Educational funnies

Today has been fun! Robert, Sherri, Timmy and I got together to discuss another of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. We have been having the boys scan each letter and try to come up with as many words that they don't recognize as possible. It has been pretty fun (at least for the moms) because this book was written at the end of World War II in another country and our current language is vastly different. Today's vocabular funny? Timmy's definition for "informal" was "not formal." So far so good, but what does "formal" mean? "Old ... as in Mom's, um, shirt." True enough, Sherri was wearing an older style and very beat up shirt, but you could see he was trying to see how to get around pointing out that he thought that formal meant old ... and that Mom was very formal. It really changed the boys' understanding of the letter when they learned what formal actually meant. As I told Sherri, however, she'll never look at that shirt the same way again! In another vocabulary moment, I was trying to explain the definition for intelligence. Robert had come up with information gathering ... as in "military intelligence" and the letter was looking for the "ability to grasp information" definition. I noticed as I was talking that Timmy had sat back with a glazed expression and was allowing drool to pool at the corner of his lip ... allowing me to point out that a lack of intelligence could be seen in the "drooling idiot" impression that Timmy was portraying. The funny part was that Timmy had stopped listening long before I got to that particular word and was reacting to something that one of the babies was doing - but the timing was perfect! All in all, the boys enjoyed this letter and are looking forward to next week.

Along similar lines, I am supposed to be finishing some annotating for my class on Saturday. I have been reading a great article on universities in the "ancient" world (meaning Rome, etc.) when I came accross a particular quote by Epicharmus about professors during the dark ages. He said, "the one thing that kept professors going was their constitutional inability to shut up whether they had anything to say or not." As I read that, I remembered my mother telling me that I would make a perfect college professor - I used to be flattered!!!