Making it Safe to Not Know

I no longer remember precisely what it was that got me thinking about it, but:

It's really important that we create an environment where it is safe to not know something.

Not in a neglectful kind of way, where we're complacently not trying, but in a the sort of way where it's ok not to know yet, and it's so ok to ask questions, to try out incomplete ideas, to say the sentence half in your native language, half in the one you're studying, to take a stab at it, and try -even knowing that your effort is going to be half-baked and incomplete.

Because there is so much learning in the trying.

Math as a Window to God's Character

I got asked today about how it is that I came to see math as a window into the character of God. I'm not sure how to show what I've learned, other than to tell how I came to know it.

* * *

I did not enjoy math in school.

The way I was taught, math was arbitrary: a never ending pile of largely unrelated formulas that must be memorized perfectly and then worked flawlessly. Close doesn't count; it's right --or it's wrong. Teachers seldom had an answer for "When are we going to use this?" They assured us that the upper math has value, but never seemed able to articulate what that value was.

I graduated from high school with a huge sigh of relief: the pre-calculus course I'd taken that year had not gone well, and the hit to my grades carried a heavy cost at scholarship time, and I figured that I'd reached the ceiling of what I was capable of in math. Though I briefly flirted with studying astrophysics, in the end the math intimidated me out of the dream, so I went with Japanese, which required no further math at all.

Then we decided to homeschool.

This meant starting over in math, from the beginning. I was intimidated, not considering myself to be very good at the stuff, but I figured that if I had a particularly "mathy" child, we could outsource math classes when I started feeling like I was in over my head.

But elementary math shouldn't be so hard. I headed to the forums to read about various math curricula. In the process, I ended up discovering how it is that people come to love math: math is patterns. And patterns are both beautiful and fascinating. Math is patterns that can be approached in many different ways, taken apart, and played with, and put back together. On occasion, I got so into a problem -a pattern- that I continued to work it even after my son's interest was spent. (This emphasis on patterns is also the core of the "new math" that everybody hates: my experience was far from unique, unfortunately, and the new "constructivist" approach to teaching math is difficult for parents who were taught with the algorithms only method, like I was.)  We started with Miquon math, which in spite of some weaknesses, taught me as much as it did my children, and then when my oldest outgrew it we continued with MEP, first because it's free, but then afterward we stayed with it because it's just excellent at teaching the kids to find the patterns. And we've all learned a lot about how to see the patterns. I find that I'm actually excited to find out what happens as my oldest gets into the "higher" maths: I am looking forward to the chance to try my hand at it again, this time realizing that there is an underlying pattern, a Real Idea, some bit of reality, that is being described by each type of problem.

I should not have been so surprised by the beauty; math is full of Truth about the world around us, and Truth, Beauty, and Goodness fit together, so where you find one, you'll usually find all three. But the idea that math could be beautiful was so different from the grind of algorithms that I'd always experienced. The reality is, algorithms are only a relatively small part of the story, and if you can work the formula, but you can't see the pattern that makes it function, then you don't really get it, and you haven't learned what it has to teach.

Commonplace Book: February & March 2019

A commonplace is a traditional self-education tool: as you read, grab a notebook. Write down things that embody Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Write down notable quotes, with or without your own thoughts about them. Write down the questions you have as a result of the text you are reading. You will find the book becomes a record of your own growth, and it becomes a touchstone for memory of things you have studied in the past. This is what Mother Culture is all about: self-directed, conscious self-education. 


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt yuo
But make allowance for their doubting, too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk to wise;

If you can dream --and not make dreams your master,
If you can think --and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them, "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings --nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours in the Earth and everything that's in it,
And -which is more- you'll be a Man, my son.
-Rudyard Kipling


Dust if You Must

Dust if you must, but wouldn't it be better
To paint a picture or write a letter,
Bake a cake or plant a seed,
Ponder the difference between want and need?

Dust if you must, but there's not much time,
With rivers to swim and mountains to climb,
Music to hear, and books to read,
Friends to cherish and life to lead.

Dust if you must, but the world's out there,
With the sun in your eyes, the wind in your hair,
A flutter of snow, a shower of rain,
This day will not come round again.

Dust if you must, but bear in mind,
Old age will come and its not kind.
And when you go -and go you must-
You, yourself, will make more dust.
-Rose Milligan



Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.
-Gothe



A Psalm of Life

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! --
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us further than today;

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's Broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe're pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act -act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Scheduling our Charlotte Mason Homeschool Day

I think that one of the things that's hardest for me to work out as we homeschool is: how much work will fit in a day? I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure this out over Christmas break as I worked up our new schedules. It's an important question: Hero is getting to the point where I need to start helping him to develop the skills to organize himself; he needs to start being a touch more independent about his school work.

