Tricotomania and more

Becky and I have been having a short correspondance in which the issue of accessible poetry came up. I had mentioned that Tigger’s drama class had an end of term performance that had included reciting the whole of The Lady of Shallot (I’ve linked to a fabulous illustrated edition from Kids Can Pres). She mentioned that she had recently met some public school teachers who seemed very concerned that poetry be “accessible” to children and she suspected that I would be accused of forcing my daughter to read (and memorize) inappropriately difficult material. My response got quite long and we think others might be interested. My e-mail forms the basis of what follows. I’ve edited and added a bit. I’d love to hear your comments.
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Well, this drama group developed the play themselves based on some ideas thrown out by the teacher (who had received a bunch of medieval costumes so that was the theme). The poem was actually suggested by one of the girls. Tigger recognized it immediately from her copy of The Nations Favourite Poems (BBC books).

If some folks think that is inaccessible, I suppose they would be horrified that Tigger asked for a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Christmas a couple of years ago. I found a lovely edition illustrated by Arther Rackham. She had read excerpts in Susan Coyne’s memoir Kingfisher Days (completely suitable for children though not written for them) and thought the idea of a play written entirely in poetry was cool. She had also come across Shakespeare in a collection about fairies her great grandmother (sadly missed) bought her which is completely full of so-called inaccessible poetry and prose, along with some beautiful illustrations. (There were several copies available from Abe Books. I linked to the first one with a photo.)

I quite like a lot of children’s poetry including stuff that might be considered accessible. But I think there is also a rather restricted understanding of “accessible” that goes around. For example, The Lady of Shallot was accessible to these kids because many of them had studied some medieval history (and they did a bit in the class) and thus the poem made sense in that context. They not only learned the poem, they talked about character and suitable activities for a play set in the middle ages. One of the kids in the class was really interested in blatant historical inaccuracies and they made a big deal of the fact that, although the poem is about the period in which the play is set, it is historically inaccurate to have them read the poem in that period because it wasn’t written until the 19th century.

And A Midsummer Night’s Dream was accessible to Tigger (at age 7) because it is about fairies. And the Lady of Shallot is about knights and ladies. A lot of what children read is incomprehensible to them, so the fact that the language is old-fashioned isn’t such a problem for them. And they don’t know (yet) that they are supposed to be scared of it.

One time when I wasn’t feeling well, Tigger sat and read me poems from Nation’s Favourite Poems to make me feel better. She reads poetry really well, but some of it was difficult stuff (John Donne and whatnot). At some point I asked her if she understood what she was reading and she said no but seemed baffled as to why I would have asked. It just wasn’t an issue for her. She liked the rhythm of it, I guess. She was happy for me to explain but it wasn’t necessary.

As I was writing this post, Tigger came in and asked why I had the Fairies book on my desk. I explained what this post was about. She wondered what “accessible” meant. Then she laughed heartily and said it was silly to think that Lady of Shallot was inaccessible (or Shakespeare for that matter). She thought it was really funny that anyone would worry about these things.

I also think we need to distinguish between what we expect a 9-year-old to do with the Lady of Shallot from what we might expect in a high school (or university) English class. I used to coordinate an Introduction to Sociology class in which we included material on postmodernism and cities. Colleagues in other departments thought we were crazy, saying that first-year university students could not be expected to understand postmodernism. But we got some great essays. Not essays we would think were great in the context of a final-year course or a graduate course, but essays that demonstrated that first-year students can indeed grasp complex concepts and begin to work with them. We had high expectations of the type of material we expected them to grapple with but realistic expectations of what we expected them to understand of that material.

I expect that Tigger will come back to these poems again and again over her lifetime. And each time she will see new things in them, focus on different aspects. Right now they are stories about fairies and knights and ladies told in rhyming rhythmic poetry. And that is completely accessible.

So Cate has been busy but she e-mailed me a great sweater suggestion. The hourglass sweater from Last Minute Knitted Gifts. That customer photos bit in the Amazon page is great. I’ve never seen it before. But it is especially useful in this instance because someone has knit the hourglass sweater. Hurray. It does look like a good possibility.

And my library has copies of the books. I’m 3rd in line.

