School plans for the first of October: Befuddled? (Updated with monkeys.)

Some ideas for today's school with Lydia:

I'm trying to think of a way to work in the first audio installment of The Screwtape Letters, recorded by John Cleese in 1989, via a link at The Common Room today. Maybe it will be our school opener today--the first letter is about Screwtape's technique for basic distraction.  There's also a very important line in Letter #1, that might go by if you don't notice where Lewis snuck it in:  Screwtape jeers that "It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's [God's] clutches.  That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.  At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it.  They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning."

Screwtape insists that it's a demon's job not to teach but to "fuddle" us.  And that leads in...sort of...to part of a chapter of Daughter of Time.  Lots of fuddling there.

Lydia has the rest of the morning to figure out her own work:  math, AO readings, and so on.

Later we will read chapter 6 of Whatever Happened to Justice?, "Enforcement of Early Common Law." Mostly it's about restitution.  In the really early days (under common law), it was less common for someone to be imprisoned as punishment for a crime, because who wanted to pay taxes to support prisoners?  It was more common to pay fines and such to the victim, making restitution.

(What happened with that?  Well, I found this story about monkeys in a cage getting sprayed with ice water, in a book I am reading myself, and I thought it was a great introduction to chapter 7 of the book, about how custom is different from common law.  Why we do the things we do, and which of those things should be important enough to be laws.  So I just highlighted a couple of the main points from chapter 6 and said we'll get back to that when we talk more about force and policing.  I read the monkey story, and we focused on chapter 7 and then also read chapter 8 which is very short. What's homeschooling for if not to be flexible?)  (Monkey slide found here.)

And we'll work on French (Internet nouns and verbs, quite fun actually), and see if we can get into our review of Latin a bit (Mica, mica, parva stella).

Did Richard do it?

Josephine Tey convinced me (years ago) that Richard III was maligned and innocent.  Since then I've discovered that not everyone agrees with her logic.  The Year of Three Kings, 1483 was published in 1983,and  written by Giles St Aubyn, one of those who weren't as convinced.  It is my last intensive teacher-read before the school year starts; I'm about halfway through, and I'm finding it good straightforward history--though not as easy to get through as Tey's fictional approach.

(Funny what things come back to you.  As soon as I read the name Lovell, I remembered the rhyme from Daughter of Time about "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog," and I was pretty pleased with myself for getting that right when Catesby and Ratcliffe turned up a few pages later.)

Life is too short to be too grim (Rumpole of the Bailey books)

Recently I  read two mysteries with a revive-somebody-old theme.  One of them was a recent Sherlock Holmes novel (Grandpa Squirrel lent it to us), not bad reading but with really a nasty crime at the bottom of it.  The other was a novel set in 1934 and starring the real-life mystery writer Josephine Tey as one of the main characters.  I finished it dutifully, but I really disliked it, for several reasons.  I never did figure out that blackmail subplot. And Josephine Tey didn't even get all that much to do in solving the mystery.  Besides, as someone else pointed out, Josephine Tey was just one of her pen names anyway, so it's not very believable that her closest friends would have called her that.

It wasn't until I got partway through Rumpole and the Golden Thread this week that I realized what was missing in those other books.  Humour.

I know the Rumpole books aren't strictly mysteries, they're lawyer stories that sometimes have a bit of a mystery attached, so maybe it's not fair to compare them.  But honestly, I would rather have a few 1980's laughs courtesy of John Mortimer than read any more of those grim and gritty newer novels, at least for awhile.  Rumpole doesn't forget that we need to laugh sometimes, even when life is less than perfect.  It's kind of the same reason we still like watching The Rockford Files.

And besides the frequent quotes and misquotes from The Oxford Book of English Verse, they enrich my vocabulary immensely with words like plonk.

P.S.  Grandpa Squirrel says he likes them just for the cover art.