The Life of an Airplant

My husband (Bill Capehart) just finished up our October newsletter. If you want to see it but are not yet on our mailing list, please send look him up on facebook and shoot him a PM requesting it. Tell him his wife sent you.
If you get this newsletter you can see some footage of the flat we will be renting!
 I'm wrapping up the last details on my upcoming talk about the use of imagination in the school curriculum for the wonderful L'Harmas Conference in Canada, (same weekend as our 37th anniversary, isn't my husband sweet!?) and true to form, while 'editing' somehow five additional pages sneaked in when I needed to be cutting material, not adding it. It's such a fascinating topic for me, though! I really need to wrap it up and put it aside so I can get back to doing other things---- continued cleaning, purging, packing, and the better thing- visiting family before we leave in late December.

 The map below makes me so excited, even though you can't see Kota Kinabalu, our new home-town for the next two years. KK is on the northern end of island of Borneo, on the northwest coast, facing the south china sea.

 I said I was excited, and I *am*.
 But also, two hours ago I was crying just because I read a description of that state of being where “…the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other.” (Allen Say, and this is a recommendation of everything of his I have read).  I wasn't feeling particularly sad at that moment. I was feeling pretty good about my plans for the day.  I was busy thinking about my talk and books and education and while looking something else up I just happened across that little quote, and it was like being punched, and the tears flowed instantly.

 If you get this, you get this, you don't need words from me. Wrapped up in that short phrase with only 11 words in it is a huge backdrop filled in with experiences, emotions, smells, tastes, the kiss of the humid air of tropic climate countries on your skin, the rough rasping of the dry air of cold climate countries, the sounds, sights, and the people, oh, the people.  All the people. Just  11 words making up a short phrase, and you know.   You know, but you cannot tell and it doesn't matter because if you get it, you get it without anything else, and if you don't...

 Nothing I say can explain it. It's just a little strange,  I'm not from around here, am I?  For those of you with roots, thank-you for loving us, putting up with us and our odd ways, and supporting us in all the ways you do, whether it's just general good will, prayers, or material goods (that apple pie was delicious, you know who you are)! People with roots are amazing.

 For those of you who get it... thank-you, too, for being part of this weird fellowship of the rootless, the air-plants of the world, thank-you for being fellow travellers on this road that goes ever on and on... we who wander, but are not lost.  It's comforting to know there are those who get it without explanation.

 And sign up for the newletter, all y'all.

Additional helps in spelling, From a 1914 PNEU conference

At a P.N.E.U. conference in 1914, one of the discussion topics was how to help children who are not learning spelling through dictation. These were some of the suggestions (all offered in addition to dictation, not to replace it): Look at a word on paper, then write it in the air from memory. Look at it on the blackboard, then copy it from memory on paper (with pencil) Work on learning and copying words in the same family (cake, bake, make). But don't do more than five or six of these at a time. Give short spelling lessons in conjunction with dictation and copywork as opportunities arise. And: "We must each follow the method which we find most effective, remembering that is merely a means to an end, and not an end in itself."

Poetry for Living

“The thing is,” said Charlotte Mason in a book she wrote for children, “to keep your eye upon words and wait to feel their force and beauty; and, when words are so fit that no other words can be put in their places, so few that none can be left out without spoiling the sense, and so fresh and musical that they delight you, then you may be sure that you are reading Literature, whether in prose or poetry. A great deal of delightful literature can be recognised only by this test.” (volume 4)

I grew up on Mother Goose and AA Milne.  However, I really learned to love poetry through boredom and solitude one Christmas season when I was 10 years old.  I had come down with a nasty case of pneumonia. First my mother thought it was just a cold combined with malingering so I could stay home instead of going to seasonal social functions.  She made me go to the seasonal social functions anyway, including a party with our sister church across the border in Mexico on Christmas Eve.  That Christmas morning I had to be told to open my presents, and as soon I had done so, I left them where they lay, and went back to bed. That's when she realized I was truly sick.  Later I was taken to the hospital with a temperature of 106 and I received horribly painful penicillin shots around the clock for the next several days. 