A quick google search turns up more great photos (and a knitalong — what rock have I been living under?!). I have to say that if I’d seen this one first, I would have wondered why Cate had suggested it. It looks great on her but not at all like what I had in my mind. Good to know how different it looks with less ease but I think this one is more what I was thinking, though I look more like the woman in the green one on the Amazon site.

Here’s another very pretty one. I note she made the neck less wide. And the photo, though beautiful, confirms my view that this is not the neckline for me. I hate those wide necklines and know that a V or a deep scoop is rather flattering to the girls.

And I think I should put this link in just so I can find it again to read through her mods. I think they might come in handy.

Of course, I’m going to do this in the yarn I have and the guage I get with that yarn. I swatched on 4mm needles last night and J. came round today and agreed that it is a bit loose for a sweater (particularly one to be worn with only a bra underneath), so I’m about to swatch again on 3.5mm.

So we’ll see how that waiting for the book goes or whether I just cast on and go. I think I could probably work out the bottom by myself but would really appreciate some guidance on the armscye shaping and sleeves. We’ll see.

Thanks again Cate. Even if I had heard of this sweater, I suspect that I might not have noticed it until now. I don’t usually look for plain stockingnette sweaters, nor “easy knits”. And “last minute knitted gifts” is something I would never see a need for since I don’t knit to deadlines. I give knitted gifts, but I knit them for other reasons and then find someone to give to usually.

BTW, some of those other suggestions and comments were also very good. I like Juno’s suggestion of Cinxa (which I had noticed before and forgotten about) and it might float up to the top of the pile at some point. I will probably not do the hooded pullover though, just because I can’t see doing too much boring stockingnette. That Patons one might stay in my mind. Must keep my eye out for nice worsted weight yarn.

While I was having all that angst about sweaters the other day, I did a bit of surfing. In the sale ‘room’ at Four Seasons Knitting I saw this lovely Koigu worsted weight boucle. Great colours, though in fact there were two dyelots. I have a couple of skeins of one with more of the reds and yellows while the bulk of the box is the dyelot with those lovely blues. Plenty of burgundy type reds thrown in so it’ll go with my new cords as well as my jeans. Lovely and soft, just as I suspected. I have 18 skeins.

Since it is bouclé, I’m assuming that plain old stockingnette is the way to go. So I’ll probably make something up. Maybe based on the Shapely Tank. Or maybe based on the shape of the Manos sweater. I suspect I’ll swatch to figure out what size needles it wants to be knit with and what sort of guage I get and then make some decisions.

In other news, I decided that I wanted to knit with some of my handspun. Cate gave me some mystery brown top (from Straw into Gold so don’t think she’s pawning off crap wool on me) back in May and I spun all of it up on the Hitchhiker a while ago. It is fairly heavy (about a chunky weight, at a guess; I think i was getting about 4 stitches to the inch on this project). I also had some of the Persimmon Tree stuff hanging around after making that mobious scarf for my mom (I know there are photos of the fluff and the yarn in the gallery, if not the mobious scarf which is now in my mother’s possession). When in Ann Arbor in late May , I noticed my host wearing a lot of brown with turquoise and the idea of knitting the two together had been mulling for a while.

So I just did it. I knit a brown hat with turquoise stripes and a couple of curlique’s on the top. My process is to guess at a number to cast on, knit the ribbing (3×1 in this case, about an inch or so), switch to stockingnette and then try on when there is enough to judge fit but not so much I’ll resent ripping. Then I make a judgement, rip and cast on the number I need to make the thing fit.

So I wasn’t really sure if I should send this person a Xmas gift and dithered over that for a bit. They’re family by my definition, but not people I routinely exchange gifts with. Decided that I hadn’t brought a hostess gift in May and thus this might be appropriate. Pulled out some of the grey romney I’d spun up and knit a matching-ish hat for her husband (who is the one I know better. She’s a new addition to the family). I’ve packed them up today to post. Whether they get there by Xmas is neither here nor there, really.

