Yellow House Homeschool

I decided today not to renew our library subscription.  If it had been free, I might have just kept it anyway, but as we live out of town, it costs us enough that it needs justifying.  I have a few reasons why I decided not to do it:

• Now Antonia has an extra swimming activity, it’s proved virtually impossible to coincide our schedule with library opening hours, bearing in mind that it’s a half day activity in itself.
• When we have made it, it’s proved even harder to return the books on time.
• As the books Antonia reads or has read to her are getting longer, it’s proving less cost effective to get them from the library.  Today, for example, I bought a novel that will probably take us several weeks to read together.  It probably cost less than the gas to get to the library, and it’s lendable or recyclable.
• In any case, I’m finding that it’s the books Antonia lives with that really contribute something to her learning and growth.  Books that stay in the house for a few weeks are quickly read and quickly forgotten.

This week I went to Argentina, virtually, of course! Fortuitously, Antonia’s magazine does about the same virtual travel thing as I am doing, and its country for the month was also Argentina. They decided that Argentina’s distinctive features are: Buenos Aires, the tango, penguins, whales, glaciers, Ushuaia, football, gauchos in the pampas and barbecued meat and mate.

After doing a little bit of research and scraping my memory I decided to read two travel books that touch on Argentina if only in part: Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries.

Neither of these books deals exclusively with Argentina, in fact Guevara’s book only takes place in Argentina in the opening sections. For the rest, he does offer one Argentinian perspective on Latin America. It became clear that Argentina was rather admired throughout the region in the 1950’s, or so it seemed to Guevara and his friend.

Quite a large chunk of The Voyage of the Beagle takes place in Argentina, from Buenos Aires to the Pampas, down to Patagonia and Terra del Fuego. As I expected, Darwin talks a lot about natural history, though strangely, he hardly seems to mention whales or penguins. The Voyage precedes his theory of evolution through natural selection, but it’s interesting to see him trying to figure out cause and effect in what he encounters.

He’s a bit more of a dunce when it comes to people, with the Victorian English gentleman’s horrible attitude to everyone except other Victorian English gentlemen. Clearly, he intended to be objective and thought himself benevolent, but this might not appear sufficient excuse to modern readers. I’ve just reminded myself that he was barely an actor in the various circumstances described, so perhaps he should not be vilified more than those who were. He still gives an interesting slice of South American social and political life – strife between Spaniards and Indians, slavery, runaway seamen, Indian children removed from their families and taken to England then returned, gauchos in the pampas, revolution in Buenos Aires (one of them!) Throughout his time in Argentina he lived on a diet of freshly killed, barbecued meat and mate.

Turning to The Motorcycle Diaries, it was surprising in a way how little had changed. The same social issues were particularly recognisable in Chile. But this is about Argentina. Guevara and his friend still lived on barbecued meat and mate, they still dossed down in a mixture of estancias, inns and government posts, but they had substituted the motorbike for the horses of Darwin’s day. It doesn’t seem as if this was really the best idea, and the motorbike barely made it out of Argentina.

These two young men were utterly clueless about natural history and most other things, but they had their own speciality – medicine. Neither Guevara nor Darwin had reached the positions that made them famous when they wrote these travel books, but in both, you can see their positions emerging out of their specialised knowledge. In Guevara’s case this seems to come from a realisation of the link between social and political circumstances and people’s state of health. When he is discussing this, he suddenly emerges from puerility into detailed and systematic explanation.

Conrad Martens accompanied the Beagle as draughtsman, and some of his sketchbooks can be viewed here.

Next week, I’m going to the UK for real, so I guess I won’t need to do any virtual traveling and I’ll probably have limited Internet access anyway.

Today was our annual trip to the fairground park, carefully timed to coincide with nice weather and a school day.  We thought we would never manage to get the two together!  So our day started kind of like this:  Mike complaining about how boring all the rides were and insisting that he’d be taking Antonia on this Boomerang thing before she’s very much older, never mind the fact that you have to be 15 cms taller than she is now.  So here he is, waiting to be turned upside-down at Mach speed on the Boomerang and he would like us to think he is waving!

Shortly after lunch, it became apparent that the rides were so ‘boring’ that he would stick with the position of official photographer instead.

Nothing would induce him to abandon his new vocation and get back on a ride.

As for me, I don’t think I’ve had so much fun since last year.  Of course, we didn’t have to queue once, and if we wanted to take a ride several times, we just stayed on it.  There was only about one other kid in the entire park of Antonia’ age, though there were a couple of coach loads of middle school kids on their end of year treat.  The place was so quiet that the attendants were willing to watch Antonia while we went on ‘big kid’ rides.  We managed a couple, before Mike discovered his new purpose in photography.  Antonia was thrilled with the whole day, and, at the end, exhausted. Between us, we took over a hundred rides.  It was great!

Mike and Antonia returned from a 24 hour excursion to a high mountain refuge, followed by lunch at a friend’s on the way back. I had my reasons for not going, but the main one was that I wanted to get some work finished. Antonia returned full of vulgar jokes, barbaric markings (felt-tip pen), and tall traveler’s tales.

