I don’t believe what my kid is doing! She came back from the US with a big book of craft projects she chose herself, and she is circling the projects she wants to do in pencil, and cross-referencing the pages that show the finished projects to the pages with the instructions. She is six and a half, for god’s sakes! When I was six, I would have cut up the book to make collages with it!
Typical day
Sure enough, things are thoroughly back to normal here. The jet-lagees ended up bouncing me from my bed for the second night in a row. It was just simpler to go and sleep in Antonia’s room. I was bounced from her bed at an early hour of the morning, supposedly to go and pick up a car from the garage and do various other essential errands. By the time we reached town we noticed it was a bank holiday, so the errands were canceled. We’ll have to do them tomorrow instead of going for a walk. It turned out the garage man was joking when he said our car would be ready for us. So I might as well have stayed in bed.
We did go for a nice lunch in town, in any case, there was nothing to eat in the house. Then we got home and since Mike is back the phone started ringing like crazy and hasn’t really stopped since, which drives me crazy. Then we got involved in some long and tangled attempt to reorganise a social plan that was made a month ago, which has numerous knock on consequences, potential for hurt feelings, and just generally leaves you feeling that the best solution is to fold at this point and forget it.
I got nothing whatsoever of any consequence done today, and I enjoyed about one and a half hours of it. I’m feeling a bit down.
Evidence based education: memory tasks
One of the things I’ve been puzzling over lately is whether memory tasks are worthwhile in education for their own sake, and if they are, then which ones?
The official answer of some education systems is that memory tasks, most often poem recitation, ‘train the brain’, and are worth carrying out for their own sake. The French public school system holds this view and the experience of homeschoolers here is that they will try to test our children for memorised poems. Clearly, poetry learning is dear to their hearts. The alternative point of view is that memory ability is innate and can’t be trained, so memory tasks shouldn’t be chosen with this aim in mind.
In practice, I had leaned towards the idea that memory ability was innate, but my back was covered because memory tasks cropped up for other reasons often enough. Antonia was memorising the order of the days and months, her multiplication tables, and irregular spelling words. I had her recite a few poems to try to help her with speaking in groups, and memorising them was a prerequisite. The Suzuki piano method we are using depends on children memorising the pieces rather than reading music.
As things stand now, I’ve decided that motivation and strategy are probably important in remembering, and that these can be acquired and improved. I noticed that Antonia would fail to learn facts no matter how often they were casually mentioned. She seemed to us and to other people to be a child who was bright but did not have a particularly good memory for certain things. In fact, she’s even capable of forgetting the name of a child she has spent the last three days playing with. Then again, she has amazing recall of events in her life.
While we were puzzling this out, I started telling her beforehand that a given fact needed to be remembered and she suddenly morphed into a child with a pretty good memory, though not yet for people’s names. I also noticed that some time after her sixth birthday she spontaneously developed that little conscious strategy we all use of repeating things we are supposed to remember a few times. I now think that memory tasks that focus on learning mnemonic strategies probably are useful, though I haven’t researched and tried any in detail yet.
And today, I discovered this interesting article about some research that looks at working memory. Working memory doesn’t have much to do with memorising multiplication tables, hopefully forever. I had always heard it called short-term memory before, and it involves holding pieces of information in memory for a short period, so that they can be used. Issues in working memory include how long an individual can remember the information, protecting it against distractions; and how many items of information they can remember. The research suggests that training working memory may improve ability in other tasks related to intelligence.
The activity we do at the moment that is most like training working memory is narration. I read a passage, and Antonia narrates it back to me, hopefully in order, with detail. I noticed that the key for her is to make a conscious effort to remember the beginning of the story, the contents of the first paragraph. I am sure she partly remembers and partly reconstructs the story from this. I started using narration with my own non-fiction reading and noticed that it is much harder than usual with the author I’m currently reading . He has a tendency to skip about within a single section with no obvious links between his paragraphs, and no sub-section headings. He’s not completely useless, BTW, he usually draws his points together at the end, but he tests my working memory on the way. Let that be a lesson to writers! Specially designed working memory tasks are likely to be more abstract, so that people can’t rely on the flow of a story or argument. I found a few listed here, but I have no idea how good they are.