More technical details for those who want them. Her hat decreases one stitch at 6 points every second round until 6 stitches remain. His is a bit less pointy, decreasing either side of 4 points every second round until 12 stitches and then doing 3 into 1 decreases to get to 4 stitches. Deciding these things in advance makes it easier. I had thought 6 decrease points and made sure my cast-on number was a multiple of six. I made his the same size and only decided on the different decrease part way through. The curlique recipe can be found in Knitting on the Edge under Fringes.

Coming Soon: A technical post on adding a knitted lining to mittens, complete with photographs of the steps. (Some of them are crap photos but it’ll be an interesting experiment.)

Tigger has read the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series. In fact, she is currently rereading them as well as reading both the Caroline Years and the Charlotte Years. This series has been something of a spine to her study of pioneer life and western settlement leading her to other books about the period both in the USA and Canada.

Tigger also plays the fiddle. I have mentioned before that she should note some of the songs mentioned in the books and talk to her fiddle teacher about them. While she liked this idea she hasn’t been disciplined enough to actually do it.

Lately at least two people (Melissa was one but I can’t recall the other) have mentioned an NPR program about the music of the Little House series. We listened to Arkansas Traveller this evening (while baking gingerbread cookies) and thoroughly enjoyed it. But even more interesting is the Pa’s Fiddle site listed in the Web Resources section of the NPR program site.

Pa’s Fiddle is the website of a project to record versions of much of the music referred to in the Little House series. And there is plenty of it. Apparently 126 separate songs are mentioned in the books. (I guess Tigger was right to be daunted with compiling a list.) The Pa’s Fiddle folks have plans for a 10 CD series (2 are out already). They have also got a companion songbook available. I was disappointed to see that it contains arrangements for piano and guitar though the sample pages contain a couple of fiddle tunes.

The whole project is linked to a scholarly project by Dale Cockrell, Professor of Musicology and American and Southern Studies, Vanderbilt University who is researching a scholarly volume of the music. We have found historical fiction and memoirs like the Little House series to be an important part of history studies. Finding others who take this work seriously as a historical source and are working on developing the historical study of the music of the period from this source is rather exciting. And it has so much potential to add to our studies. (Of course, that might make us weird, given HarperCollins view that they need to market the books as adventure rather than history. HT Becky and Melissa)

This is such an exciting project, though I suspect they are unaware of just how many young people might be interested in it. Of all the Laura Ingalls Wilder fans out there, I can’t imagine Tigger is the only one who is learning to play the violin. I do recognize that most young people take a more classical approach to their studies, but giving them an opportunity to play fiddle tunes from books they love would be a fascinating addition to even classical music studies. Maybe the Pa’s Fiddle folk might consider producing a small collection for beginning fiddlers, though they do have a pretty full dance-card at the moment what with the 10 CD series.

For those of you in the US, you can order the 2 CDs and the companion songbook (designed for reasonably competent musicians) from their website. I’m probably going to phone in an order though I’ve also e-mailed their business office asking about Canadian retailers.

And if anyone has any good sources of American folk music for fiddle, do let me know in the comments.

Thanks for all the help on the sweater decision. I’m still mulling and thought I should share some of that with you in case you have other helpful ideas (some of the comments about Banff were very helpful and things I might not have thought about).

So let’s start with the suggestion that big girls shouldn’t knit with anything thicker than aran weight. Elann has this which looks lovely (and let’s ignore that free pattern shown with the yarn because it is very tempting but entirely impractical). This pattern looks interesting but would need to be sized up. (What is with the Italians?)

If we went to a chunky weight, the Knitting Pure and Simple hooded pullover might get a lot of use. It looks a bit boring to knit but plain stockingnette can look great. Especially if I went for a tweedy yarn like this though I’m torn between the Cranberry Wine and the Victorian Blue. I had a card with snips but threw it away for some mysterious reason. On the other hand if I wait until next week, I could have Classic Elite Beatrice. Looking at the snips, none of the colours really do much more me though..

For some reason this is also attractive. It might be the bell sleeves. Not sure what an empire waist would look like on me. They have an unfortunate connection with maternity wear in my mind.

In a worsted weight, this design from Patons (I know, surprising, to me anyway) looks like a distinct possibility — good shape, interesting to knit…

What I ought to do is go look through my box of IK mags and see if anything in there jumps out at me. But that hooded pullover is really growing on me…. or maybe the Patons one with the cables.

