2006-06-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

June 14, 2006

A Literary Twilight Zone: Where Winnie the Pooh and Froggy meet Don Quixote in Turn of the Screw

The Main Character: A reluctant transplanted graduate student, middle school teacher, wife and mom of one and soon to be two

The Prologue: The Books That Started It All: Susan Wise-Bauer's The Educated Mind and Julie Peters' Julie and Julia

Susan Wise-Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind
My one true passion in ife has always been books: Escapist, romantic, thought-provoking, change-the world journeys. My bookshelves make up a miniature library that span the Dewey decimal system. I have books on physics, germs, history, politics, autobiography. Authors from Barbara Kingsolver and Maria Doria Sparrow to Jennifer Cruise and Fern Michaels.

I've been committed to educating myself and to ensuring that I can bring love of learning and knowledge to others since as long as I can remember, so when I stumbled on this book on Amazon.com, I had to have it and wanted to add Wise-Bauer's other titles as well. The Educated Mind is basically a primer for educating yourself in the classical way from home as many of our greatest minds have. I read Part I at the beginning of June. Basically, this gives you a way of evaluating and improving yourself as a reader. Using her test, I'm a pretty good reader but there's still room for improvement, especially if I'm to read many of the titles on her lists.

Wise-Bauer recommends journaling your thoughts as you read, exploring whether or not you agree with what you read and why, and then taking these thoughts further by discussing them with others. Well, pretty much since college, I've been a lapsed journaler. I'd like to argue that there were just too many thoughts and too much living going on, but I suspect it was more just trying to keep up with school work and full-time earning a living. Too much writing what other people required to want to write for myself. Also, since moving to Florida, I've had a hard time connecting with other readers who might want to discuss such works as those that Wise-Bauer recommends, or even such fluffy fun escapist list as Jennifer Cruise's Bet Me and In Her Shoes.

I thought about starting a book group... In fact, there was a time in my life when book groups WERE my life. In fact, it was the way I met my husband Jim. Shortly after joining an on-line life in 1995, I moved to nowhere Alabama. I quickly found that my standard pick up line "What are you reading?" tended to generate glazed stares in the eyes of men who selected their dates based on whether you preferred Orange or Red (University of Tennessee verses the University of Alabama for those of you who are not from the Deep South).

Anyway, in order to find intelligent life.... ahem.... readers I could connect to while living here, I branched out from AOL's e-mail to their online book community and discovered bookgroups. Most groups tended to be limited to bestsellers and to not go deeper than "Did you like this book?" Or, what did you think about so and so sleeping with so and so? type questions. Yes, this was better than the football discussions of my local community for someone whose knowledge of football is limited to the difference between a field goal and a touch down. Still, it wasn't a deep exploration of literature.

The first bookgroup I signed up for was where I met my future husband. It was devoted to the works of Umberto Eco, and by chance, shortly before moving to Nowhere, Alabama, I had picked up a copy of Foucault's Pendulum, the book the group was reading, for a $1 at a thrift store (another one of my passions, thrift stores). This group went beyond the college litarature class and much much deeper than the standard book group. It took them six months to get through the book and during that time I read that book three or four time through and a part of it that was going to be under discussion every week. During the time the group met, I made some great long distance literary friends and decided to apply to graduate school. More on that later.

Any way, this exploration that we did with the book groups seems to be what Wise-Bauer recommends for attaining her "classical education." How in the world would I have time for that kind of commitment on each book, research for my thesis, prepare lessons, and be a wife and mother to a two year old as well as a soon to be born newborn?

When I picked up Julie Peter's Julie and Julia, she seemed to have the answer: To Blog.....

Julie Peters' Julie and Julia
Julie Peter's was depressed and feeling stuck in her life but wasn't sure what to do about it until she stumbled on a classic from her childhood, her mother's copy of Julia Child's masterpiece: Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She embarks on a year long experiment in which she attempts all 524 recipies in the book and chronicles her experiences on a blog. As she proceeds with the experiment, she learns a lot about herself and the art of "living with gusto."

To be perfectly honest, a similar experiment in my house would probably result in mucho tears, divorce, and self-disgust. For one thing, I was experimenting with vegetarianism when I became pregnant (although I seem to have developed an extreme need for chicken since the First Reponse test came back positive). Secondly, most of my culinary experiments create results which my husband labels as "glop." I'm pretty much a disaster in the kitchen with all but the most basic standard fare.

However, what better way for a busy wife, mom, teacher, and student to explore what she reads and encourage dialogue with other readers in a non-pressured, non-academic environment than blogging? So, what are you reading? Would you consider coming along on my adventure of developing a "well-educated" mind, knowing that Froggy, Winnie the Pooh, and The Little Engine that Could will be blended with Henry James and The Man of La Mancha?

A Classical Education in 21st Century Florida