I was in the hospital a full week, mostly by myself. Visiting hours were strict back then.  My parents both worked fulltime and my younger siblings weren't allowed in the hospital ward so it wasn't easy for them to come visit for more than an hour or two each weekday.  My parents brought some of my presents to the hospital to keep me company during the long, solitary and boring hours between shots.  The first three days I didn't really care.  I was just that sick.  However, once the rounds of antibiotics by injection took effect, I felt much more interested in life and was ready to go home.  The doctor would not release me until I ate all my meals. I was already a gawky stick of a child, something of a picky eater, and I had lost a lot of weight.  I sent back my hospital meals mostly untouched.  But I had hardly eaten much before I got pneumonia, and I wasn’t going to start then (when I grew up, I got over this aversion to food, unfortunately).  Finally, my father would come to the hospital at meal times to eat my meals for me so the right boxes were ticked off and I could come home.

Meanwhile, I was incredibly bored and I had nothing to do except continue to be jabbed with needles around the clock, every four hours.  I was extremely needle phobic when I was hospitalized but I lacked the energy or oxygen to put up my usual fight, but they still filled me with horror. There were only soap operas and game shows on daytime television in the seventies, mostly deemed inappropriate for children.  There were no cell phones in the world,  nor  any electronic games to speak of.  I didn’t have a lot of energy even if a nurse had been free to play a game with me.  I had my Christmas presents, though. I  savoured one gift in particular.  It was  a marvelous anthology of poetry from my Aunt (see below for title). She always gave lovely gifts.

I read it all the way through, and then began again.  And again.

One one of his visits to the hospital my dad used a series of dots and dashes on paper to teach me the rhyme scheme for limericks and other forms of poetry.  I wrote very bad poetry and even worse limericks, but they scanned.

I pushed away the horror of needles and the smell of disinfectant with Tennyson’s ballads and Wordsworth’s daffodils and other wonders. I hugged Emily Dickinson to myself like a longlost friend. I wrote scores of very bad limericks after the fashion of Lear.


Sometimes they recite.  Most recently it was Christina Rosetti's Flint:
"An emerald is as green as grass,
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.
A diamond is a brillant stone,
To catch the world's desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
 What we never do talk about at this stage is schools of poetry, rhyme scheme, symbolism, or gendered nuances and patriarchy in poetry.  We talk about the poems we like and maybe what we like about them.  We also talk about what we did that day, which of the treats we do and don't like, and how many spoonfuls of sugar one might be permitted.  Poetry is a natural part of their lives. It's taken for granted that humans read poems, just as they read other things, and some of the poems they like and some they don't, and that's perfectly normal to them as well.  
 

The Light Brigade faced death squarely in the eye, and I, too, could face my own ordeals inspired by their courage, even though my ordeal was the far more humiliating needle in the buttocks six times every 24 hours. By the time the ordeal was over, I had so many bruises behind me they had to start giving me the injections in my thighs, but I was forever filled with the morally bolstering and soul-warming gift of poetry.  

Over the next few years I read that book so many times it fell apart, and then I read it to my children and bought a replacement, twice, when it, too, fell apart.I taught some of those poems to my daughters and they are teaching some of them to my grandchildren.   I have been blessed to have tea and poetry afternoons with my grandchildren where they choose a poem from their family's copy of this book and I read it while we have tea in pretty china cups and I offer treats I learned about in our travels in Asia.  The oldest child in that family is barely 9. Even the four year old likes to choose her own poems for me to read to the group.  The children talk about what they like about their poem, what it means, and they have debates about them as well, spontaneously, sometimes silly, sometimes erudite enough to grace the table of any Oxford don, if we ignore the crumbs and spilled tea, the jam smeared faces, the bits of ppeungo-bang that have escaped. 
But a flint holds fire."

More than once in their mother's childhood, we have stood at the sea and one of us has said, "I must go down to the sea again...' and we knew what the other meant.  More than once, I have said to their teenaged mother when we had a busy and noisy toddler and a new baby, "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree," and the vision of beehives and bean-rows and a place where peace comes dropping slow came to mind without being said, and she knew what I meant.  I imagine some day in the future of these grandchildren some one of them will comment on a flashy piece of commercialism with 'but a flint holds fire,' and the others will know what she means without another word. Poetry is another vocabulary, another way of thinking, feeling, and picturing, another way of meaning.   

That meaning is derived from more than the dictionary.  A line is greater than the sum of its parts- it holds richer, deeper, broader meaning than merely the definition of the individual words. It comes from the sound and the sense, the rhythm and the feel.  It comes from shared experiences, like reading poetry over the tea-table, or reciting it to your grandparents, or standing in a quiet, sunny space in the woods on a sultry day and looking at a creek still and smooth as glass and thinking of Milne's lines, "Between the woods the afternoon has fallen in a golden swoon..." Flints will ever always mean something more to these children than merely a gray stone which is used to start campfires.  It has a host of associations for them now. 