But before I can hand him a schedule, I have to make one.

Commonplace Book: late 2018

A commonplace is a traditional self-education tool: as you read, grab a notebook. Write down things that embody Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Write down notable quotes, with or without your own thoughts about them. Write down the questions you have as a result of the text you are reading. You will find the book becomes a record of your own growth, and it becomes a touchstone for memory of things you have studied in the past. This is what Mother Culture is all about: self-directed, conscious self-education. 


Since the gospel embraces all truth, there can never be any genuine contradictions between true science and true religion. This doesn't preclude the need, however, of thinking through the interrelationships between religion and science as new and interesting discoveries are made. When properly done, the result is necessarily a deeper appreciation of divine goodness and of all the truths of the Gospel.
-Faith of a Scientist, Henry Eyring, 41


Thus, we are part of a grand scheme embracing all of creation, complicated and orderly beyond our most extravagant dreams. In it, there is the order of immutable law. Eclipses and certain atomic interactions can be calculated with any desired degree of accuracy. The universe has been likened to a fine watch, unexpectedly picked up in the desert. One might assume the watch was assembled by accident, but the only reasonable  assumption is that it had a creator who left it there. So it is with this magnificent universe. It is obviously more complicated  than a watch...
-The Faith of a Scientist, Henry Eyring, 44


 Communication of information involves both a sender and a receiver. The Gospel flows out from the Creator of the world who sees the end from the beginning. It flows out to all those who are able to receive it. Too many of those who are blind and deaf to this flow of information foolishly deny the existence of the Creator. How much wiser they would be if, like Helen Keller, they could overcome blindness and deafness and reach out and touch Him.
-The Faith of a Scientist, Henry Eyring, 48


Do not, therefore, attempt to obtain a perfect pronunciation at the first lesson. Talk yourself, talk continuously. At the commencement, let the pupil speak as little as possible; it is in his ear and not on his tongue that it is important to fix the word or the phrase. When the spring is abundant it will flow of itself, and the liquid supplied by it will have the advantage of being pure.

Let us not forget that the little child listens for two years before constructing a phrase, and that he has possession of both the sound and its idea, that is, the spoken word, long before attempting to produce it himself. ...

The spoken word must precede in everything and everywhere the word as read or written. ... Be certain of this, that it is only by thinking directly in the language studied that you will arrive at reading fluently a page of Virgil or a page of Homer.
-The Art of Teaching & Studying Languages, Gouin, p52


"Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything," he shouted, his thick, short arms making wide gestures of indignation, "for 'tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and don't you be forgetting it! Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for --worth dying for."

"Oh, Pa," she said disgustedly, "you talk like an Irishman!"

"Have I ever been ashamed of it? No, 'tis proud I am. And don't be forgetting that you are half Irish, Miss! And to anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. 'Tis ashamed of you I am this minute. I offer you the most beautiful land in the world --saving County Meath in the Old Country-- and what do you do? You sniff!"

Gerald had begun to work himself into a pleasurable shouting rage when something in Scarlett's woebegone face stopped him. "But there. You're young. 'Twill come to you, this love of the land. There's no getting away from it, if you're Irish. You're just a child and bothered about your beaux. When you're older, you'll be seeing how it is.
-Gone With the Wind, p49

A Creative Spelling Lesson

So it went like this:

Me: Divide the syllables, please.

Hero: The eruption goes.... here! Bwahahaha!!!

And there you have it! He's not wrong...

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Baby Steps Blog (@ritsumei_babysteps) on Oct 31, 2018 at 8:12am PDT

Number Play

One of the most unexpected things that has happened with homeschooling is the way that this second chance at learning math has really revolutionized the way that I understand and approach math: I always wondered why it is that kindergarten books start out with patterns, thinking that those had very little to do with math. Boy did I miss the boat:

Patterns are the heart and soul of math.
And they're fascinating.

So today, I'm helping Dragon with his math, and it's patterns, and they're driving him crazy.

I had a look at that third one, and saw that it's increaing by odd numbers:

1+3=4
4+5=9
9+7=16

So it's a pattern of "interval", I told him. And he was confused. So I asked him, "What's an interval?" And he said it's the space between. Yep. I also reminded him to get out his notebook so he's got some scratch paper to play around with, which he did.

And he noticed a different pattern, as he was looking over his multiplication chart:

2x2=4
3x3=9
4x4=16

So it's a multiplication pattern, squaring, and traveling diagonally down the center of the multiplication table. Which is cool. Both patterns fit.

