from curriculum planning…. sigh…. four kids… 7 subjects (at least)…. 52 weeks…. getting there. I thought 30 Boxes would be the perfect tool — but it only allows me a max of 8 events per day. So now I’ve switched to Google calendar….sigh again…
so I’m switching gears for a bit….
Maybe the problem isn’t that boys are aggressive, but that we’ve neglected their moral education. As Teddy Roosevelt wrote to one of his sons: “I would rather have a boy of mine stand high in his studies than high in athletics, but I would a great deal rather have him show true manliness of character than show either intellectual or physical prowess.” Manliness, then, is not the ability to survive in the wilderness, or wield a rifle. But having such skills increases the odds that one’s manly actions—which Roosevelt and others believed flow from a moral quality—will be successful.
The profound mysteries of why we enjoy music:
Again, I am fascinated by the emotional differences produced by the oboe, on the one hand, and the clarinet on the other. The oboe is said to have a ‘nutty’ flavour, and the sound it makes is not in itself agreeable to my mind. But used by a Tchaikovsky, and raising itself from the depth of an orchestral ocean in solitary pleading, it has overwhelming pathos. Why is this? A clarinet is a much more serviceable instrument. In range and power and variety of tone it can do countless things denied to the oboe. Mozart’s matchless Clarinet Quintet (or the scarcely less remarkable one by Brahms) could never have been written for the oboe. It is music on a tremendous scale in beauty and sublimity. Yet the clarinet cannot pierce the heart in the way the oboe does.
I will have to include that reading when we go back to a study of the instruments.
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