Book Review - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Source: google.com via Katherine on Pinterest

Okay, so if you took my advice last week and read the first book of the Harry Potter series, you are now breathlessly eager to press on and read the next book.  In fact, like some young people of my acquaintance, you may have shown up on the doorstep of a Potter-friendly family less than 24 hours after borrowing the first book to request the second.  (We will only lend it to you if it's okay with your parents, and if we aren't reading it ourselves.) These books really are that good.  J.K. Rowling has virtually singlehandedly created a generation of readers.

The second book does not disappoint.  Again we have the memorable characters, fleshed out a little beyond mere archetypes now, undergoing typical pre-teen angst in ways that are just different enough from reality that we can safely laugh at them, but that also advance the incredibly complex story arc of the seven book series.  The trio of Harry, Ron, and Hermione are central, of course.  The Dursleys who oppressed Harry in the first book are even more oppressive, and his school nemesis, Draco Malfoy, has a father who makes him seem congenial by comparison.  Professors Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape are joined by the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Gilderoy Lockhart, an image-obsessed celebrity with a talent for self-promotion... and not much else.  We meet Dobby, the excessively self-deprecating house-elf, and are treated to a visit to the enchanting Weasley residence by means of a flying Ford Anglia.

Harry must deal with the distrust and fear of his own fellow students in this book, as an ancient evil lurks the passages of Hogwarts, and Harry is suspected of collusion with the forces of darkness.  Students, ghosts, and pet cats are being Petrified, and ultimately only Harry's courage and determination can solve the riddle and confront the source of the evil.

Themes: This book begins to flesh out the theme of class warfare in the wizarding world which will be important to the rest of the series.  Many of the aristocratic class of "pureblood" wizards have deep dislike for "muggles" (ordinary non-magic humans) and anyone who has very much to do with them.  In America we would probably see this as a jab against racism, but I wonder if Rowling didn't have the evils of Nazism or British colonialism in mind.  There are also general themes of loyalty, friendship, and the need for discernment in where one's trust is placed. 

Cautions: some dark themes, but not really more so than the first book.  However, some of the plot points may be more troubling for young children: the risk of death, a malevolent monster, unjust suspicion of Harry and Hagrid, and possibly creepiest of all, an innocent student being controlled by a sinister magical artifact.  Also, as in all these books, obedience to authority is never unquestioning.  Harry and his friends break school rules when they feel it is necessary, and they are frequently portrayed as right to do so.  Our kids have read this book starting at age 8 with no ill effects.  But, if they read this one, they will clamor to read the third book -- which is darker and might be more appropriate for ages 10 and up; and the fourth, which is much darker and should probably be delayed still more.  The best advice I can give is to read it before or with your child, and be prepared to discuss issues that come up in your own family.  And enjoy it for what it is, a modern fairy tale with a great sense of fun.

Quilts of the Past: Delectable Mountain Star

Since it's a busy Monday and I don't have time to create a blog post ex nihilo, I'll treat you to an instalment of Quilts of the Past.

This is a quilt I finished in 2008: Delectable Mountain Star.  It was part of the 4-quilt series I made from my late mother's clothing, one quilt for each of us kids.  This is the quilt that made me not love half-square triangles anymore.  The background was a bunch of old cotton sheeting that was in her scrap bag.  The colored fabrics were all sorts: old aprons, shirts, jumpers; some 100% cotton and others not.  Some were heavier weight than others.

I quilted feathered wreaths in the large white spaces.  This was before I had my Megaquilter, and actually, my old machine did feathers okay.  But I haven't done much with feathers ever since.

The quilt is queen-sized and lives with my brother Andy in Virginia.

Turn of the Seasons

I think a squirrel used our front step the other day to eat his picnic lunch while watching traffic go by.  All the walnut peelings in a neat pile.  Around this time every year, our yard becomes like the I-5 corridor for squirrels, as they fetch walnuts from our neighbors' tree across the street and bring them back to their nests in our trees.  Every once in a while they'll taunt the cats.

Blackberry season didn't really start this year until September, because of our late, cold summer.  When I was picking these I noticed one cane that was still in blossom, with only a few tiny green berries and one bee who had crawled into a blossom to die.  Our week of hot weather has changed and we are back to cool for the last few days.