5x5=25
6x6=36

He starts figuring out the next numbers in the sequence; it's pretty obvious, really, looking at the multiplication table. So I wondered what comes next when you do it my way. Maybe I should have predicted what happened, but I didn't:

16+9=25
25+11=36

It's pretty cool. I would never have predicted a relationship between this adding of odd numbers thing to square numbers. Makes me want to explore these numbers more, though I wouldn't know how to go about doing it. I love that our math program (we use MEP) sometimes causes these spontaneous discoveries that we can play with.

Numbers are so much cooler and more interesting than I ever suspected in school.

A Little Outside Time

We headed to our current favorite park yesterday. I misjudged how chilly it was, so we grabbed the leaves for our nature books and jumped back into the car to do the actual drawing. And then we took a walk. It was a breezy day, and there were all these fluffy white seeds flying everywhere. The kids assumed they were cottonwood seeds, and while I had my doubts (aren't those earlier in the year than this?) I couldn't say for sure that they weren't, so I didn't say anything. But I'm really glad we went on the walk, rather than just wimping out and going home. Turns out, it wasn't cottonwood fluff, it was from milkweed.

 And not only is it really soft, but we found one on the ground that had fallen out in a clump.

Languages By Ear

This post is part of a series.
Part One: Listen, Listen, Listen
Part Two: What To Read
Part Three: A Web of Language
Part Four: {this post}


Gouin talked about the importance of making our first and primary instruction in the foreign language we have chosen aural instruction: the ear, he said, is the primary organ of language learning, not the eye; our children should hear new words before they see them. The same is true for adult students of languages: training the ear is key to success.

How is it, then, that so many people pronounce so badly the foreign languages that they have begun to learn at school? We believe we have found the true answer to the enigma. The first great cause of a bad accent is reading — reading undertaken at the wrong time, too soon. The second cause is reading degenerating into a bad habit; and the third cause still seems to us to be reading. Let us explain.
-Francois Gouin, The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages

Gouin then goes on to explore the three ways that premature and incorrect use of printed materials damage the student’s accent. First, if the student sees the word before he hears it, he will attempt to pronounce it using the phonetic rules he is already familiar with, and of course the pronunciation rules of English applied to French (or any other language) yield terrible results. If this continues uncorrected, the student runs into the second hazard: his reading builds bad habits of pronunciation that become ingrained. In addition, Gouin discusses the way that focusing on written lessons first accustoms the student to translate in his head first, and only speak afterwards, which slows both the recognition and production of sounds and greatly impedes the journey to native-like fluency. The solution he offers is to focus on aural language first: the student should learn with their ears before anything else.

Read more at By Study and Faith.

Expanding our Linguistic Web

Last spring, I started reading Gouin's Art of Teaching and Studying Languages, I wrote a series of posts about it for By Study and Faith, and we started using our own madeup series of phrases we've been learning in the kitchen. I didn't finish the book at that time because the ereaders I was using couldn't keep my place, and I eventually got frustrated with trying to find where I'd left off, but I slipped it into our most recent book box, and it came the other day, so I've started reading and I'm thinking about foreign language instruction again.

A post shared by Baby Steps Blog (@ritsumei_babysteps) on Aug 19, 2018 at 8:53pm PDT

The book is a reprint, and it has a number of typos where the scanning process was imperfect, but even with that, I'm enjoying having a real paper copy to hold in my hands; I like those so much better.

So I found my spot again, and started reading.

---

In order not to load our text with too many examples, we leave on one side all such exercises as would arise from the possible and ordinary  accidents which are connected with this series and complete it. We will simply point out that, as an aim can be attained, it can also be missed. ... The maid who upsets the water in carrying it to the kitchen would miss her aim. ... The development of the indirect and complementary series of accidents  is hardly less rich in terms and sentences than the development of the direct series itself.
-The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages, (reprinted) p 43

---

This is an interesting prospect. We've been working on an "Applesauce Series" and it's gradually generalized into whatever fruit (real or pretend) is handy when we're doing it. And we've "cooked" some crazy things, though I think that the real food we've cut up has had more impact on their skills: it seems that real activity is considerably more effective than pretending for this activity. The kids are doing quite well with this in terms of receptive language: I can tell them to do a number of variants on our Series that we've been working with. Productive language is more unsteady, but that is to be expected, and is exaggerated by the fact that I have not been doing well with integrating this into our regular kitchen talk.