There is actually a term used for this string of association behind words (and lines of words in poetry).  It's the rather inelegant word 'chunking.'  Our brains works at a more efficient organization of memories and knowledge through this chunking process. We put phone numbers together combining them, so instead of learning 7 separate digits, we might turn 5-5-1-0 into 55-10. The word apple doesn't just mean the red fruit in our minds, it represents a host of other things- trees, George Washington, pies, computers, that time we went apple picking, the history of the marketing of the delicious apple over tastier, better breeds, the season best for apple picking, and more.  Try it and see- play this little game of association with me.   If I say George Washington, what are some things that come to mind? 
Selma? 
Water?
Fort?
Oak Tree?
The words, phrases, memories, experiences, all those things you pulled up and recalled just now- each is an example of how our brain makes connections, and each of those connections makes things easier to remember.  Words and memorable phrases such as we fine in poems are like microchips or extra storage cells for lots of additional information. And what are books and stories full of?  

 In an eloquent 1997 review of a not very happy anthology of poetry (now I believe out of print), J. Bottum writes:

"...one reason we read poetry to children is to hand on a deposit of words and phrases, the investment of prior generations in the language. There is a purpose in putting lines like “young Lochinvar is come out of the West” in children’s anthologies—and “’Twas the night before Christmas” and “what is so rare as a day in June?” and “I hear America singing” and “Under a spreading chestnut tree” and all the rest of the Victorian parlor classics, together with the most hackneyed, overquoted lines from Shakespeare and Dryden and Pope and Keats...  The person who is not given these references as a child will be deprived as an adult, lacking old memories around which the language can thicken.

... Another reason we read poetry to children has to do with what can only be called magic. Heavy meter and insistent rhyme are a kind of sorcery, through which words achieve unity not only with their meanings but with the things they represent. To put it another way, meter and rhyme confirm children’s deeply conservative desire that the world make sense in all its parts."

"Language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet, writer, philosopher, well over a hundred years before scientists came up with the theory of 'chunking.'


 “Is poetry important for today?” somebody might ask me, and they really mean that no, it's not. 
 “How will it help them get a job?” is another question I've heard, and of course, I can't claim that it will. But if that is all that matters, why do we do anything at all not directly connected to employment? Why sing a song or listen to one, why learn more than one way to prepare chicken, why buy two different shirts because we like the pattern when five duplicates of the same shirt would be more efficient?  Why bother asking me the question, since that will also not help you with employment? 

” Isn’t it old fashioned?” I have been asked, or passively aggressively told, reall.   I suppose it is, in some circles.  But the fact that something may have fallen out of fashion in some circles is not itself evidence that it deserves to stay out of fashion.  Surely we don't believe things matter only insofar as they are widely valued by our current culture.  "Old fashioned' is an observation, not a reasoned position. And that observation may not be as useful as we thought, since poetry books are still published, poetry still read.  So it isn't exactly like bustles and buggy whips. 

 ” I don’t like it, so I don’t see why I need to teach it to my kids. I turned out just fine without it.”  This is the most unanswerable argument of all, because I have nothing to say which matches my ideas about courtesy.  I don't know how to respond that won't be hurtful. We are standing on opposite sides of an incredibly wide and deep chasm, and we don’t speak the same language.   Because no, you didn’t turn out just fine without it, or you wouldn’t need to ask that question. You wouldn’t limit education by equating it only with ‘necessary for a job’.  You wouldn’t limit what you teach your children based on what you like or dislike, know or do not know.   It isn’t that you are a bad person, a dumb person, a worthless person.   I am shocked by such questions, but I don’t want to mock those who ask. I want to weep in pity, but nobody likes to be pitied at all.  But what else are we to feel when confronted by precious souls who have been defrauded, hurt, wounded,  and they don’t know it. They had the gift of wings, and the wings were sheared off before they ever had a chance to use them. 

Poetry gives us wings, beauty, a wider vista, a deeper emotional life, a new way of seeing, thinking, and feeling.  We read poetry because it's rich and expresses ideas and helps us make connections and understand more than before. We read poetry because it's a human endeavor.  If it were valueless, there would be no book of Psalms.  It doesn't matter what it has to do with a job. 