There are only a very few of the precious golden raspberries, but they are wonderful.  Right now, Primigenitus is peeling our apples and making homemade applesauce while watching Morgan Freeman in Invictus.  Pizza is in the oven for dinner: I'm finally finished with Grandma's Lanterns quilt after working on it most of the day.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Source: None via Katherine on Pinterest

It's been a long time since I did a book review, so I'll get back to it with one you've probably heard of.  Chances are good that the vast majority of my blog readers have already read and enjoyed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling.  But, as I noticed when I first began teaching at a Christian school years ago, the Harry Potter series is one of the deep lines of division among modern Christians.  I would never endorse children reading something against the wishes of their parents, and if that is your situation, kids, I encourage you to cheerfully honor your parents in this.  But this post is designed to convince you, parents, that you should read this book and consider sharing its richness with your children.  Christianity Today recently published an article on the Harry Potter phenomenon and its enduring literary merit which you might find helpful.  No doubt about it, Harry has shaped our culture, and mostly for the better.  The common objections are still there, but have died down somewhat now that the series has been brought to a conclusion that remains faithful to classic ideals of what is True, Good, and Beautiful.

In this first book of the seven, Rowling creates a character who is almost a stock feature of children's literature: the neglected orphan, despised by his remaining relations, who nonetheless has a special destiny.  In fact, she almost overdoes it, exaggerating Harry's hardships (bullied by his cousin, forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs) for fantastic and comic effect.  A large part of Rowling's genius is in her ability to take recognizable literary archetypes and tweak them so that they are fresh and funny.  This is basically a school story, and we have the stock characters: the overindulged child, the aristocratic bully, the teachers' pet, the klutz, the class clowns (they're twins), and the adults who are coincidentally absent when the kids are in the midst of danger, so as to make the story more exciting and immediate.  The only difference is the setting, which just happens to be a school of magic.

Let me assure you, on my honor as a Latin teacher, that none of the "spells" in any of the Harry Potter books are capable of doing anything real, whether harmful or beneficial, other than perhaps making Latin a little more interesting.  Every once in a while I'll be able to tell exactly who in my classes has read the books, just based on their reactions to a single vocabulary word in the list.  Most of the spells are dog Latin rather than the real thing, but with enough similarity to start those kids who are so inclined down the path to classicism.  This would be a good point to mention Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis, the elegant Latin translation, which played a significant role in helping me improve my own Latin knowledge.

Themes of this book: friendship, loyalty, perseverance, kindness to the downtrodden, and a willingness to assume responsibility even in difficult matters.  Also love that endures beyond death, particularly the self-sacrificial love of a parent.  Good vs. evil, which is a theme of all fantasy to some extent, is of course present as well.  There are some characters who are completely evil, but they are not always the ones we expect.  Many characters are, just as in real life, deeply flawed but capable of rising to the occasion to do the decent thing.  While this is not a book that specifically inculcates a Christian worldview, there are redemptive themes in,with, and under it, and I recommend it for that reason.  And because it is a rip-roaring fun read that will inspire young people, especially boys, to pick up a book more frequently.  And because I'm convinced I'm a distant relation of Hermione Granger's, and

Cautions: Much has been made of the "occult" themes of witches and wizards.  If you would object to the Oz books because of the good witches, Casper the friendly ghost, or the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, this is probably not the book for you... but the real occult is much darker and more insidious; this is implied in Rowling's books, despite what her detractors may say -- truly evil characters are truly horrible, and the good characters are repulsed by them.  I also felt that Harry is a very postmodern hero with regard to his attitudes toward authority: for example, the orphan Oliver Twist naively blundered into trouble just for asking, "Please, sir, may I have some more?"  But Harry dishes out wisecracks and insults as good as he gets from his oppressors, and frequently breaks school rules when he believes it's necessary for the greater good.  This is why I believe parents and children should read the book at the same time, or parents first, and discuss it.  Also, since this is the first of seven books, and since Harry gets older and the forces of darkness get darker with each book, many parents who had no objections to the first 2 or 3 books of the series will want to wait until their kids are teens before allowing them to read books 4 and beyond.

WIP Wednesday #11: a friendly Farmer

I seriously cannot stop piecing these blocks.  They're like my daily sudoku now.

Farmer's Wife Quilt block #39: Friendship.  I chose fabrics from my late mother's clothing (and hey - a pink ribbon for breast cancer awareness too!) and from her daughters' and grand-daughters' quilts to represent friendship across the generations in our family.  Piecing was fairly simple: I made HSTs cut 3 7/8", then on the pink triangle I attached a 2" square as a "fast 45" - I marked a diagonal line across the square (actually I eyeballed it, but you're supposed to mark!) and stitched along the line, flipped and pressed back, and trimmed the extra off the back.

