{"id":242,"date":"2008-09-04T21:06:50","date_gmt":"2008-09-04T20:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/?p=242"},"modified":"2008-09-04T21:06:50","modified_gmt":"2008-09-04T20:06:50","slug":"even-a-sack-of-potatoes-can-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/?p=242","title":{"rendered":"Even a sack of potatoes can learn!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Antonia is still a zombie!\u00a0 But never mind, our day had a few highlights.\u00a0 Charlotte Mason had a theory that I will have to paraphrase: you never know what will light your kids fire, so just give them some of everything and see what sticks:<\/p>\n

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  1. We read about the Athenians sending out their triremes to deal with pirates and we got to looking up what a trireme really is<\/a>.\u00a0 A trireme is multi-storey war ship with rowers on three levels.\u00a0 It was the fastest thing on the sea at the time (like maybe 17 km\/hour).\u00a0 Antonia couldn’t get over the fact that the crew consisted of about 200 people and that it was 5 times the length of our living room.\u00a0 She has been drawing her ancient boats as little rowing boat sized things with about 2 people on board.\u00a0 I couldn’t get over how beautiful the modern reconstruction, Olympias<\/a>, is.\u00a0 I had to stick a photo of it on my desktop for a while.\u00a0 If I had a teleport machine, I would have popped over to Athens to see it for real.\u00a0 Antonia is starting to understand all kinds of things like why water travel was preferable to land travel in ancient times, the problems of navigation and the reasons for coast-hopping.<\/li>\n
  2. Antonia tried knitting for the second time.\u00a0 It really went quite well, in that she knitted several rows by herself in the end, though she keeps inadvertently adding stitches.<\/li>\n
  3. We listened to the Prom 63 concert on BBC radio’s listen again facility<\/a> (4 days left, and highly recommended!)\u00a0 We both really enjoyed listening to the Motets and Chansons with interspersed Indian music, though some part of me couldn’t help thinking that this was a rather simplistic approach to ‘fusion’.\u00a0 It sounded nice, what can I say.\u00a0 Neither of us like Messiaen much, I’m afraid.\u00a0 But we both loved the Night Ragas like crazy.\u00a0 It took me right back to India, to those crazy nights travelling through Maharashtra in decrepit cars and late trains, the lovely candle-lit nights in Mandhu and Orchha, the platforms of the railway stations just about everywhere.\u00a0 Not that we ever heard musicians quite as talented as this.\u00a0 Mike groaned that he didn’t really understand the structure of Indian music, but Antonia and I are kind of used to it.\u00a0 Music is like a language, you learn it naturally from exposure.\u00a0 I love India.\u00a0 To me it really seems like Europe’s twin sister in terms of culture and potential quality of life.\u00a0 It’s undeniably true that Indian society has a problem to solve in sustaining life at all for many of its people, but at least if they can solve that, they will have plenty to live for.\u00a0 I couldn’t really say that of every place I’ve been to.\u00a0 Now I’m all nostalgic for India.\u00a0 I even had to turn most of the lights off, to get that intermittent electricity feel!\u00a0 If I had a teleport machine, I would be in Orchha right now.\n

    P.S.\u00a0 I realise that based on the image of India abroad, some people might not understand the ‘quality of life’ thing.\u00a0 It’s kind of subjective: reliable transport and electricity contribute only a tiny percentage to my sense of quality of life.\u00a0 Decent music, literature and food, and a couple of thousand years of history under my feet are vital. Like everyone else, I find that enough food and clean water are even more of a prerequisite of course.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Antonia is still a zombie!\u00a0 But never mind, our day had a few highlights.\u00a0 Charlotte Mason had a theory that I will have to paraphrase: you never know what will light your kids fire, so just give them some of everything and see what sticks: We read about the Athenians sending out their triremes to … Continue reading Even a sack of potatoes can learn!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}