“…we have set up a little tin god of efficiency in that niche within our private pantheon which should be occupied by personality. We trouble ourselves about the uses of the young person to society. As for his own use, what he should be in and for himself, why, what matter? Because, say we, if we fit him to earn his living we fit him also to be of service to the world and what better can we do for him personally? We forget that it is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God shall man live,––whether it be spoken in the way of some truth of religion, poem, picture, scientific discovery, or literary expression; by these things men live and in all such is the life of the spirit. The spiritual life requires the food of ideas for its daily bread.”  (Charlotte Mason)

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http://amzn.to/2xEzR1S
The Golden Treasury of Poetry, edited by Louis Untermyer and illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund is the book that gave me such pleasure when I was in the hospital at age 10.

It was republished a few years later as The Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry, slightly different cover and I think maybe two or three poems are omitted here that were in the previous version. It wasn’t a substantive difference.

Another poetry anthology I highly recommend to anybody with young children (about grade 6 and below) is any early copy of the Childcraft poetry volume. About 1970 and before would be excellent. You can find these easily in thrift shops and second hand stores. If you can't find a Childcraft, look for any multivolume set of Children's stories and literature published between 1919 and 1970 or so, and buy just the volume with poetry and Mother Goose in it. It's sure to be affordable ( about a dollar if you in the U.S.) and much better than a couple of other anthologies often recommended to homeschooling families. I am not a fan of those. ------------------------------------------------------ Available for Purchase:

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View my products: https://gumroad.com/wendiwanders

   Education for All, a new Charlotte Mason e-zine. In this issue: Handicrafts, toys, imagination, nature study, and more!

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Charlotte Mason VS Unit Studies

Can we talk?   There's an approach to education that looks fun, it looks well planned, it looks intricate and makes us feel busy and like a lot of things are happening, so it must be more educational.  I admit it can be a lot of fun.  But my concern is that it can also be a burden.  It makes many families feel like they aren't doing enough if the aren't doing all this stuff.  It creates a lot of clutter and business and sends us down many a rabbit trail- and it's actually a distraction rather than an education.

For the Charlotte Mason educator philosophy, principles, ideas, these are the things that matter. In a Charlotte Mason education it is ideas and connections that matter, and the feeding of the mind through those ideas.  Where does the work of the mind happen?  In the mind.  Not in the creating of many projects, but in the mind.

But wait, you might be thinking.  The science of relations!  That sounds like unit studies!

 Many homeschoolers love unit studies because they seem to do such a good job at making education ‘inter-disciplinary,’ at forming connections between one topic and another.  They had unit studies in Miss Mason’s day- it was called ‘the correlation of lessons,’ and correlation is the building of connections.

The person making those connections is the one who is doing the most learning.  When Mom is the one creating lessons that build these connections, then Mom is the one who is doing the most learning.  We often hear this from parents, don’t we?  “I’m learning more than my kids!” Mom will say in excitement.  Sometimes this is merely because we are older and wiser now and have learned better to appreciate things we did not before. But more often that is a clue that we are the one making the connections, and we need to step back and let our children deal with the material more directly themselves.

Consider what Miss has to say about the sorts of extraneous projects we find in many unit studies:

She [Miss Mason] believed that the ability to make intellectual connections was an inborn gift – something that “must emanate from the soul, or person,himself,” and that if ideas are presented to the person in a pre-digested, pre-connected form, “this tempting unity may result in the collection of a mass of heterogeneous and unassimilated information.” (paragraph extracted from a study by Lynn Bruce, more on the source below)

Read Miss Mason’s description of the earliest form of unit studies and see what her description reminds you of!

“A fascinating vista is open before us; education has all things made plain and easy for her use; she has nothing to do but to select her ideas and turn out a man to her mind. Here is a tempting scheme of unity and continuity! One might occupy all the classes in a school for a whole month upon all the ideas that combine in one ‘apperception mass’ with the idea ‘book.’ We might have object- lessons on the colours, shapes, and sizes of books; more advanced object-lessons on paper-making and book-binding; practical lessons in book-sewing and book-binding; lessons, according to the class, on the contents of books, from A B C and little Bo-Peep to philosophy and poetry. A month! why, a whole school education might be arranged in groups of ideas which should combine into one vast ‘apperception mass,’ all clustering about ‘book.’ The sort of thing was done publicly some time ago, in London, being the idea round which the ‘apperception mass’ gathered.