I guess it will be obvious that I’m coming round to the idea that some kinds of memory exercises might usefully be incorporated into our homeschooling. Learning effective ways of remembering and improving overall ability are very worthwhile goals of education, … if it can be done! But the memory tasks that seem to have some evidence behind them are a far cry from learning poems!
I notice from the internet that working memory training has also been used to help kids with ADHD. In that case, I imagine that it would also help any kid who has low concentration in some situations. It might even help me remember not to burn the lunch when I get distracted by requests from my family. But that would be expecting miracles!
The end of my holiday
My three weeks of holiday end tomorrow. Little Miss and Big Mister will be back and we’ll be back to full-time homeschooling! I thought I would take stock of what I did and didn’t do for the last three weeks. Did I claw my way back into a healthy, normal adult life?
- I did meaningful work other than parenting and educating a child. Paid, too…
- I spent an average of 15 minutes a day on housework and errands instead of well over an hour.
- I stopped reading books as a kind of mental pacifier and began reading them for interesting content again.
- I got to the gym for an average of 1.5 hours every day. The part I needed most was the stretching. I seize up completely if I don’t stretch.
- I got to hang out with some friends as an individual instead of one of the family group.
On the other hand….
- I did not really recover anything resembling a sense of self. This is bad news, as I’d always manged to do this on my little holidays before. On the other hand, I did stop feeling completely obliterated.
- I did not become wildly enthusiastic about any new projects, or even about the various events that are already scheduled in my next few months. That’s also bad news, and I always had before. Yesterday, I toyed with the idea of beginning to investigate ways in which I could pursue my art history research interests at some time in the future… right! Beginning to investigate future pursuits is an activity I know I’ll be giving up starting tomorrow.
- I totally failed to make headway on any significant tasks other than the paid work project.
- Not only did I leave my existent bad habits right where they were, I even gravitated to my natural student-like lifestyle again, which in my case means dining on pizza while watching Red Dwarf at 3am, then getting up at about 11am. Actually, I might transfer that to the positive side of this little assessment.
I’m not sure if I’m quite breaking even, but what can I do? I’m looking forward to seeing my two kids again, anyway. Three weeks is a long time without them. I just wish they were a bit more autonomous. And I do mean both of them!
Small advances in literacy
Here are a couple of things we’re going to be working on that I think will be a help to Antonia’s literacy in the long-term.
Greek letters. They’re used in a lot of mathematical and scientific contexts, they’re easy and fun to learn when you’re young, and if you don’t learn them you will one day finding yourself reading passages like: “(shape) over d (unknown symbol) (other shape) equals the ultimate answer; where (shape) is the Infinity Constant and (other shape) is the hypotenuse of the space-time continuum”. In other words, you will have enough problems to be going on with, without having to keep shape and other shape straight in your mind.
I found the Open University’s set of applets for learning the Greek letters to be very nice and efficient. The one on trying to put together Greek words at the end is just a bonus for our current purposes.
Roman numerals. These might be a mere curiosity in some cultures. True, they often appear decoratively on clocks, but in the end, most of us go by position, rather than reading the numbers. In France though, it’s customary to express the centuries in Roman numerals. ‘XVIIeme siecle’ is the 17th Century and so on. That’s a nice little addition to the already pressing need to keep straight the idea that the17th Century belongs with the 1600s. Antonia has nearly reached the age where she will find it helpful to have instant recognition of all the numerals up to XXI.
I was surprised that I couldn’t find any nice applets for teaching kids the Roman numerals from scratch so I’m resorting to good old-fashioned flashcards. The first 8 have the individual numerals I, V, X, L, C, D and M. The next set have I to XXI with the range of years corresponding to the century on the back. The last set are more individual numerals for building numbers with.
