We went out to look for animal tracks in the snow, but we got a negative result. All the animals are sensibly hiding in the woods. So, we made a few tracks of our own, sledge tracks, snow angels, paths trudged everywhere and ergonomically designed snow chairs at the sunset spot where we stopped to admire the view. Anyone can tell that humans were here.
I tried to do a Chinese format landscape of the houses across the valley from us.
I wouldn’t have thought of introducing calculators to Antonia yet but it’s part of the math program we’re using, so we did it for the sake of completeness. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it turned out to be slower and less accurate than getting the answers by working them out on paper. So I suppose there are skills being learned here! Like remembering the string of characters you’re supposed to type into the machine and making sure that they were all registered.
It’s funny how these exercises often don’t develop the skills they nominally appear to be developing – though I wasn’t sure till now, what skills calculators do develop. We also did a bit of map work with grid referencing. Finding the references was easy. The observation skills needed to find the objects we were supposed to be referencing in a small map… not so much.
These people said:
“Evolution “cannot be subjected to a test” because it is something that supposedly occurred in the past and is not occurring today. And before you jump all over that, natural selection (changes within a species that are occurring at present) is not evolution, and there is no recorded instance of a new form or function being observed to have developed through natural means.”
I thought I would jump all over them. Even though I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to leave a comment at their blog, I can understand this one. People who expect to see radical visible changes in organisms in a handful of human generations, e.g. since we discovered evolution, are missing something. A grip on timescales possibly?
Approximately 500,000 generations (about 250,000 each, from our common ancestor) are estimated to separate us from chimpanzees, our closest relatives, a process that took about 6 million years. Whether this has produced significant differences in form or function is bound to be a subjective judgement. So check out the chimpanzee genome sequencing project, for something a bit more precise. Wikipedia gives quite a nice summary, and there’s about a million other things on the net. It’s a fun thing to research and it underlines the fact that a grasp of genetics is absolutely essential to anybody hoping to understand evolution.
Personally, I’m impressed by just how many genes have changed in so short a time, how few of the changes are visible, and how few changes you need to create visible differences (like chihuahuas from wolves).
For evolution happening today, see here. It mostly concerns nasty little things like resistance in organisms we can’t see and would rather be without. So as well as getting a grip on large time scales, you need to get familiar with small spatial ones, and with processes as well as morphology.
For the rest of this little discussion, see here and here. I have to go and teach my kiddie something before lunchtime now.
I took the TV out of the living room and arranged this table so that the kids could sit round it and eat or draw yesterday. I really love this arrangement, but even though we’ve given up daily junk TV, we still use the thing, and I don’ t know where to put it. For now, I tried sticking it on the table against the wall, covered with a patchwork cloth to protect it from knocks. It isn’t quite the same. I wonder, if someone did a study of people’s living rooms, how many would be basically arranged as TV-watching theatres? How many have separate TV-watching rooms? And how many have a TV in every room?
When my parents were young, people lived in the kitchen, the living room was known as the parlour, and you only used it when guests came round. I like domestic architecture and have visited old houses belonging to everyday people in much of France and the UK. It’s not rare for the home to consist of two almost identical rooms: one used for sleeping, eating and living on an everyday basis, the other for guests, births and deaths.
Ours is very much a working house, rather than a place where we come to rest and take care of our needs, but its a modern kind of work. There are places to read, write, draw and use computers scattered around everywhere.
I got a hen that lays amazing chocolates. Antonia got a bell and a Kinder egg. Little Rabbit is pretending she brought them, but really it was Mike. Antonia hid the eggs for the hunt out in the snow. A little while later our guests arrived bearing more eggs. Mysteriously, by the evening, there was hardly a crumb of chocolate left in the house.
We all embraced the late winter conditions in our own ways. I was busy cooking and hanging out. The kids were outside building igloos – all except Antonia, who preferred to snuggle down by the fire with an adult friend and draw flower pictures.
Mike just got back from the supermarket, where they have started a new campaign to push sushi to the more traditional French. ¨Don’t worry, contrary to what you’ve heard, it’s not raw fish¨. What the heck is it then? Cooked tuna, apparently, wrapped up with some rice, and, wait for it, … mayonnaise! Mike told them what he thought of it. Bleeech!
But lest the Americans should get smug, Antonia subjected us to the film Polar Express this evening. What is going on there? I shouldn’t be surprised that Hollywood took a short and harmless picture book and turned it into a long movie, with no significant plot additions. What does disturb me is that they seem to have drawn a lot of inspiration from Big Brother, and they’re still pushing it as a family movie. If I tended to have nightmares, there’s plenty of material here. The kids who give the impression of being drug-pushing, cyncial, gangster tweens; the adults, who are really not the kind of types you would want your kids hanging around with; and especially the whole cult-like indoctrination experience: terrifying journey under harsh conditions, setting up a sense of elitism, scenes of mass hysteria when they do get to the North Pole, conversion to true belief in Santa…! That one pushed my cultural buttons all right: scenes of Hitler raising his arm above the mindless, screaming crowd. What is this movie trying to say? Or do? And if it’s not trying to say anything, what can I say about a culture that produces stuff like this ‘innocently’?
We are pretty easy going parents, but we are unusually of one mind here. This movie is awful. I’m going to bring it out again when my daughter’s a bit older to show her what she should run from. Until then, I’m hiding it.
We’re having our annual Spring party tomorrow, and I’ve had to make a few changes to the initial plan.
I decided that we can put the Easter Eggs in white plastic cups and hide them outside, that way they won’t get soaked or buried in the snow while the kids look for them. With any luck they’ll stay outside and make snowmen, as the house is a bit small for so many people, and I had sort of hoped (ha, ha!) that we would be eating outside! I’ve had to make a few changes to the menu as well. We were going to be having wild primrose and dandelion leaf salad. Hmmm, I don’t think so:
These were the only primroses in sight, and they’re looking a bit folorn. Instead we are having:
Our spring party is our own family’s combination Easter/Passover/Just Plain Spring celebration. And because it’s all ours, we get to invite whoever we like and do it all our own way (weather permitting). By coincidence, we’re having it on Easter Sunday this year. Passover is really ages away, but it feels near to us as Mike and Antonia are counting down time till they head off to the US, for a real Seder amongst other things.
… that territorial stuff starts to kick in!
Age 4: a pretty nameplate produced at preschool, and put up there by Mum.
Age 5: a polite notice that says ¨Private room, do not come in, Antonia¨, posted on own initiative.
Age 6: ¨Keep Out Worm¨, courtesy of the Horrid Henry annual, very much on own initiative!
Antonia has always been a very fair child. This is my little present this morning:
¨Keep out vacsinase (vaccination) prick¨ ! Three out of four words spelled correctly, I note. We are getting somewhere. Hmmm,… and just who am I supposed to be keeping out of my room?? Anyway, all this territorial stuff is just going through the motions at the moment. Little Miss is aware that personal space exists, but it isn’t really part of her psyche yet. We’ll see later on.
I left Mike in charge of homeschooling this afternoon, due to mushy brain syndrome. In fact I also did that yesterday afternoon, due to weekly shopping and fever on Antonia’s side. Mike’s less adaptable than I am about the activities he will undertake. So far, Antonia and he have mainly shared an interest in board games. Looks like they have a few new possibilities: playing in the snow, learning to write Japanese characters, building things out of the recycling trash, and BAKING. I’m rooting for the baking!