Charlotte describes this lesson scheme in some detail in Volume 2, pages 255-6, then comments:

“Everybody said, ‘How pretty, how ingenious, what a good idea!’ and went away with the notion that here, at last, was education. But ask ‘What was the informing idea?’ The external shape, the internal contents of an apple,– matters with which the children were already exceedingly well acquainted. What mental habitudes were gained by this week’s work? They certainly learned to look at the apple, but think how many things they might have got familiar acquaintance with in the time. Probably the children were not consciously bored because the impulse of the teachers’ enthusiasm carried them on… This ‘apple’ course is most instructive to us as emphasising the tendency in the human mind to accept and rejoice in any neat system which will produce immediate results, rather than to bring every such little course to the test of whether it does or does not further either or both of our great educational principles.”

See also Volume 6, pages 115-16, where Miss Mason discusses a similar course of study applied to Robinson Crusoe:

“The whole thing must be highly amusing to the teacher, as ingenious amplifications self-produced always are: that the children too were entertained, one does not doubt. The teacher was probably at her best in getting by sheer force much out of little: she was, in fact, acting a part and the children were entertained as at a show, cinema or other; but of one thing we may be sure, an utter distaste, a loathing, on the part of the children ever after, not only for ‘Robinson Crusoe’ but for every one of the subjects lugged in to illustrate his adventures.”

But, many parents might say, the children are having so much fun with these unit studies.  That is probably true.  My own children fondly remember our medieval dinner and the drawbridge we made from a cardboard box for a mattress and the costume party.  They don’t actually remember very many facts from those days.  That the children are having fun

“…does not at all prove that these are wholesome food; they like lollipops but cannot live upon them; yet there is a serious attempt in certain schools to supply the intellectual, moral, and religious needs of children by appropriate ‘sweetmeats.’

As I have said elsewhere, the ideas required for the sustenance of children are to be found mainly in books of literary quality; given these the mind does for itself the sorting, arranging, selecting, rejecting, classifying, which Herbart leaves to the struggle of the promiscuous ideas which manage to cross the threshold.” (Mason, Volume 6, p. 117)

And one of my favorite CM paragraphs illustrating the importance of natural connections as opposed to artificial, contrived connections:

“Another point, the coordination of studies is carefully regulated without any reference to the clash of ideas on the threshold or their combination into apperception masses; but solely with reference to the natural and inevitable coordination of certain subjects. Thus, in readings on the period of the Armada, we should not devote the contemporary arithmetic lessons to calculations as to the amount of food necessary to sustain the Spanish fleet, because this is an arbitrary and not an inherent connection; but we should read such history, travels, and literature as would make the Spanish Armada live in the mind.” (Volume 3, page 231)

It’s not that you cannot help your children with this. You can be their tour guide. Occasionally you can give your children a hint about where to make some connections, and certainly if you think of one and are excited about it, share it with your children. It’s okay to tell them, ‘While this was happening in Greenland, this is what was happening across the world in India,’ or “I just noticed that….”Just don’t stress about it, and do give the children time and freedom to make their own connections.=) Sometimes they will surprise you.

Once upon a time I was reading King Lear with a child who was then 8 when we had a experience with this connection making.  I wrote about it to others:

“My 8 y.o. does not give very good narrations of King Lear. I break it down in small bits and help her over the difficult passages, but still, I’ve been thinking that maybe we should skip this and do another play with her (I’m still not sure about the tragedy element for her). I haven’t been at all sure she really was following the plot. However, today we happened to read the story of Cap O’ Rushes from Jacob’s English Fairy Tales. In this story a king asks his daughter how much she loves him. When she says as much as meat loves its salt, he throws her out, thinking she loves him not at all. Immediately, my daughter sat up and said, “Hey, we read that somewhere else!” A little further discussion helped her reach the point where she remembered it was King Lear. Incidentally, she also recognized the similarities to Cinderella in the latter half of Cap O’ Rushes.”

This connection of her own was more valuable and memorable to my child than a month’s worth of  Unit Studies.

If you are interested in reading further about these ideas and principles, I cannot recommend a better source than CM herself.

 If you want a shortcut look at these ideas, try the study of Miss Mason’s tenth Principle, by Lynn Bruce, available here.

I really don’t think you need a study guide or text book for books like Paddle to the Sea or most other books. Read the chapter, trace the journey on a map, ask for a short narration if your child is old enough. That seems too simple and easy. It’s so simple, that I suspect many of us subconsciously feel that we’re cheating, but it’s really a very meaty, idea-filled study.