Hmmm… that Expelled movie…
I have come to the conclusion that I’m 85% certain that a certain Expelled movie is one big hoax and joke, admittedly in rather bad taste, what with the whole Holocaust thing. I want to be the first to rumble them. I have several arguments in favour of my theory. Argument one is the Argument from Authority and the Argument from Generalising from Anecdote combined. I am an expert on American humour. After all, I’m married* to an American. American humour goes like this:
During the first, lengthy stage, the American will try to unnerve you by treating your sparkling wit and brilliant repartee to dirty looks. During this phase they will also utter a number of ‘ideas’ which… well… how can I put this politely? I can’t. But they will appear to be taking themselves seriously. (viz. normal behaviour of creationists and ID-ers)
In the second stage, when you are least expecting it, the American will fire off an ‘idea’, but this time it’s a false one, almost completely indistinguishable from the real ones, but specifically designed to let them have a good laugh while you’re figuring it out. (viz. Expelled)
Finally, the American will be overcome by his own hilarity and collapse on the floor guffawing, leaving you to feel like a fool for ever believing that anyone could seriously put forward such nonsense.
Viz. just you wait! – it seems clear to me that the Expelled crew must be rapidly approaching the third stage.
My second argument is the Argument from Faith. It is simply impossible that human beings acting in good faith could be as incompetent, ignorant and stupid as these people appear to be. That sort of thing comes from an attitude of “let’s see how far we can push it before someone clicks”.
My third argument is the Argument from Symbolic Coincidence. Their film was released within three weeks of April Fool’s Day. Clearly, a release on the first would have been too obvious. Clearly, they’re thinking April Fool.
***** quick addition: President Nixon’s court jester camping around in his short trousers is a bit of a give away, as well!
Conclusion: any minute now they’re going to start laughing and shrieking “got y’all jumping up and down, didn’t we!”
No amount of contrary evidence will sway me from my conclusion, of course. We all know that evidence is completely out of fashion, so there’s no point even bothering.
If anyone happens here who hasn’t heard of Expelled, consider yourself fortunate, you’re missing the laugh of the decade. If you want to know, check out Expelled Exposed or almost any blogger on ScienceBlogs.
* happily, though I’m expecting a few dirty looks for this piece of work.
Journey to Lhassa
I’m on schedule with my translation work but not ahead. Writing about exhaustion is exhausting. This evening I took a little break to look at a National Geographic DVD about Tibet. These DVD’s came free with a Sunday edition of a British newspaper, and they seem to be circulating around the ex-pat community. Our mothers all give them to us because they think we’re so isolated! (?)
The book I’m translating is not set in Tibet, but it is in the Tibetan cultural zone, and I thought it would be interesting to see some film of the area. It turned out the DVD was orientated towards human interest rather than landscapes, and towards the experience of non-Tibetans in particular. I though this rather strange in a National Geographic film, but maybe I’m being naive. It seemed a bit low budget, and rather inclined to preserve the Mystery Of Tibet aura, rather than enlighten the viewers.
Once I got over my disappointment, I did get quite engrossed in the first human interest story. For most of the 19th century, Tibet was closed to foreigners, but that didn’t stop them trying to get in, usually for reasons that had little to do with fascination for Tibetan culture. Spies, conquerors and missionaries just about sums it up. The Russians and the British were squaring off on either side of the Himalayas. The very existence of a country called Afghanistan is another product of this now little-known history.
The first story on the DVD, about Nain Singh, the Pundit, was truly remarkable. He was born in the Himalayan foothills at a time when the British ruled India. He was recruited to travel through Tibet to Lhassa, carrying out geographical surveying on the way. His tools were a carefully calibrated walking pace, some modified prayer beads for counting his paces, and some measuring equipment concealed in a prayer wheel. He wandered quietly into Tibet with the trading caravans, stayed in Lhassa and wandered quietly back out again, with his information. If he had been caught he would have been killed, nevertheless, he could just as easily have died from the conditions he encountered.