Block #40: Friendship block.  The sunflower fabric is from one of those circles of fabric cut with pinking shears to decorate the top of a canning jar with a make-a-mix kind of gift we received from friends.  The rest of the fabrics are from the scrap bin.  I had to do math on this one - good old Pythagoras told me that the hypotenuse of a triangle where the sides were each  3" long would be 4 1/4" long (or awfully close).  So I calculated 3/4" for each of the pale green strips (cut 1 1/4"), and the center square was cut 3 1/4" (for a 2 3/4" finished size).  The HSTs are cut 2 3/8", and the corner squares are 2" - base measurement for both of them is 1.5"

Block # 41: Friendship Star.  Easy peasy 9-patch.  Didn't even break a sweat.

Block #42: Fruit Basket.  The only tricky thing about this block is that it's based on a 5x5 grid, so you have to remember that 1/5 of 6" = 1 1/4" (scant), and that 2/5 of 6" = 2 3/8".  Then the magic quilter's numbers: for a square, add 1/2"; for a HST, add 7/8"; for a QST, add 1 1/4".   There's another basket block coming up soon that is almost identical.

I don't teach math, but I do like de-mystifying the process of language learning for my students, and the math that you need to make quilts is a little bit like a language, I think. I really like the mental challenge of figuring out these blocks.  And this week, with school starting, I have had SO much nervous energy that these little 6" squares have kept me sane.  I did manage to get my entire year's worth of lesson plans turned in, but that's small comfort when I think of how many loose ends there are this year.  The first week of school is very much a WIP right now!  I've also done a bit of knitting on those stashbuster socks, but precious little else.

Check out what others are doing over at Freshly Pieced.

What I did on my summer vacation

Well, school is back in session and I have to account for how I spent the past summer.   Here's the obligatory essay.

• Our old car broke down and we bought a new one.
• I memorized the countries of the world, even Tuvalu and Kyrgyzstan.  And I can spell them.
• I participated in the Tour de Fleece and went to Sock Summit.
• We went on the Great American Road Trip, culminating in Disneyland.
• I joined two quilt-alongs, the Farmer's Wife and the STARS, and have been obsessed about them, particularly the Farmer's Wife.
• I read (or listened to) a bunch of books and reviewed them.  I need to get back to the book reviews; I haven't done one in awhile.
• There was a lot more: a family reunion, Family Camp, cleaning, shopping, blueberry picking, house painting, a little bit of gardening.

It was a good summer and I'm more than a little anxious about adapting to the new fall schedule, but I'm pretty sure it will be a good fall, too.

Farmer's Wife Quilt block #37 -- Flower Pot.
I created this block with a decidedly awkward combination of paper-piecing and tem-plate-free rotary cutting.  The hardest bit was the Y-seam on the yellow triangles in between the flower points.

Block #38 -- Four Winds
This block was entirely based off of 1" finished size squares and HSTs, so it was easy to figure out how to piece it but a little challenging because there are so many small pieces.  I did all the HSTs without cutting the diagonal first, whether using a grid or just a pair of squares, so that helped.  It took a bit of trial and error to get all the stripes pointing in the same direction.

First day of school

Cedar Tree students returned to school today, and there are a lot of them.  Classroom usage is maxed out and teachers are multitasking. My classroom is no longer my own, but is being shared with 12th grade (homeroom and storage) and 7th grade (math and Bible as well as Latin).  As if to emphasize this, Primigenitus knocked down the Verb Land bulletin board before I got to school today for my 2nd period class.  Maybe it was because he never had the Flat Stanley unit back in 1st grade and wanted to experience it.  So a lot of my classroom decor is going to need fixing, fast.  Verb Land is essential for 7th and 8th grades. (And yes, "Verb Land is Fallen" triggered my choice of musical accompaniment for this post.  I'm sure many Latin students share similarly apocalyptic feelings about the start of school and especially about the downfall of verbs -- it really gives a new meaning to "deponent verbs," doesn't it?  Or even supines, which we don't cover in my class).


The biggest change from last year is that I will be teaching 6th grade in the 6th grade classroom, not in my designated Latin classroom, which is no longer quite so designated as it was.  That means I have to be an itinerant again, but there's no help for it.  Eighteen students will not fit into the classroom formerly designated for Latin.  So once I have all those names matched up with faces (imagine a class full of kids with names like Adam, Alan, Alex, Alice, Amos, Andy and Andrea -- although these are not their names -- and you about have it) I will only need to get used to a totally different set-up and a much higher student load, and commuting to class in the rain once the rain starts.


And the different schedule.  The schedule may well be the hill I die on.  I can't even wrap my mind around it today, so I'll save it for another time when I've had a few more runs to practice.  School is great, I love it, but wow.  Summer was over too fast.

If you happened on this blog and have a few thousand or million dollars to spare, please consider the Cedar Tree building project as a worthy cause.  We need those phases 3-5 sooner rather than later, in my opinion.