Sometimes we add so many extra, unrelated projects- and it’s a bit like adding a bicycle wheel to your 8 cylinder Corvette- quite superfluous, and a rather clunky detraction. in the years before switching completely to CM I went to a lot of work planning our studies so that everything coincided. I did this to avoid confusion (mixing up learning from one subject with another) and because I thought the children needed me to put together these ‘units’ so that they would connect their subjects together better.

Cm said that children make their own connections and form their own relationships- and she was right! They do! They are not as easily confused as I imagined (especially when you follow CM’s advice to break up similar subjects with very dissimilar activities and use a century book or timeline and a map).

I am continuously astonished by the connections between one topic and another that we discover, connections that I never would have thought have making (I was astonished when I found on my own that one of Wordsworth’s poems is ‘Surprised by Joy,’ which is where C.S. Lewis got the title for one of his books, and both concern the death of a loved one). We also delighted when we accidentally stumbled upon another connection when we read another poem by Wordsworth about an event my then 11 y.o. had read about in another book (the selling of the English, Angles, boys on the Roman slave market and Pope Gregory seeing them and saying they were more like Angels, and consequently sending evangelists to the British Isles).

The connections in life are far more far reaching than the ones I made in my unit studies.

If you appreciate what you read here, I believe I have some other goodies you'll enjoy.  Take a look below!
 https://gumroad.com/wendiwanders



$5.00- Education for All, vol 2- the Imagination (and more) issue!- transcript of the imagination talk from the AO Camp meeting, with additional material I had to cut to save time.  
 
 $5.00- Education for All, a new CM journal,   Feed Your Mind!  This issue contains several articles on handicrafts, outdoor play, nature study and science. See sidebar for purchasing options if you are in the Philippines.


 $3.00 Five Little Peppers and How They Grew Copywork (grades 2/3, carefully selected with an eye toward finely crafted sentences, lovely bits of writing pleasant to picture in the mind's eye, and practice in copying some of the mechanics of grammar and punctuation typically covered in these years.

  $3.00 Aesop's Fables Copywork for Year One!  Carefully selected with an eye toward well written sentences, memorable scenes, and some practice copying sentences that model the basics of capitalization and punctuation.   Suitable for use with children who have already mastered the strokes and letters for basic penmanship.

Picture Study!  Miguel Cabrera's beautiful, diverse families, painted in 18th century Mexico this package includes 9 downloadable prints along with directions for picture study and background information on the artist and his work. $5.00

Common Kitchen:  What's for lunch?  Isn't that a common problem in homeschooling families?  What to fix, what is quick, what is frugal, what is nourishing?  How can I accomplish all those things at once?  We homeschooled 7 children, and I was a homeschooling mom for 29 years on a single income.  I collected these recipes and snack ideas from all over the world.  These are real foods I used to feed my family, my godsons, and sometimes my grandkids.  Includes some cooking tips and suggestions for sides, and for a variety of substitutions.  I think every family will find something they can use here. $5.00

Nonsense & Fun: A Scouting Song

Go Get the Axe is one of AO's folksong selections this year.  On our FB group somebody asked if it was okay to switch it out with a different song they like better.  That is always perfectly acceptable, and nobody needs our permission for that.

For those who are curious about the song, here is some additional information about it, and about the genre of nonsense songs.

How old is it?

Older than Bugs Bunny.  It's an old Boy Scout camp song which predates Bugs. It goes back to the early 1900s according to contemplator:  http://www.contemplator.com/england/gogetax.html  (contemplator moves its songs around, so if this is now a broken link, search for go get the axe on their site).

It's not terribly old in the world of folk music.  Some additional references:

Peterson's magazine, vol 92 1888 quotes references a political parody tune: "At the April dinner of the GridIron club at the Arlington Hotel in Washington, April 22, four members sung to the tune of "The little black bull" a song, the title of which was given as "Peeping through the Knot Hole in Papa's Wooden Leg or Why Was the Ocean Built so Near to the Shore?"

There's a reference in the 1904 book 

Jim Hickey :a story of the one-night stands /by George V. Hobart One-night stands here has little to do with the modern meaning, but rather, refers to a troup of comic actors and singers who travel and perform, one night each place.

 'The Hackney Scout Song Book' (1938 edition) references an older YMCA Camp Song book

What is the point?

