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Showing posts from September, 2010

An alternative Triviuum

The classical (and Medieval) learning methodology of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric is still sound (not that I know it well enough to comment on it competently) but I'd like to offer a scaled-down version that I think can be worked in into anyone's life--child or not.  I propose that possessing a love of reading, an active imagination, and a love for and time spent outdoors will aid any student in any endeavor. It isn't enough to read, because the majority of Americans can do so.  The trouble is that skill is not exercised enough, is not cultivated, is not turned into a tawdry love affair.  So you can read--BFD!  The more important question is: Do You? Reading and reading regularly (of a variety of books, by the way) leads into and is supported by my next necessity: imagination.  This is a quality that everyone possesses, unlike literacy, but too many have one stunted by TV.  Now, TV in small quantities (how much is small?  Good question) will not stunt an imagination--it m

Poem

All right, so you don't want to take the ecology challenge.  Maybe you'll read a poem.  This was written, I dunno, a year or two ago. Bag of Bones It was an opossum,  now it’s only a pile                                  of gore  on the hundred and eight  degree pavement of Six                                         Mile. Bloody tire track impressed  in the carcass, splintering  bones and squeezing the life  out of organs.                          We drive on past, not giving it a second thought. Paying more heed to the  heat than the decay. How long are the dead remembered? Who besides the paid groundskeeper Trims around the stone fifty years hence? Who prays for the opossum’s soul?