching butterlies and humming forgotten tunes, telling stories of my childhood, experiencing my children. Perhaps more than wondering what the lesson is for my children, I should consider the message: Life is wonderful.
Such a child will be like a fingerprint – unique in all the world, unique in all of history. And . . . uniquely qualified to make the world a better place.
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