Day 7: Reading List on the Net {National Poetry Month & 30 Day Blog Challenge}

I've been saving up apparently. I put the links here and come back to tell about them. Sometimes that's when I actually read whatever it is all the way through. Admittedly, I also didn't have a post in mind for the 30 day challenge, or a poem for that matter. I haven't even looked at the CCPL's prompt. This could get tough.

Medieval method destroys modern day 'superbug' MSRA. Interesting! Thinking out of the box doesn't mean coming up with something completely new but trying something different, even if that means going back hundreds of years!

William Blake, poetry. Why not, it's National Poetry Month after all. And it fulfills the poem-a-day challenge I set for myself, even if it's not right here on my blog. Nancy's blog is lovely; you won't mind the visit.

The mind needs nourishment as does the body. This is about children but really, is it so different with adults?

"[Children] experience all the things they hear and read of; these enter into them and are their life; and thus it is that ideas feed the mind in the most literal sense of the word 'feed.'" ~quoted from vol. 6, p. 40

More about nourishing the mind. Brandy always writes so well.

Just as mommy prepares the child a generous diet regardless of her ability to prepare it herself, so the generous teacher reads aloud from wonderful, beautiful books. We do not assume that just because the child can only make pancakes, therefore she can only appreciate pancakes. Rather, we assume that she can read the pancake books on her own, but that we honor her soul by feeding her generously, even if in the early years it is a feast of the ears rather than the eyes and it is consumed with Mom rather than in solitude.

Good reading skills promotes math success. This seems obvious to me.

Brandy gives a good 'list' of commonplace necessities. I'd added a few to my Amazon wishlist.

Imaginative Conservative on the false promises of progress in the US.

In their bewilderment, Americans have now all but lost the ability to formulate what they most need: an imaginative reconstruction of their history and a sober assessment of their prospects. The idea of freedom and the ideal of progress have combined to reassure Americans that, unlike other peoples, they are, and forever will be, the masters of their fate. Such a pleasing illusion has exhausted its usefulness and become an impediment to thought and action.

Manifesto for Liberal Education. I'm not going to quote a lot of this but he's got some really good points. Here are the points on which I agree right off.

Thesis One: Lectures are not a legitimate part of liberal education, at least not as a primary part.
Thesis Four: Students should not specialize (or at least not soon), and professors should teach not what they know but what they don’t know.
Thesis Seven: Liberal education is irremediably bound to reading.
Thesis Eight: The reading that defines liberal education is that of great books.
Thesis Nine: My final thesis says: Education should never ever be academic. (As in there has to be a human connection.) 

Fair Tales Need a Shakeup
This one I got a chuckle from. We've been sporadically watching "Once Upon A Time" and boy have those fairy tales been shaken up! But the originals are for the imagination, for thinking. Fairy tales don't need a twist of any sort. They work just fine. I mean, after all see how much thinking it got Pinborough doing?

They need a shake up for sure, and not just a feminist one. What are those stories really telling us, other than women cause each other problems that men need to sort out?

Good question- it's telling us that that is exactly what we don't want to happen. They should help us to see what is good and what is not. And then you can write your own 'happily ever after' fairy tale. Don't mess with the old ones. Really.