Ebenezer

I just realized that even though every personality test I’ve taken categorizes me as an introvert, I think I’m actually an extrovert or at least a fence-sitter. It’s just that the conversation topics I’m interested in are not at all the same as most of the population, and I like to dispense with the small talk it takes to get to know new people.

I’ve been homeschooling for more than three years now in part because of statements like these made by my son’s teachers:
Education Week blog

Karen Chenoweth critiques Charles Murray’s ideas, ones I referenced in a previous post. I agree with her concerns. But why can’t we take the kernel of truth — that intellectual differences are just as real as differences in skills in physical, musical, artistic, leadership and empathetic areas — and say: All courses of study are AVAILABLE to all who want to try. NOT all courses are required. We encourage everyone to try with the knowledge that they can change course if it doesn’t work out. But it still is ridiculous to REQUIRE four years of high school math for EVERYONE. Core requirements should be what is necessary to function independently in society. Consumer math. Budgeting. Understanding credit. Interest. Basic investing. Also civics and community service. Home ec, maybe, though it saddens me that many children aren’t learning cooking, cleaning, and simple repairs at home any more. But: College prep should not be core requirement. Requiring those who aren’t able or don’t care dilutes the difficulty and value of the class. Those students are welcome, but should not be forced into it.

In fact, why don’t we make things like auto shop required courses and precalculus/12th grade math an elective? I wish now that I had taken shop in HS. Let each child, with family guidance, chart their own educational course in high school, exploring interests and pursuing passions. That’s why I’d like to keep homeschooling through high school.

In her book At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman writes in praise of the familiar essay, the literary form I would most love to spend my time researching and writing.  Such essays are simultaneously jocular and  erudite, winsome yet full of the highest, best and most precise vocabulary-stretching language. Their authors examine everyday subjects, topics we think we may already know all about, yet, through slightly self-deprecating personal anecdotes and research of trivia, make them seem entirely new.

Really what Fadiman describes are the best blog entries you’ve ever read. They can be about life’s minutiae, but they are not dull laundry lists. Rather, they straddle the line between the academic paper and the diary entry,  putting the personal in the context of the universal.

Though she doesn’t reference blogs, she does contrast the familiar essay with other types of "essays, " including the type of writing that appears on too many blogs:

If I were to turn [essayist Charles] Lamb’s 1821 "Chapter on Ears" into a twenty-first century critical essay, I might write about postmodern audiological imagery in the early works of Barbara Cartland. If I were to write a twenty-first-century personal essay, I might tell you about the pimple on my left earlobe that I failed to cover with makeup at my senior prom….(snip) … But I don’t want to write — or read — either one of those essays. I prefer Lamb’s original, which is mostly about his musical ineptitude but also about the sounds of harpsichords, pianos, operatic voices, crowded streets, and carpenter’s hammer: in other words, about the author but also about the world. (p. xi)

As such a woman of letters, then, Fadiman presents a dozen of her own familiar essays, a genre she previously featured in her collection Ex Libris (a book I own perhaps only for the piece on what happens when you marry and must merge your personal libraries). Her topics include coffee, ice cream, American flags, lepidoptery and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Imagine the best dinner conversation you’ve ever had: that’s what it’s like to read these essays.