Reading List on the Net {July 2015}

It apparently takes me entirely too long to get through things I set to the side to 'read at a later date'. That 'later date' seems to keep getting later and later. These I've put here are all within July  at least (never mind the original dates on the articles- good information is timeless).

I categorized them this time. How'd I do? Some probably fit into more than one category, or even need a new label.

Homeschool/Education:
Beginning Charlotte Mason's Methods with Older Children

The last two years: With two years of copious, and mostly informal writing under their belts, most children will be ready to begin formal instruction. Difficult as it is for us to realize today, Charlotte Mason didn't recommend formal writing instruction until the last few years of school, even for those who had been been following her methods from the beginning. Narration is a natural process of building composition skills. Trust that process. Now you can pick a writing program and begin shaping your narrations into standard forms. You'll still have two good years left to work on it--and it is enough.

Article Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature

At a more granular level, this approach involves teaching a dense thicket of theory focused on “the text.” But literary works are not texts; that is, they are not just words on a page linked by abstruse techniques. Does anybody really believe that Dickens set out to create a sort of puzzle one needed an advanced humanities degree to make sense of? And that he wanted the experience of reading his works to resemble solving a crossword puzzle? Would he have attracted a mass audience if he had?
Literary works are not texts in that sense. The text is simply the way the author creates an experience for the reader. It is no more the work itself than a score is a concert or a blueprint a creation capable of keeping out the rain.
No, the real literary work is the reader’s experience. ...
Readers who mistake theater for reality are vanishingly rare, but almost every reader spends time wondering what she would do if she were to find herself in the same fix as the characters she is reading about. Would we wonder about being in the circumstances of words on a page?

A Rational Lesson, from AO Parents' Review Article Archive

The stages by which the former kind of idea is reached are very easy to follow. First comes the direction of attention to the matter in hand; then that careful note of successive sense impressions which is called Observation; then the separation by the mind of what is distinct in these different percepts from what is common to them all; and lastly, the expression of this in correct language. These four stages have been called Attention, Observation, Generalization, and Formulation.

The Blessing of Catechizing Our Children

The Bible is our curriculum, or the content of our prophetic teaching. We cannot give our children a better or more useful gift than knowledge of the Holy Scriptures from their earliest days (2 Tim. 3:15). We should read and explain Scripture to them at the level of their own understanding. As they acquire the ability, they should read and memorize it for themselves. We need to introduce older children to study Bibles, concordances, commentaries, dictionaries, and other helps, and they should share in explaining God’s Word to their younger siblings.

Isaac Asimov Calls for More Engineers Through Science Fiction

[Isaac Asimov] was also an advocate for getting more students interested in science, math, and engineering. He believed that good science-fiction wasn’t a distraction or “merely” entertainment, but an essential recruitment tool that did get people interested in science (see the end of his essay for his personal testimony).

Personal Enrichment:
Can you prescribe nature?

Brain scans showed reduced activity in an area of the brain linked to risk of mental illness in participants who took a 90-minute walk among oaks, birds and squirrels.

Politics/Civil Issues
The Scapegoat for Strife in the Black Community

The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for 50 years. Catch phrases about slavery have stopped people from thinking for even longer than that.

Shakespeare and the decline of America

"Of course he was a black woman. I understand that. Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman." [Maya Angelou]. In much the same way, Goethe felt sure that Shakespeare was a spiritual German, who had accidentally been born in the wrong place. G.K. Chesterton had no doubt that he was a devout Catholic. And, in a sense, they're all right. Or rather, as T.S. Eliot put it, "the most anyone can hope for is to be wrong about Shakespeare in a new way." 

And here are others that I may or may not have actually gotten to read yet:
https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/moms-are-born-persons-too

http://sheismore.com/30-characteristics-of-a-modern-lady/

http://goodguyswag.com/30-characteristics-of-a-good-guy/

http://studentstories.hillsdale.edu/2014/09/29/hillsdales-list-top-ten-books-youve-got-to-read/

http://blog.theliteracysite.com/fiction-readers

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/10/grim-tales (I came across this post while reading Tending the Heart of Virtue; spurred me on to finish the book.)