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Resources, Resources from Becky Rupp
The Teaching Company
The Virginia-based Teaching Company sells college-level courses on DVD and audio CD in the fields of science, mathematics, business and economics, history (ancient, medieval, and modern), religion, philosophy, fine arts, music, and literature and language. All are taught by professors at accredited colleges and universities, among them Williams College, Cornell, Middlebury, UC Berkeley, Georgetown, and the University of Pennsylvania. Those that we’ve tried – with the exception of the high-school-level chemistry course, which was abysmal – have been terrific. In fact, I’d steer clear of the (limited number of) high-school-level courses, and go straight for the main selections, most of which are certainly appropriate for interested teenagers.
A few samples: “The Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics,” a 24-lecture series covering math from the Babylonians to the 21st century; “Books That Have Made History,” a 36-lecture series variously discussing (among others) Homer, Marcus Aurelius, the Book of Exodus, the Koran, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Henry David Thoreau; “Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy;” “Meteorology: An Introduction to the Wonders of Weather;” “Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity;” “Peoples and Cultures of the World;” and “The Story of Human Language.” And over 300 more. The courses range from 12 to 60 30-minute lectures each, and DVDs and/or CDs are accompanied by helpful printed guidebooks.
Check it out online. One note of caution: don’t cringe at the prices. The Teaching Company has a “rotating sale” policy, which means that all of their courses go on sale at least once a year, at price reductions of up to 75%. For more information, call (800) TEACH-12.
Peas?
Anybody growing peas this summer?
For ages 7-11, Gregor Mendel: The Friar Who Grew Peas by Cheryl Bardoe (Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2006) is a 40-page picture-book biography of Greger Mendel, whose cross-breeding experiments with peas (green, yellow, tall, short, smooth, and wrinkled) paved the way for the modern science of genetics.
“Pea Soup”, designed by a college anthropology student, has a brief biography of Gregor Mendel, an explanation of his discoveries, and an interactive pea experiment (click to breed your own).
From Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Dolan DNA Learning Center, see “Gregor Mendel and Pea Plants” for a series of interactive animations on Mendel, his pea experiments, and the rules of inheritance.
“Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics” at is an interactive tour of an exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum, including an overview of the famous pea experiments.
Perhaps the most beloved of childhood pea stories is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” the story of a prince who wished to marry a real princess. How to tell? You offer her a bed for the night, pile twenty feather mattresses upon it, and under the bottom-most mattress, tuck a pea. If the princess wakes up black-and-blue in the morning, she’s the real thing.
For an annotated version of the original tale online, see Sur la Lune Fairy Tales, which – as well as the text of the story – has links to the tale’s history, similar stories from other cultures, modern interpretations of the story, and a photo gallery of illustrations.
One wonderful modern interpretation is Lauren Childs’s picture-book The Princess and the Pea (Hyperion, 2006), which pairs a witty text with drawings and enchanting photographs of dollhouse miniatures by Polly Borland. (The princess isn’t real, but the little mattresses are.)
In Janet Perlman’s The Penguin and the Pea (Kids Can Press, 2006), all the crucial characters – prince, princess, suspicious queen mother – are pudgy penguins.
In Tony Johnston’s The Cowboy and the Black-Eyed Pea (Putnam Juvenile, 1996), heiress Farethee Well (“a young woman of bodacious beauty”) wants to marry a real cowboy – identified when she sneaks a black-eyed pea beneath his saddle blanket.
And then there’s Once Upon a Mattress – a popular Broadway musical in 1959, now re-made and available on DVD (Disney, 2005) – in which Prince Dauntless falls in love with the doofy Princess Winifred (a.k.a. Fred), but has to deal with his controlling mother and the pea test. It’s 90 minutes long, rated PG. Available through rental stores or from Netflix. $14.99 from Amazon.com.
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