A Charlotte Mason education is not utilitarian. 

There is a place in your children's life for nonsense and fun, and just plain hilarity and giddiness. That place is where Go Get the Axe belongs.  Again, you can definitely and freely, without any condemnation from us, choose a different folksong.  Just make sure there is room and material for a bit of free nonsense in your child's life.
From volume 2:
Rest––At the same time, change of occupation is not rest: if a man ply a machine, now with his foot, and now with his hand, the foot or the hand rests, but the man does not. A game of romps (better, so far as mere rest goes, than games with laws and competitions), nonsense talk, a fairy tale, or to lie on his back in the sunshine, should rest the child, and of such as these he should have his fill.

From volume 6, in a section where Mason is lamenting the educational, and life, failures of two overly earnest young men who attempt to learn and memorize their way through life, going at all their subjects all wrong, because they have "never got so far as to learn that knowledge is delightful because one likes it; and that no effort at self-education can do anything until one has found out this supreme delightfulness of knowledge."

Give children the chance to appreciate nonsense and absurdity.

"A cultivated sense of humour is a great factor in a joyous life, but these young men are without it. Perhaps the youth addicted to sports usually fails to appreciate delicate nonsense; sports are too strenuous to admit of a subtler, more airy kind of play and we read:
R––heard Mr. Balfour and Lord Rayleigh praising Alice in Wonderland. Deeply impressed he bought the book as soon as he returned to London and read it earnestly. To his horror he saw no sense in it. Then it struck him that it might be meant as nonsense and he had another try, then he concluded that it was rather funny but he remained disappointed."

The sense of humour that allows children (and adults) to appreciate nonsense also allows them the grace of self-depreciation, humility, the ability to laugh at themselves when they are being absurd.
Children need, "wholesome happy nonsense, and the children who can thoroughly enjoy it are growing up with that inestimable treasure a sense of humour - that salt in ourselves which brings savour out of the commonplace, and preserves us from the infection of the stale, the flat, the unprofitable dullness of prosaic minds."

Admittedly, a very little of this goes a long way, and we do not need to introduce the children to too much silliness.  They will arrive at it on their own, anyway.  Including an occasional silly song or nonsense verse is helpful in giving them a template for the form and metre, for showing them how it might be done cleverly and with wit, and for letting them know that parents, too, can appreciate a bit of frivolity.  But don't overdo it.

From volume 1: 
"The Sense of Incongruous.––All their lessons will afford some scope for some slight exercise of the children's thinking power, some more and some less, and the lessons must be judiciously alternated, so that the more mechanical efforts succeed the more strictly intellectual, and that the pleasing exercise of the imagination, again, succeed efforts of reason. By the way, it is a pity when the sense of the ludicrous is cultivated in children's books at the expense of better things. Alice in Wonderland is a delicious feast of absurdities, which none of us, old or young, could afford to spare; but it is doubtful whether the child who reads it has the delightful imaginings, the realising of the unknown, with which he reads The Swiss Family Robinson.
This point is worth considering in connection with Christmas books for the little people. Books of 'comicalities' cultivate no power but the sense of the incongruous; and though life is the more amusing for the possession of such a sense, when cultivated to excess it is apt to show itself a flippant habit. Diogenes and the Naughty Boys of Troy is irresistible, but it is not the sort of thing the children will live over and over, and 'play at' by the hour, as we have all played at Robinson Crusoe finding the footprints. They must have 'funny books,' but do not give the children too much nonsense reading."
 If you do choose to use this song, in addition to just singing it for fun, you can also play around with the lyrics. 

There are many different verses, so you can look up other versions and add them.
Your kids can make up their own if they like.

Another verse:
The chambermaid came to the door,
"Wake up you lazy sinners.
We need those sheets for tablecloths,
and it's almost time for dinner."


Use other familiar poems to make up silly verses:

Under the spreading chestnut tree,
The village smithy stands:
The smith a mighty man is he –
But we'll throw him through the window.

        The window! The window!
        We'll throw him through the window.
        The smith a mighty man is he –
But we'll throw him through the window.

The boy stood on the burning deck,
And he refused to leave:
He said, "When this deck gets burnt out –
I'll throw it through the window."

Old Mother Hubbard she went to the cupboard,
To get the poor dog a bone:
But when she got there the cupboard was bare –
So she threw it through the window.

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner,
Eating his Christmas pie:
He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum –
And he threw it through the window.