Edited to add: I should have checked this again before I uploaded but Cassie suggested Eris and I have the pattern. It is very tempting. Any yarn suggestions?

I noticed this the other day. It looked worse with the bottom of my foot showing through. But I did not panic. I put them in the wash and then instead of putting them in my drawer, I threw them in the knitting basket. Today, I got out the bin with leftover sock yarn in it fully intending to reknit the heels. This is what I found.

Nowhere near enough to reknit a heel. This is what you get when you knit toe up to make sure you don’t run out. Insignificant leftovers.

Does anyone have enough Socks That Rock in the colour Ruby Slippers to knit a heel? And would you mind sending it to me?

I know. Some of you are laughing. But not that kind of advice. Fashion advice really. Here is the problem:

I need more sweaters.

You see I never really wore sweaters a lot before. I found wool too warm indoors. And it is too damned cold outside for a sweater to be much good as outerwear (contrary to my time in the UK). So I knit a few cotton sweaters that I used to wear a lot. And then I knit that modified Tara (check the Gallery) worrying the whole time that it would be too warm but found it fine, possiblly because of the v-neck and 3/4 sleeves.

When I knit that red sweater with the Manos de Uraguay yarn, I figured it would only get worn for a very short part of the year when it was kind of chilly but I was still too cheap to turn the heat on. WRONG. I am wearing it all the time. It is really comfy. Looks good. And is exactly the right weight for drafty church halls, and even my own house (since, frankly, I’m too cheap to have the heat up all day and much of my house is not fabulously well insulated).

The problem is that even I am getting sick of how often I wear that sweater. So I need more. I quite like the idea of chunky yarn (since it’ll be quicker to knit apart from anything else). But I also want something that has a bit of shape. The Manos sweater is sort of tunic shaped, a bit like the Indian tunics of a salwaar kameez. (The idea of a salwaar kameez in chunky Uraquayan wool sounds almost a bit too cross-cultural.) I did it with a v-neck. The sleeves are belled. There is a bit of waist shaping.

I am somewhat tempted by Banff but am worried it is too bulky and I’ll just look huge. (Let’s face it. Jenna and I do not have the same build.) I found some Classic Elite Paintbox in that weight at Elann.com. I’m thinking that the French Ultramarine might be nice, though the Purple Pallet would go really well with a pair of cords I just made myself. (I have fabric for another pair of cords that would look great with the French Ultramarine.)

In a chunky weight I also like the look of this in Victorian Blue. They will also have Classic Elite Beatrice from December 19th.

So, I guess my questions are:

What do you think of Banff? (for those who have not met me in person I am about a size 16-18, with a waist and relatively curvy shape though not very busty for that size)

Any other ideas of nice sweaters in aran weight or heavier yarn that would be good for my work at home/homeschooling mom lifestyle?

Thanks for all the suggestions.

A while ago I posted about the fact that as an unschooler I try to support and enable my child in learning what she wants to learn. One of the most difficult bits of this has been religion. My daughter has a faith and wants to go to church and learn more and I am enabling that. My faith is not as strong but I have found a parish that I am comfortable with and am learning along with her, with the support of the clergy and others in the parish.

It is advent. So I picked up some advent resources at church and we’ve been using them. The christian education coordinator did say that there would be aspects of some of them that I wouldn’t be comfortable with but she thought that we could just discuss it and it would be fine. What I am about to write about has been dealt with between Tigger and I in that fashion and she was right.

But I still want to vent about it because it is one of those things that really makes me wonder what some Christians are thinking and what their motivation for their faith is. A few years ago I explored some resources like the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society and found their views excessively rational. But some things make me see why folks would dismiss religion as irrational superstition.

One resource we picked up was a an activity book called Prayers and Promises (from Creative Communication for the Parish though I can’t see it in their current catalogue). It has a poster with a story that you put stickers into every day and a little booklet with readings, puzzles, etc. It starts with the story of Adam and Eve, goes through Noah, Abraham, etc etc through to the birth of Jesus. Overall, it is kind of a nice approach.

