Category Archives: self-study

Four new-to-me podcasts that I’ve recently picked up…

entertainment, humour, self-study

Definitely Not the Opera (CBC) – With Sook-Yin Lee;  An entertaining look at popular culture.

Wiretap (CBC) – I love Jonathan Goldstein’s columns in the National Post.  This is even better!  Wilson’s been getting long walks so that I can listen to two eps back to back.

Freakonomics Radio (NYT) – You read the book. Now listen to the podcast.

The Therapeutics Education Collaboration podcast is intended for medical practitioners.  It presents information on evidence-based drug therapy content, and give that I’ve been getting some, I’m interested in looking at the evidence.  It’s Canadian too, which is good ’cause we’ve got a slightly different approach to pushing the pills.

 

Finding your passion

reading, self-study

Zen Habits and Zen Family Habits are two very inspiring sources of inspiration for clarifying and decluttering ones life.

Today, Zen Habits had The Short but Powerful Guide to Finding Your Passion and it really spoke to me.  As someone who worked outside the house for almost 20 years and then found myself at home in a new country with school-age children, the notion of finding my passion has never been far from my mind.

The article suggests that you answer a number of questions including

  1. What are you good at?
  2. What excites you?
  3. What do you read about?
  4. …
and then walks you through a process for narrowing down your choices, carving out the time, and even making a living at your passion.
The article is very worthwhile, and if you haven’t been to these sites before, spend some time looking around.  You won’t be disappointed. 

Finding your passion

reading, self-study

Zen Habits and Zen Family Habits are two very inspiring sources of inspiration for clarifying and decluttering ones life.

Today, Zen Habits had The Short but Powerful Guide to Finding Your Passion and it really spoke to me.  As someone who worked outside the house for almost 20 years and then found myself at home in a new country with school-age children, the notion of finding my passion has never been far from my mind.

The article suggests that you answer a number of questions including

  1. What are you good at?
  2. What excites you?
  3. What do you read about?
  4. …
and then walks you through a process for narrowing down your choices, carving out the time, and even making a living at your passion.

The article is very worthwhile, and if you haven’t been to these sites before, spend some time looking around.  You won’t be disappointed. 

St Teresa of Avila

self-study, spirituality, teresa of avila

I attended the first lecture of a six-week continuing ed course at St. Mike’s this morning.  The title is Teresa of Avila I:  World and Life.  The suggested reading is her spiritual autobiography titled  The Life of St. Teresa of Avila by Herself (or a variation, depending on translation).

The instructor is a spiritual director and retreat leader at a local Jesuit retreat centre.  She seemed very knowledgeable and we got some background on the genesis of Teresa’s autobiography (why did she write it?  for whom?  what constraints did she face? etc).  I had read the first quarter of the book and found the information very useful in understanding her style of writing as well as the content.  
The course was held in a seminar room that became standing room only (well, sitting on the window ledges).  There were 25-30 people there, including 3 men and 4 nuns in habits.  The rest were mainly women my age and older.  I arrived rather early as I wasn’t confident that I knew my way around campus, and another woman plunked herself down beside me and started chatting.  She had been on a pilgrimage last year that included a visit to Avila.  During the course, though, she seemed to zone out, and spent a good deal of it flipping through my copy of the text.  
Teresa lived in the 16th century, at the height of the Inquisition and the beginning of the Reformation.  Women’s voices were suppressed and they typically were denied much formal education.  There is lots to learn about this time, and it looks like it should be a great course.
Next semester the same instructor will teach a course that focuses more on her mysticism/spirituality, based on her book The Interior Castle.  Depending on how this goes, I’ll likely sign up for that one too.

St Teresa of Avila

self-study, spirituality, teresa of avila
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I attended the first lecture of a six-week continuing ed course at St. Mike’s this morning.  The title is Teresa of Avila I:  World and Life.  The suggested reading is her spiritual autobiography titled  The Life of St. Teresa of Avila by Herself (or a variation, depending on translation).

The instructor is a spiritual director and retreat leader at a local Jesuit retreat centre.  She seemed very knowledgeable and we got some background on the genesis of Teresa’s autobiography (why did she write it?  for whom?  what constraints did she face? etc).  I had read the first quarter of the book and found the information very useful in understanding her style of writing as well as the content.  

The course was held in a seminar room that became standing room only (well, sitting on the window ledges).  There were 25-30 people there, including 3 men and 4 nuns in habits.  The rest were mainly women my age and older.  I arrived rather early as I wasn’t confident that I knew my way around campus, and another woman plunked herself down beside me and started chatting.  She had been on a pilgrimage last year that included a visit to Avila.  During the course, though, she seemed to zone out, and spent a good deal of it flipping through my copy of the text.  

