Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Andrew broke his arm yesterday

He jumped out of the tree in our front yard, started to twist on the way down and put out his right arm to break his fall.

He has to wait for Friday for his cast, so the swelling will go down. I estimate he should get out of his cast two weeks before Nutcracker. It's a clean break of the forearm, a greenstick break but mostly the whole way through. He is acting pretty chipper- too chipper for a kid I need to keep from falling onto an already broken arm.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

In Defense of Memorization

Great article!
Link: http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_3_defense_memorization.html
Snippet: From The Cat in the Hat on up, verse teaches children something about the patterns and relationships that bind together the words of which it is composed. Poetry sets up an abstract system of order and harmony; the rhythm and the rhyme scheme are logical structures that a child can comprehend even before he understands the words themselves, just as he can grasp the rhythmic and harmonic relations of a piece of music.

Friday, October 03, 2008

Book: The Martian Child by David Gerrold

Few books grip me so that I can't go to bed until I've read the last page, no matter the hour. This book gets that rare honor. The Martian Child , labeled as a novel based on true events, reads as more autobiographical. The story of a single gay science fiction writer who adopts a "hard to place" son, this is the most powerful expression of the power of parental love I have read since Expecting Adam. There is not much more I can say except, read this book.