a perfect summer evening

Feeling kinda icky so I didn't want to drive out to Danvers. But soon was feeling cooped up in the house. So after I had my salad I went for a walk to the park. The sun was setting and twilight was setting in by the time I walked past the little league game in full swing: White Sox vs Indians. Once I got into the park proper there were no people. Strange how very different the park is at different times of day. A few fishermen out on the rocks and a couple of young men? older boys? on the beach. But the path was deserted. I pulled out my rosary as I rambled over the grass and rocks and off and on the path. The lumious mysteries today. SAying the prayers sometimes under my breath, sometimes aloud, sometimes focusing on them, sometimes looking at the light on the water, listening to the crickets, the geese over there across the harbor. Smells, the tide was out, the flowers were in bloom, the grass had been mowed a few days before.
Peaceful. I did a circuit around the perimeter of the park, hitting all my favorite spots, finished my rosary and then headed home in the dark. The last run of the game was hit as I approached and all the boys were running in to home. The White Sox won and parents tooted car horns and clapped and joyful shouts from the field.
How nice to be out in the summer evening, just a bit cool, a little sliver of a golden moon hanging in the haze among the leafy trees.
Now I think it's time for bed....

thinking of the future

I was just thinking (in the shower, of course) how cool it will be to have the bathroom all to myself and not shared with roommates. I can leave my watch on the sink overnight with no worries about being a nuisance to others (for I am sure Dom would never complain about such things). I can put a hamper for dirty clothes in the bathroom closet and not have to haul them back to the bedroom. I'll have the whole bathroom closet for towels and sundries, not just one shelf. (of course Dom will have a shelf all to himself if he wants) I can put all my vitamins in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom so they aren't cluttering my bureau top. I can move the magazine rack and put the trashcan in a more logical place.

I don't mean to imply anything negative about my roomies, they are great girls and generally quite easy to live with. But now I am starting to feel the restrictions I never noticed before because they are just what one expects when living with other people who are not your family. And those won't be there when I am simply sharing this space with a husband. (Of course I am sure a whole other set of changes will creep in, including little prickly beard hairs in the sink. But those are realizations for another day.)

banned books

Here for your enjoyment is the list of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Read more. Convince others to read some. [I don't know if you actually need to read some or convince others as long as you've got practically any marked as read on this list ... you get the point.]

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (just finished teaching it)
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn currently teaching
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud
70. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. Separate Peace by John Knowles
76. Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Emile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Emile Zola
104. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Domenic forwarded this to me
he got it from Happy Catholic who also had some interesting commentary to go along with the list.

A cardinal speaks out

In this article about embryonic stem cell research.

If only more people knew all the facts.

That hope of treating disease is the driving force behind this bill. Yet the "promise" of embryonic stem cell research has been exaggerated. The journal Science last week published a warning by Stanford University experts that "it is nearly certain that the clinical benefits of the research are years or maybe decades away." They added: "This is a message that desperate families and patients will not want to hear." But they need to hear it. They were led to support this unethical research by hyped promises of miracle cures.

Stem cells from umbilical-cord blood and adult tissues, posing no moral problem, have advanced quickly toward treating juvenile diabetes,
Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, sickle-cell anemia, cardiac damage and other conditions. The fixation on destroying embryos has diverted resources away from more promising therapies, and therefore ill serves suffering patients as well as embryonic human beings. Congress should reject this bill and support promising medical research that all Americans can live with.

confirmation

we had confirmation this morning and it went well
the bishop was great--- good homily
and Thomas actually showed up, was confirmed, and seemed happy to be there, not sulking
though Olivia fainted after the consecration and had to be carried out
all our kids were well dressed and well behaved.
one girl from one of the other parishes had a shockingliy skimpy skirt...maybe she just didn't own any decent clothes.

attendance policy

very important but hard to formulte. I'm never happy with the wording of mine.... or with my enforcement of it.

I found this one online and thought it pretty good.

Regular Attendance is required in this class. Repeated absences will not be accepted without penalty. Furthermore, students who arrive late or leave early will be counted as absent. Students who miss more than three classes risk having their final grade dropped one letter for each ensuing absence. Students who miss more than six classes will automatically fail the course. If you believe that you will be unable to adhere to this requirement, for whatever reason, then it is strongly recommended that you take this course some other quarter.

asking good questions

...the hardest thing to do as a teacher.

This site is for high school kids, but has good framework for basic questions to ask about a novel. More...

one day in the life

another prof is teaching both one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and The Handmaid's Tale...

Link to her syllabus (good essay questions) More...

Finally.... thoughts on teaching a summer lit class

It's been hard to find time to gather my thoughts enough to record them. This class meets 4 days a week. And last weekend we went to Maine to visit Dom's mother and sister.

First I really am enjoying the experience so far. 13 students in the class, a good number. 7 women, six men, a good balance. Three older women, two mothers and one grandmother who is raising her grandkids. The rest seem to be average college age kids... juniors and seniors all so I don't have to put up with the freshman stupids. One Japanese exchange student, a girl who struggles with the language a bit, but is really trying to keep up and manages to jump in with a good question or insight at least once per class, which is really all I ask.

No slackers, it seems to me so far. There was one guy who hadn't opened his mouth so far. I think he probably just didn't get into Jane Austen. He likes Huck Finn, especially the grifters plot line. Generally everyone participates. We have some good discussion, even if I do have to prompt them along. I don't feel like I'm pulling the whole load.

I'm giving a quiz every day, usually on who are the bigger of the minor characters or what are some of the big plot points. They seem to be reading and "getting it". One girl asks lots of good questions. I appreciate it, makes me feel like I'm addressing their concerns.

Coming up with the paper topics is hard. But satisfying too. i haven't read the first paper yet, so I don't know how they are doing. That's tomorrow's task.

Persuasion was good. They found the language difficult and the issues a bit foreign. And maybe a bit harder for being the first book too. I spent much time going over plot points, it was harder to get into themes and issues, but I think we managed tolerably well.

Huck Finn has been a bit more fun.

I'm eager to see how they'll react to the rest of the books.

I like the schedule. I get afternoons free and the class is not too long so there's no drag. Seems like the best summer job I've had so far. And I'm making more than twice what I did temping last summer.

Toward a bilingual America

This reminds me of some of the conversations I had with Dom. Especially last summer when I was taking the class that focus on Latino students at Salem State.
I still feel undecided on the issue. I think most of the teachers at SSC were kinda wrong-headed. But then I think this author makes a great point.

Which kills more: ideology or religion?

This piece from an athiest in Africa examines criticism of the Catholic Church.

And the same issues from a Catholic perspective: short, but a good introduction to the Catholic point of view

The Real Meaning of Sex

An amazing essay. Need I say more?