But this idea of adding in accidents is interesting. I think that may be just what we need. Maybe a variant Series would go like this:

Pick up the apple.
Place the apple on the cutting board.
Pick up the knife.
Cut the apple in half.
Be careful not to cut your finger.
Move your finger away from the knife.
You have cut your finger.
Your finger is bleeding.
Don't get blood on the apple slices.
Go to the sink.
Wash the cut.
Put a bandaid on the cut.

It is, perhaps, slightly gruesome to just write them out, but this adds several new sentence options to our conversations, and I'm pretty sure that my kids would have a blast hamming it up, acting this one out, and fun is an important element in these activities!

I think that this will be a good way of keeping our exercises fresh. We're also experimenting with how to deal with different conjugations, though I'm finding that aspect tricky: I have to work really hard to stay in the tense that I select through the whole exercise, and while the kids are recognizing the similar stem and fundamental meaning, they're not really getting the finer details that the conjugations give. That's one area where having someone that's genuinely fluent would be really, really useful. But we're making progress, and it's steady, which is the goal.

Commonplace Book: June

A commonplace is a traditional self-education tool: as you read, grab a notebook. Write down things that embody Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Write down notable quotes, with or without your own thoughts about them. Write down the questions you have as a result of the text you are reading. You will find the book becomes a record of your own growth, and it becomes a touchstone for memory of things you have studied in the past. This is what Mother Culture is all about: self-directed, conscious self-education.

Dealing With Prereading

This past year has been the first year where my oldest had significant quantities of reading in books that I assigned based on the curriculum we're using (Ambleside Online) but that he read independently in a book that I had not previously read, or that I'd read so long ago that I couldn't remember what happened. In the not-too-distant future, I'm going to have three kids reading challenging books, and I'm going to need to be able to have intelligent conversations about these books, and also keep the household running.

My strategy is to keep a prereading notebook. It's just a regular composition notebook, which I covered first with scrapbook paper and then with contact paper. That's what I do with most of my notebooks, and they are practically indestructible: my scripture journal has been with me for five years, most weeks drug to church and back in my backpack, and it's still beautiful. Which means that I can count on this notebook, which will see lighter use, lasting nicely as well and plan on it not falling apart before my youngest is reading these same books. Also, being pretty helps me to like it, and want to use it, and that helps me to get the job done. It's remarkable how much difference it makes to have an attractive notebook, even if it's just a composition book that I got for $.50 in back to school sales at the end of summer.

It's Working: Foreign Language Learning the Charlotte Mason Way

I've put a lot of time and effort in the past month or two into studying the method that Francois Gouin developed for studying foreign languages, and about 2 or 3 weeks ago, I started putting some of what I learned into practice in our home. Oh wow, guys, this is amazing. I am learning so much! And my kids are learning quite a bit! This is definitely something that we're going to continue to do.

Our first efforts have been in learning what I think of as my "Applesauce Series": we're learning to talk about what happens as you make applesauce. These are our main props (the bowl was handy, and it's pretending to be a pot today)

Latin Resources for Your Homeschool

We're learning Latin. I suppose this this shouldn't surprise me, but it kind of does. Still. Six months after we started: I hadn't planned to have the kids do Latin, much less to do it myself. God had other plans, so here we are.

Turns out, there's lots of resources out there.

The kids are using Latina Christiana I, which I still like.

I decided that I need to know a little more than they do, so I picked myself up a copy of Wheelock's Latin, which I also like. It's got a bit of a learning curve on it: Latin has a lot of grammar. A lot a lot. But I'm getting it figured out, and I think I'm going to really enjoy this, oddly enough. I'm looking forward to reading Horace, someday. That's where I want to go with this, now that I'm doing it.

Experimenting with the Gouin Method of Foreign Language Instruction

As I was writing about the intersection of Charlotte Mason and foreign language instruction, I discovered that the author she looks to for her instruction method, Francois Gouin, has a book -- and that it's online for free. So I've been reading it, and as a result I'm making some tweaks to how we are doing our language instruction. They're not huge tweaks, the biggest changes is the level of intentionality that I'm able to bring to our instruction. I'm pretty excited. Even better, I've got a group of people who are also experimenting with Gouin's methods, so we can all talk it over an see what works and all help each other improve the instruction in our homes.