The other Tibetan explorer I admire didn’t make it into this DVD. She came along just a little too late. But she has the advantage of having been a true proponent of Tibetan culture, whose journey to Lhassa was a genuine pilgrimage. I enjoyed reading her travel writings on my first trip to India and Nepal, while waiting for planes and things. Her name was Alexandra David-Neel, she was born in Paris, and ended her life not far from where I now live, in Digne-les-Bains. She was to all intents and purposes a European Tibetan Bhuddist and performed the ceremonies usually expected of a traveling lama in the Himalayan villages she passed through. She also made it in and out without carnage. I emphasise this point because the second ‘hero’ of the National Geographic DVD failed in this respect.
History is full of amazing things, people and places, but often only a few of them are at the forefront of our minds. In particular, the achievements of women and non-westerners tend to fall by the wayside. I was glad to learn of a new one and be reminded of another … also the battle for Tibet goes on, while most of us know little about it.
PS. Speaking of Westo-centrism, I had to laugh at the National Geographic highlighting the point that the only use the Tibetans had found for the wheel was in the prayer wheel. If they’re going to go to the trouble of mentioning that, they might also draw people’s attention to the fact that wheeled transport would be bloody useless in Himalayan conditions. Just in case the viewers are lacking enough experience of such places to figure that out. But I suppose it’s part and parcel of the ‘strange and primitive people’ presentation.
Work at home
Phew! My little translation job is taking more out of me than I had imagined. I am really, really glad to have these three weeks on my own, because it’s taking an awful lot of concentration. I don’t think it was really going to be compatible to be actively homeschooling a six-year old and doing this at the same time. Not for me anyhow, but I do tend to be a bit distractible. My bonus for all this work is that I’ve found out a whole bunch of things about Tibetan Buddhism that I didn’t know before. Very interesting.
This is one of the places in the book, Phuktal (or Phugtal) Gompa. Wow!
At the start of the translation process, my colleague and I just read the book to see what was in it. I needed to get a feel for the structure, the ambience and so on. We both felt that the grammatical structure was not very appropriate for English. I’ll leave out the grammatical details, but we decided to shift the whole tense structure and that has quite a lot of repercussions. It’s hard to keep track of when I’m dealing with it, but when I read it through, it seems to work just fine. I hope we are doing the right thing. I really think we are, but it’s right on the edge of what I would consider to be within the scope of a translation.
Anyway, the next step is to translate the French very roughly into English. This is a singe. I wouldn’t say a monkey could do it, but there a plenty of translation machines that can. In this case it’s important that I do it myself because I learn the detail of what the book is saying in the process. It doesn’t really take too long anyway. Just like the stupid machines, if I get to a word I’m stuck on, I leave it in French. At the end of this, I have a monstrosity of a text that is at least mostly in English, and preserves the content of the original. It has the wrong words, the wrong sentence structure, everything is wrong, but it helps me remember what was intended in the original, and above all, it’s no longer in French. It’s important to get away from the original language because it’s amazing the linguistic pull it can have on the mind, tricking me into using turns of phrase or words that I wouldn’t normally consider. Whereas bad English is just bad English and gets fixed.
So now I have the hardest part. I have to make the author’s experience mine and completely redraft his work in English. It bears some resemblance to acting. My rotten draft has become the script and the basis for interpretation. If I can’t understand the script, I refer back to the original briefly. My author’s experiences were pretty intense and he was a very young man when he was living these events. As a good ‘actress’, I have to take all that in my stride, in fact I have to become it to some extent. It would be difficult to immerse myself properly with someone constantly asking me if it’s snack time yet, and can the snack be chocolate? I’m writing about a place where the total nutritional variety consists of about 5 items – and that’s just the cosiest part. Also, it wouldn’t necessarily be accurate to say that I’m enjoying it. I value the experience very much, but it’s quite a difficult one. Some of the events and emotions I have to describe are quite extreme, in all directions, good and bad. I catch myself wanting to put off certain sections, because I don’t really feel like processing all the emotions in them. But I have to do them anyway, because it’s not going to get any easier once these three weeks are up. Some parts are lighter and even funny. Then there are the technical linguistic difficulties, but they are par for the course. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the thesaurus and haven’t always found the solutions I was hoping for – yet. So, I have to get all this part done before my family get back, or it will go hard with me. On top of all the emotional upheaval, I have this huge sense of responsibility for producing something of good literary quality. In the space of three weeks.