Teresa lived in the 16th century, at the height of the Inquisition and the beginning of the Reformation.  Women’s voices were suppressed and they typically were denied much formal education.  There is lots to learn about this time, and it looks like it should be a great course.

Next semester the same instructor will teach a course that focuses more on her mysticism/spirituality, based on her book The Interior Castle.  Depending on how this goes, I’ll likely sign up for that one too.

My classical education

journal, self-study

Most of you know that I homeschooled Michael for Grades 4 and 5. It was a wonderful experience that I recommend to anyone with the desire, opportunity, and energy. Not only great for the student, but I learned a lot about myself that I didn’t know before.

One of those things is that I actually like history. I have lived for a long time believing that I hated history. I didn’t think I had a good memory, and it all seemed so dry. Well, my memory isn’t good for lists of facts or disconnected stuff, but I have found that I actually like learning history, and that has opened up the vast realms of historical literature that I have in the past ignored.

I followed a classical approach to homeschooling as outlined in The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. I can’t go in to the details about the program in this post, but essentially you do a four year cycle, roughly covering Ancients (5000 BC-AD400), Medieval-Early Renaissance (400-1600), Late Renaissance-Early Modern (1600-1850), and Modern (16850-present). You do it three times, which takes you through 12 school years (grades). Each time, you look deeper into the period and read more complex literature. We did the first two years, using age-appropriate history resources and coordinating novels/literature.

I have decided to embark on some self-study, roughly following the high school recommendations. I am going to start with the Ancients and plan to read:

There are more possibilities in the book but I’ve picked out readings which either I already own or were easily available to me. I will be using Spielvogel’s Western Civilization as my history text book and am still awaiting it’s arrival from Alibris as I managed to score a good used copy to keep my costs down.

I’m almost finished the Pentateuch and used the reading guides in my New American Bible Study Edition to give me some background, as well as A Catholic Guide to the Bible by Fr. Oscar Lukefahr that I got from Paperback Swap a year ago and hadn’t cracked.

I’ve also been listening to a podcast from UC Berkeley that I found on iTunes. The course is called History 4A: The Ancient Mediterranean World and it’s free. The first three lectures are missing (I think she decided to record the lectures at that point) and unfortunately, I missed the discussion of the Sumerians which will be useful for the Epic of Gilgamesh. The drawback of these podcasts is that I can’t see any of her slides. And she’s slightly disorganized, which makes listening a bit of a chore when I can’t see what’s happening in the classroom. As I said, it’s free and interesting, and kills time in the car.

There are a ton of online (and offline) study guides for the works I plan to read, but I’m going to try to go without, at least somewhat, and let the works sink in to my brain on their own.

My classical education

journal, self-study

Most of you know that I homeschooled Michael for Grades 4 and 5. It was a wonderful experience that I recommend to anyone with the desire, opportunity, and energy. Not only great for the student, but I learned a lot about myself that I didn’t know before.

One of those things is that I actually like history. I have lived for a long time believing that I hated history. I didn’t think I had a good memory, and it all seemed so dry. Well, my memory isn’t good for lists of facts or disconnected stuff, but I have found that I actually like learning history, and that has opened up the vast realms of historical literature that I have in the past ignored.

I followed a classical approach to homeschooling as outlined in The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. I can’t go in to the details about the program in this post, but essentially you do a four year cycle, roughly covering Ancients (5000 BC-AD400), Medieval-Early Renaissance (400-1600), Late Renaissance-Early Modern (1600-1850), and Modern (16850-present). You do it three times, which takes you through 12 school years (grades). Each time, you look deeper into the period and read more complex literature. We did the first two years, using age-appropriate history resources and coordinating novels/literature.

I have decided to embark on some self-study, roughly following the high school recommendations. I am going to start with the Ancients and plan to read:

There are more possibilities in the book but I’ve picked out readings which either I already own or were easily available to me. I will be using Spielvogel’s Western Civilization as my history text book and am still awaiting it’s arrival from Alibris as I managed to score a good used copy to keep my costs down.

I’m almost finished the Pentateuch and used the reading guides in my New American Bible Study Edition to give me some background, as well as A Catholic Guide to the Bible by Fr. Oscar Lukefahr that I got from Paperback Swap a year ago and hadn’t cracked.

I’ve also been listening to a podcast from UC Berkeley that I found on iTunes. The course is called History 4A: The Ancient Mediterranean World and it’s free. The first three lectures are missing (I think she decided to record the lectures at that point) and unfortunately, I missed the discussion of the Sumerians which will be useful for the Epic of Gilgamesh. The drawback of these podcasts is that I can’t see any of her slides. And she’s slightly disorganized, which makes listening a bit of a chore when I can’t see what’s happening in the classroom. As I said, it’s free and interesting, and kills time in the car.

There are a ton of online (and offline) study guides for the works I plan to read, but I’m going to try to go without, at least somewhat, and let the works sink in to my brain on their own.