In a lot of ways, what Gouin suggests is really pretty close to what we've been doing: he suggests making the ear the primary "organ of learning" rather than the eye: listening, rather than reading or writing, is at the heart of his method. We have long made it a priority to keep Japanese in the atmosphere of our home to train our accent, help establish native patterns in our mind, and remind us to use our language; it's remarkable what a difference it makes to have a playlist going in the background! I have tried to teach my younger kids what I can through speaking to them out of what I know. This has been slow, in part because I'm a non-native speaker, and when we started this several years ago, I was really not fluent. At all. I've come far in the time since then, and the kids have come a fair distance, but we still have a long way to go before we're fluent. What Gouin offers us is a way to be more systematic about our instruction, and that's pretty exciting:

DIY Simple Book Binding for Homemade Books {Tutorial}

I looked at my copy of Pilgrim's Progress the other day... and realized it's a retelling and not the original. Drat. I suppose that I could buy a new one, but the book budget is currently used up, so I decided to make my own homemade copy. Since I'm doing one, I may as well do another, so I am also doing a copy of the poems my older son ought to be doing, but isn't because the whole etext thing isn't working for me right now. I greatly prefer a real book in my hand!

First, I went and grabbed the Project Guttenberg PlainText UTF-8 version of the text  of Pilgrim's Progress that Ambleside Online links to, copied and pasted it into Open Office. I'm also making a copy of the recommended poems for Ambleside Online Year 5, which are not public domain, but are made available to the public free of charge because the women of AO are amazing and generous. Both of these texts copy and paste nicely to my word processor, so I don't have to go through and delete weird characters or anything like that. Next, I picked out a cool special character (Open Office has special characters on the Insert menu), bolded it, and used the word count tool to help me break it up The Pilgrim's Progress into readings, putting my special character about every 800 words, which is the length of reading the AO recommends for this book; the poems we'll just do one in a sitting so they don't need that kind of thing.

I also added a pretty title page with fancy font, and made sure that all my text was at least 12pt font: too much smaller and you'll have a small print edition of your text, as it's going to shrink when it's printed. If you like your text a little on the larger side, you might go 14. I typically print at about 10, so I'm happy with a smallish font. You can add in illustrations if you want, but I didn't; this version that I'm doing this time is a very functional book, but it's not really elegant. It is, however, cheap and tough: the ones that I did for Our Island Story and Secrets of the Woods have held up beautifully as I've read to my son over the past year and a bit.

The Importance of Models in Copywork

 We use the traditional copywork method as our primary handwriting method; the kids first write letters, then phrases or sentences, and then longer passages, as their ability matures. In the beginning, especially, the amount of writing actually done is relatively small; handwriting sheets from outside of the Classical education philosophy typically are too long for the beginner. More importantly, they have too few models for the student to look at.

---

Set good copies before him, and see that he imitates his model dutifully: the writing lesson being not so many lines, or 'a copy'––that is, a page of writing––but a single line which is as exactly as possible a copy of the characters set.
-Charlotte Mason, 1:235

---

A Civil War Foldout for our Book of Centuries {Crew Review}

I was excited when I looked through the Á La Carte products from Home School in the Woods for review this time and realized that The War Between the States Timline was included in the wide range of products that they offered crew members: Hero(11) is just starting to study the Civil War era, and I wanted to include it in our Book of Centuries as a foldout. They have a whole collection of timelines available, but this one is just perfect for where we're at.

There's so much going on in the war, and in the events both before and after, that I think that it'll be good to have a special fold-out, which will leave room for other world events from that time on the main pages of our timelines. We don't have a lot of wall space, so our timelines have always been in binders. This has a number of advantages, including that they last really well, and so we can accumulate a lot of the different things we read about into the timeline over years of reading, so I was excited to have a space-efficient way to include a lot of information about this important period of American history.

This Week: Garden Planning and More

I'm excited: Once upon a time, I used to participate in the Daring Bakers cooking challenges, but I struggled to keep up and dropped out after a while: it was too hard to be consistent. When I finally felt ready to try again, they had finished. And I haven't found a different baking challenge -- until now. King Arthur Flour is hosting one. And they're doing Gruyère-Stuffed Crusty Loaves. I'll need to find the fancy cheese, but otherwise, it's ingredients that I've got on hand. However, it's a method that I've never tried before, so that ought to be fun to do.

Ezekiel 13: Peace-- But There is No Peace!

I have long loved Patrick Henry's address to the Virginia Convention: the "Give me liberty or give me death!" speech. Someday, I want to use Benjamin Franklin's method of studying, and this speech is the first thing that I want to dive into (probably followed by George Washington's Farewell Address). But tonight, in reading to Hero from the Bible, I discovered an allusion that Henry made that makes that final, powerful paragraph even more powerful.

Here's the end of the speech:

---

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

---

Tonight, as we read in Ezekiel 13, I noticed this:

---

Because, even because they have seduced my people, saying, Peace; and there was no peace; and one built up a wall, and, lo, others daubed it with untempered mortar:
-Ezekiel 13:10  (emphasis added)

---