But on the second and third days, where the Adam and Eve story is told, there is something really disturbing. In the first day where they tell about the garden we find this in a section where the child is asked to imagine themself in the garden ” … but no mosquitoes bite their noses, no bees sting their toes. A wolf and a lamb are having dinner together (not each other!), a lion and a deer are playing tag.” Even more worrying the next day, when we deal with the snake (who is explicitly stated to be the form Satan takes) we find “Now the lion roared at the lamb, and thorns and thistles suddenly appeared. The sun’s heat burnt their skin, and sickness and death became a part of life.”

What is going on here?! Lions and wolves are carnivores. To imagine a lion that does not eat the deer loses something essential to its lion-ness. When did mosquitoes, bees, thorns, and thistles become evil?! Do people seriously believe this?! Because it is patently absurd.

Interestingly, in the scripture passage at the beginning of this day 3 lesson, we find “Now the snake was the most cunning animal that the Lord God had made…” How does that get turned around to attribute all the stuff we don’t like to Satan in the explanatory passage below?! Seriously, the explanatory passage makes it sound like thistles, snakes, etc. are not part of God’s creation. Why is it so difficult to have a more complex understanding of God’s creation? And what damage are we doing by pretending to children that a world in which lions do not eat other animals is possible and even desirable. That really is irrational superstition.

I am reminded of a conversation Tigger and I had in Blockbuster one day. I suggested that we rent Two Brothers because I thought she’d like it. She noticed that it was rated PG and I pointed out that it said that was because of violence. I said that from the description it sounds like maybe that is mostly tiger violence and I thought it would be all right. She looked at me, incredulous, and said “But mommy, tiger violence isn’t real violence. Tigers can’t be vegetarians.” Maybe I shouldn’t have allowed my (then) vegetarian child to watch Big Cat Diary while eating her dinner when she was younger. 

Willa posted some thoughts on collaborative learning in which she talked a bit about right brained learners. She and I corresponded a bit about it because I sometimes find that some things in posts on this topic resonate with me (in relation to Tigger) and sometimes I’m not so sure. There was one list (that I can’t seem to find now) which really didn’t seem to fit so I hadn’t explored this topic earlier. But in the discussion with Willa, I decided that maybe I should do a bit of reading. So I got Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World: Unlocking the Potential of Your ADD Child by Jeffrey Freed out of the library. I’m not done reading it yet bit it has provided some useful information.

It is interesting, given my discussion in August of Mighton’s Myth of Ability, that Freed suggests giving right brained kids math that is considerably further advanced than their current grade level and then going back and filling in arithmetic as they need it. He actually suggests doing Algebra with grade 4 kids.

For Freed, part of the reason for this is to overcome the disinclination of perfectionists to try new things and to capitalize on the competitiveness that he has observed in these kinds of learners. Tigger, like me, is not at all perfectionist or competitive but there still seems to be some value in this sort of approach.

In fact, Tigger (who would be in grade 4 if she were in school) expressed an interest in algebra last spring and we did briefly consider doing it. But then I think I got worried that I was pushing her and that algebra was way too advanced for her. I recall asking a few people about the Key To … series and when folks said that they assumed knowledge of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, I thought again about math goals and decided on the homeschoolmath.net e-books. (I really like the books, by the way, and recommend them to anyone looking for good coverage of the elementary school math curriculum.)

We started with Geometry this fall. The book goes from angles through triangles to calculating area. It avoids circles so students don’t need to understand decimals to use it. I had found some dry-erase graph paper that I thought would be useful for the section on area. But the logic of the book made a lot of sense to me so I discouraged Tigger from jumping right to the bit where we needed the graph paper. I told her that in order to do that she needed to know some of the other stuff in the book. It is a very conceptual program and has lots of drawing so she did enjoy doing it. But she got sick of it after a while and we stopped. Before we got to the bit about area.

At a loss for what to do next, I got her to do the pre- test from the Math-U-See website so that I could work out what she could do and what she couldn’t and maybe pick something. I told her why I wanted her to do it and she did some problems and pointed out stuff she had never learned how to do or had forgotten. We then picked out some relevent bits of the e-books to cover some topics she said she’d like to do.

