Month: August 2007

Pretty easy drive to Maine. Tonight we’ll see Pippa appear in the The Wizard of Oz (she’l be in three presentations, of which we’ll see at least two).

Arrived in Framingham. The backlog before the George Washington Bridge and the bridge itself were hellish, but the rest of the drive went fine. Tomorrow, in Maine!

Road to Framingham this morning. It’s hard to pull away just as we were getting familiar with the building and reacquainting ourselves with Princeton, but I’ll be back Monday.

I try to keep my mouth shut about the U.S. government, but every now and then something irks me to the point that I’m moved to comment. For instance:

White House spokesman Tony Fratto replied, “Every day this Congress gets a little more out of control. . . .”

It has been a long time since my elementary school civics classes (and even then I was a rabble-rousing lefty), but I think I remember Mrs. Jameson and Mr. Recht teaching me that the key difference between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union lay in the fact that the Communist Party controlled the Soviet government, whereas in the U.S.A. the three branches of government function to limit one another’s powers. Congress being “out of control” is a good thing for U.S. democracy — I would have thought.

Via Stephen Downes, I saw Wesley Fryer’s article on “natural learning,” the kind of learning we try to foster in our practice of homeschooling (and the kind I have in view when I pine for a way to homeschool seminarians). I don’t have much to add except that a large part of the deliberation and reflection that don’t go into my book project this year will go into seeking ways to promote natural, rather than merely “technical,” learning about the New Testament.