She had seen many things she half understood: a cannon at the top of a mountain with a man standing beside it… she saw this through binoculars, but nobody else saw it… her friend M. was to attend a ceremony where he was to give everyone bread and say something she couldn’t quite remember about bodies … (First communion. She was heartily shocked when I told her her friend was a Christian! It’s not as if we keep her in a box or anything, but she hadn’t put all the bits of information together)…

… She had the judgment of character and the temerity to ask the Master of the House what kind of child he liked least. He replied, “The kind that tears the House apart.” … She had enough experience of her nearest and dearest to drag her father through the door of the House before his parting remarks on WiFi were concluded, lest they miss lunch … She made some accurate observations on the behaviour of dogs, especially young partially trained ones … Her remarks on natural history were detailed, but astonishing: she saw foxgloves of every colour of the rainbow, or was it bluebells? She saw a multi-coloured spider, the size of my big toe, which shot liquid at them from its bottom (spinnarets?) She was able to assure everyone it was venomous, which she had on the authority of all of her grandparents. (One of these experts is more than usually ignorant of nature, and they all live 6000 miles apart, so I don’t know how they came to know the same kinds of spider) … Oh! and by the way, she saw a marmot from the window of the refuge in the morning. Now that does sound accurate, and even exciting, as they are shy.

I was completely fascinated. If a child’s willingness to tell you everything they have been doing and seeing is an indicator of a good relationship, then there is nothing wrong with ours. True, we fell out only ten minutes later, over the question of whether I would hang around acting as her lady-in-waiting while she teased me incessantly with names I dislike, or whether I would, instead, go and chat with my husband. But, she didn’t exactly clam up on me then either.

I went downstairs to chat with my husband. I told him it was lucky we had a dentist appointment for Monday, since the main part of my crown (of which I lost a chunk about 2 months ago) came out last night, and was now sitting in our house museum. He said, “I told you so! Didn’t I tell you so? Well it’s no good expecting me to do anything about it now!”. I replied that I hadn’t asked him to do any thing about it, and he said: “Of course you didn’t…. BUT, if you HAD, I wouldn’t have been able to.”

So there.

With my translation project slowly drawing to a close, nothing would do but I must sign up with the Open University again.  I was missing it!  And as Antonia becomes more independent I am starting to look towards my plan for a Masters degree and eventually perhaps a doctorate.  Starting in September I will be taking a course in archaeology.  I have lots of other plans and my dear husband is quaking in his boots, in fear of their cost.  I don’t blame him either, it’s appalling how much extra I have to pay by living in Europe.

I don’t think my next course will qualify me to work on digs or anything like that, but I hope I’ll have the background to understand archaeology as it applies to areas of art history I’m interested in.  In the meantime, I’ve realised that I’m not going to be able to approach future study in the same leisurely manner I adopted in the past.  I’m going to have to squeeze my reading, and writing too, into short, intensive bursts, surrounded by periods of interruption.  These are not my best working conditions.

So… I’m developing a new method of note-taking, that involves taking the notes before reading the book.  (I love typing that with a straight face).  Seriously, though, I’ve decided it will make my life easier if my notes are based on the expanded book structure, and I can get the first part of that from the table of contents and headings.  I insert extra parts that might have been subheadings if the authors had chosen to go wild in that particular direction. Then I can quickly scan it and markup any parts that are likely to be relevant for particular questions, and include any further research or action items I need to do in separate headings.  I use a mindmapping software called FreeMind for this.  So far it seems to be working quite well.  I am finally working on reading my way properly through Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice as an introduction to the course which I think may be more content based.  It is a thick tome full of useful, well, theories, methods and practices many of which are more applicable to some interests than others.  So far I am getting through it pretty quick so maybe my method works!

I’ve done huge amounts of reading this week.  The hard thing is going to be finding the right balance.

Mike claims that Carpe Diem means ’seize the carp’!

We all know perfectly well that this is not the case.  But today we seized the one day in the foreseeable past and future when it was not raining and we did not have some prior engagement, and took off to a water garden not too far from where we live.  It was beautiful and interesting, with plants in flower, petrifying fountains, insects, sculptures, water chimes, … and coach-loads of school kids getting their education.

I was able to observe that Antonia’s allergy to school has not decreased one little bit.  Whenever she saw them, she headed determinedly in the opposite direction.  We still got close enough to see that they spent their time being herded around in crocodile formation, getting told off for taking up space and making noise and being lectured about plant types.  I’m still kind of wondering if they actually learned more from this experience than my kid did.  I half suspect that neither the school-kids nor Antonia actually ingested that much new information.  What I do know is that she had a lovely time appreciating and observing everything the garden had to offer.

I think the school kids were mostly bored.  The other interesting thing that happened is that as the garden was fairly small and closed, we told Antonia she could go where she liked as long as she was on the paths.  Practically as soon as she was out of our sight, one of the gardeners assumed that she was with a school party and either lost or playing truant and ordered her back to her guardians.  That was kind of strange!

All in all we had a nice time, and as I type the rain has set back in again.