After that, there’s several phases of rereading, spell-and-grammar-checking, making sure nothing got left out, that the content came through unmangled, and that none of the presentation got screwed up, then rereading again to convince myself that I’m as happy with it as I’m going to be. But all that should be less intense.
I hope it will be OK.
Excruciate the brats
¨Excruciate the brats¨ is my favourite quote from Graves of Academe. It also seems to be what the British schools are determined to do. Some of them have taken up with this weird Brain Gym movement. Possibly its main advantage is that it might not be fully compatible with creationism. Since I’m a free woman at the moment, I’ve been reading this article and the accompanying comments until late into the night and laughing. I do think there is hope for us Brits. If only because we’re a bunch of cynical, sharp-tongued, sarcastic, arrogant gits. Our collective soul – oh gods, I don’t mean that – we don’t really do collective or soul very well… anyway our whatever is laid bare here for all to see (particularly in the comments, where people tend to let themselves go a bit).
Actually Brain Gym is a cunning ploy that only the Americans could have come up with. You take a common sense idea that everyone knows already, dress it up in sciencey sounding garbage (not troubling to be too accurate, it’s the general ambience that counts), then excruciate the adult’s bank balances. As a home educator (fancy title, eh!), I find that sending my kid down the mail box achieves similar effects to those promised by Brain Gym and costs me less than nothing.
Strewing the Periodic Table
Here’s the part of the science curriculum I’ve come up with so far, a modern icon, the Periodic Table. There’s only one I know of that’s pretty enough to hang on the wall. It comes from Theodore Gray’s site. I must say that I although I think the poster is amazing and the site is (was?) brilliant, it seems to have suffered from a sudden proliferation of advertising for this same poster which drags it down a bit. Here I was, planning to buy the poster anyway, and now I would like to get some extra information about all the elements and enjoy the pictures. There is lots of information, photographs and other wonderful stuff. And, at a rate of about three times per page, there are lots more adverts for this poster. Nobody, but nobody, who visits this site will be left in any doubt that there is a poster for sale. That, I suppose, is the idea, but I’m sure there must be more refined ways of achieving the same end. Maybe it’s just me, but this does not breed in me an earnest desire to buy further posters for everyone from my third cousin to my neighbour’s budgie. It breeds in me a certain irritation.
Currently, we’re having a small problem with our poster because the US postal service have decided to mangle it, but I’m confident we can sort that out. With the Periodic Table goes a certain amount of vocabulary, which will hopefully emerge from our idle chitchat around it:
- parts of the table: period, group, atomic number, atomic mass number,chemical symbol
- some groups whose names are worth knowing: alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, transition metals, chalcogens, halogens, noble gases
- some other ways of describing elements: metal, metalloid, non-metal, radioactive, stable, unstable
- elements and their names: Mike’s view is that we should all learn Tom Lehrer’s Elements song off by heart. This probably will work quite well as we are all big fans of Lehrer, even though he’s rarely suitable for children. Antonia’s favourite song is called Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. That’s possibly because she can not understand so many of the others (I hope).
Anyway, we already know chunks of the Elements song. And thanks to Theodore Gray we will be able to know that our big favourite ‘Fooly-em’ (Thulium) has “very few applications” and that “some people consider it the most useless of all naturally occuring elements”. We might have guessed that from its name.
PS. In case you hadn’t gathered, Theodore Gray is selling posters like the one above ; )