Little Miss Muffett sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey:
There came a big spider, and sat down beside her –
So she threw it through the window.
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water:
Jack fell down and broke his crown –
So she threw him through the window.

Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon:
The little dog laughed to see such fun –
So they threw him through the window.

Above is from an old boy scout camp song book.

Make up your own with other nursery rhymes or poems your family knows:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And threw it out the window, the window
The FIRST story window
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And threw it out the window,

Mary had a little lamb,
It's fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that she would go,
She'd throw it out the window, the window, the second story window
Everywhere that Mary went, she threw it out the window.

Little Bo Peep, she lost her sheep
And knew not where to find them
Leave them alone and they'll come home
Then throw them out the window, the window, 
the third story window.  Leave them alone and they'll come home
then throw them out the window.

Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
There came a great spider which sat down beside her
and she jumped out the window!
The window, the window, the fourth story window
There came a great spider which sat down beside her
so she jumped out he window.

Little Jack Horner sat in his corner
Eating his Christmas pie
He stuck in his thumb and drew out a plum
Then threw it out the window, the window the fifth story window
He stuck in his plum then drew out a plum and threw it out the window

 And so on with as many MOther Goose rhymes as you care to try.


Here's the Harvard version, learn it and learn some synonyms: 
Peering through the aperture in father's artificial appendage
who'll tighten the chronometer when I cross the bar?
go procure the viand dissector, there's an insect on baby's cerebellum
one of the greatest sociological factors of the development of the male of the species Homo Sapiens is his immediate maternal ancestor.

As with all songs where children start making up verses to fit the tune and pattern of the lyrics, they are actually learning about rhythm and meter without stress- some lines fit, some need to be shortened or lengthened, and the kids will figure it out. Doing this strengthens their ability to work with words and to make words work for them, to understand the mechanics of poetry conceptually long before they are given the technical terms for rhyme schemes and metre.   Not that there needs to be a utilitarian purpose and function to everything you do. Nonsense adds a bit of lightness and fizz to the juice of life. 

 It's okay to just have fun.

(above info gleaned mostly from Mudcat.org)

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Sample Plutarch Narrations

I'm cleaning out cupboards, nooks, crannies, and secret bookshelves, the detritus of decades.  By secret, I mean something more like forgotten.  One of the bedrooms has a bookcase in a niche in the wall that is completely hidden when the door is open.  You have to be in that room with the door shut to see the bookcase.  The contents of that bookcase were largely the books in use by the person using the bedroom at the time, and their notebooks and journals and so forth.  The room was used by three kids in succession and I was seldom in the room with the door shut and it was just a case of out of sight, out of mind.  None of those three cleared out their notebooks they had stashed on that shelf so it's really an archeaological dig (seriously, a dig, I won't desribe the dust levels on this forgotten shelf).

The following narrations were on undated scraps of paper ripped from a composition book and stashed there.  They are untitled as well.  I know they are from Plutarch, and I know the kid who wrote them the least academic and least motivated.  I think probably this student was around 12 or 13 when these were written, but it could have been any time in the first couple of years in high school. This student often gave the subjects of Plutarch shortened nicknames.

I share them here just to give other parents using Plutarch some idea of what a Plutarch narration could look like. It doesn't have to be a comprehensive thesus.  Ideally, once a week or even every other week, I should have worked with this student, taking one such narration and helping the student turn it into a longer composition, with better spelling and clearer writing.  But when every reading of the day is narrated by hand, this length is acceptable for most of them.  It's a gift, really, terse prose.  At least to me, because I have never attained it.


1.The Achaians used to use foreignors in their military so they could have better leaders. The problem with this is that the generals would often start unnecessary wars to help their own. When 'Phil' redid the entire military, he fixed this problem.

2. This account seems accurate because he has very personal details about the battle with the Firmanians. He also spoke of detailed injuries among the upper ranks. He went out in front of his army and didn't make a big deal about that.

3. "Phil" trained his military much differently than other generals. The first significant change he made was the make-up of his army.  He chose young men and fined them if they refused to join.  Phil made his army do their drills in large, open public places where people could watch.  After trying to turn in areas like that, moving in an open battle field was easy.

4. He put a luxury tax on many unnecessary items that people bought, thereby creating another source of income for the government and also discouraged lavish purchases. It helped reduce the things the people bought, but for some reason, the Roman people loved Cato for making this tax.