I have sorely neglected this blog in the past few weeks and I have a feeling that neglect will continue for a while until life gets back to 'normal' (whatever that looks like) but rest assured, my many readers, I have not forgotten about it. The blog will live on though seas may roar and foam...
Once again I have a lazy quote post but I really have wanted to quote this passage for a while. I don't know what other people's experiences with homeschooling were but this gives a good picture of the essence of our home life (well, maybe not down to the details but there's something about the feeling in this scene that seems to capture part of my childhood. Ahh, those were the days...)
So, here is a long excerpt from George Eliot's Middlemarch:
Also, it must be admitted that Mrs Garth was a trifle too emphatic in her resistance to what she held to be follies: the passage from governess into housewife had wrought itself a little too strongly into her consciousness, and she rarely forgot that while her grammar and accent were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cooked the family dinner, and darned all the stockings. She had sometimes taken pupils in a peripatetic fashion, making them follow her about in the kitchen with their book or slate. She thought it good for them to see that she could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders 'without looking' - that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone - that, in short, she might possess 'education' and other good things in 'tion', and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll. When she made remarks to this edifying effect, she had a firm little frown on her brow, which yet did not hinder her face from looking benevolent, and her words which came forth like a procession were uttered in a fervid agreeable contralto. Certainly, the exemplary Mrs Garth had her droll aspects, but her character sustained her oddities, as a very fine wine sustains a flavour of skin...
Mrs Garth as certain hours was always in the kitchen, and this morning she was carrying on several occupations at once there - making pies at the well-scoured deal table on one side of that airy room, observing Sally's movements at the oven and dough-tub through an open door, and giving lessons to her youngest boy and girl, who were standing opposite her at the table with their books and slates before them. A tub and clothes-horse at the other end of the kitchen indicated an intermittent wash of small things also going on.
Mrs Garth, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling her pastry - applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches, while she expounded with grammatical fervour what were the right views about the concord of verbs and pronouns with 'nouns of multitude signifying many', was a sight agreeably amusing...
'Now let us go through that once more,' said Mrs Garth, pinching an apple-puff which seemed to distract Ben, an energetic young male with a heavy brow, from due attention to the lesson. '"Not without regard to the import of the word as conveying unity or plurality of idea" - tell me again what that means, Ben.'
(Mrs Garth, like more celebrated educators, had her favourite ancient paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her 'Lindley Murray' above the waves.)
'Oh - it means - you must think what you mean,' said Ben, rather peevishly. 'I hate grammar. What's the use of it?'
'To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood,' said Mrs Garth, with severe precision. 'Should you like to speak as old Job does?'
'Yes,' said Ben, stoutly; 'it's funnier. He says, "Yo goo" - that's just as good as "You go".'
But he says, "A ship's in the garden", instead of "a sheep",' said Letty, with an air of superiority. 'You might think he meant a ship off the sea.'
'No, you mightn't, if you weren't silly,' said Ben. 'How could a ship off the sea come there?'
'These things belong only to pronunciation, which is the least part of grammar,' said Mrs Garth. 'That apple peel is to be eaten by the pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pastry. Job has only to speak about very plain things. How do you think you would write or speak about anything more difficult, if you knew no more of grammar than he does? You would use wrong words, and put words in the wrong places, and instead of making people understand you, they would turn away from you as a tiresome person. What would you do then?'
'I shouldn't care, I should leave off,' said Ben, with a sense that this was an agreeable issue where grammar was concerned.
'I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben,' said Mrs Garth, accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring. Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse, and said, 'Come here and tell me the story I told you on Wednesday, about Cincinnatus.'
'I know! he was a farmer,' said Ben.
'Now, Ben, he was a Roman - let me tell,' said Letty, using her elbow contentiously.
'You silly thing, he was a Roman farmer, and he was ploughing.'
'Yes, but before that - that didn't come first - people wanted him,' said Letty.
'Well, but you must say what sort of man he was first,' insisted Ben. 'He was a wise man, like my father, and that made the people want his advice. And he was a brave man, and could fight. And so could my father - couldn't he, mother?'
'Now, Ben, let me tell the story straight on, as mother told it us,' said Letty, frowning. 'Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak.'
'Letty, I am ashamed of you,' said her mother, wringing out the caps from the tub. 'When your brother began, you ought to have waited to see if he could not tell the story. How rude you look, pushing and frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows! Cincinnatus, I am sure, would have been sorry to see his daughter behave so.' (Mrs Garth delivered this awful sentence with much majesty of enunciation, and Letty felt that between repressed volubility and general disesteem, that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a painful affair.) 'Now, Ben.'
'Well - oh - well - why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they were all blockheads, and - I can't tell it just how you told it - but they wanted a man to be captain and king and everything-'
'Dictator, now,' said Letty, with injured looks, and not without a wish to make her mother repent.
'Very well, dictator!' said Ben, contemptuously. 'But that isn't a good word: he didn't tell them to write on slates.'
'Come, come, Ben, you are not so ignorant as that,' said Mrs Garth, carefully serious. 'Hark there is a knock at the door! Run, Letty, and open it.'
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