She wanted to learn division so we did that section of the Multiplication and Division II book. I figured we’d go back and do some of the multiplication stuff later. I liked the way division was presented and I think it really helped Tigger understand the concept of long division (and some alternatives) but I’m not sure I should have made her do all of the practice problems. There was a lot of resistance. And I almost lost her before we did the thing she had wanted to learn.

Some of the problems suggested checking your answer by multiplying and we skipped that because she didn’t know how to multiply in columns. But she decided that would be good to learn so we went back and did that. We did the lesson on distributive property. I let her skip some of the practice. Then we did multipling in columns (one of the factors is a one digit number). Then I was reading Freed.

So, the next day I took a piece of paper and we did one problem like the ones we did before. Then I gave her a 3 digit by a 2 digit number and showed her how to do it. I showed her with carrying (previously we had done the ones on one line, then the 10s on the next, and so on), using the same problem we just did. Well, I started to show her and then I had a phone call and she worked it out. She was very proud of herself. So then I got her to do the harder problem we’d just done. And then I gave her a 4-digit by a 3-digit. She looked at it and started to back away. It’s too hard. The numbers are too big. I reminded her that she’d just worked out how to do the other one and this wasn’t really any harder. She reluctantly bought that and tried it. We checked it with the calculator and she had done it right. She was happy. We stopped. She said that we shouldn’t use the books; that I should just teach her myself.

Then I read more Freed. I thought more about the algebra thing. I talked to Tigger about it, explaining what Freed had said. She is interested. But I then felt like I should make sure she knows how to do the things we just learned. So I printed out some review pages from the Multiplication and Division III book. She has been resistant but she’s done some. The first time, though, she forgot what to do and didn’t go look it up or ask for help but worked herself into a state about it. I think we’ve fixed that. (Her resistances have some of the flavour of what Freed describes of perfectionists but she is pretty easy to talk out of them and she doesn’t show other signs of perfectionism.)

As an aside, I used to be worried about how to get her to learn her multiplication tables but she seems to have learned them more or less. Not sure how. We haven’t done that much practice but a lot of them are in there. And I’ve encouraged her to count on her fingers when she doesn’t know them so she figures them pretty quickly. I asked if she can visualize the sequences (she doesn’t know them as times tables but as skip counting sequences) and then find the right number but she says she can’t.

So I’m back to the algebra idea. It seems like it might be fun. She likes that conceptual stuff. I think she likes that it is supposed to be hard. I have no idea where to start. I did a bit of searching and like the look of this novel (which is not in my library) and this which also comes with a workbook. Except that in the excerpt available there is a bit about how you learn algebra in middle-school because that is when your brain is ready that is feeding my anxiety about pushing too hard or going too fast.

And then I check one of the links in Willa’s post that I didn’t check the other day for some reason, and Stephanie has a list of right-brained and left-brained traits that puts algebra in the left-brained side. Freed does say that it is often taught in a very left-brained sequential way but doesn’t need to be. And Tigger isn’t strongly right-brained though she does have some traits (as do I, thanks Willa for pointing that out). And she does get excited about the idea of algebra.

I’m not sure where this is going but I wanted to get these thoughts out there because there are folks who will probably leave helpful comments. Some of the difficulty is with me letting go. Though, like Willa, I think a bit of structure helps and doing some math is a good thing to provide some structure with. I have also seen her enjoying math and school really kicked that out of her and I would like her to get to a place where she recognizes that she can enjoy it (we have had some glimpses of that). I also think that maybe if we do some stuff that is more advanced than anyone would expect her to be, it will help me relax a bit about whether we are doing it regularly or not. I don’t have anyone really challenging my decision to homeschool or my methods but I am still not totally confident. There is some weird gremlin whispering things that is bugging me. Probably the same gremlin who is whispering things about pushing her when I know that mostly I’m trying to meet her needs, which often are ahead of where kids are expected to be at her age.

Thanks for listening.

Christmas Tree: Open storage for pretty cat toys.

[Yes, we have lost a few baubles. There is no evidence of shards of glass in the cats or anyone else, thankfully. The funniest thing is that the tree is right next to the piano and the “sneak” up on the tree by walking on the piano keys. Increasingly bass notes indicate impending mischief.]