Natural learning is about making connections, in history, philosophy, belief and practice. Tie in music, art, science, geography, patterns, religion, animals, minerals or vegetables. This is unschooling practice and strewing practice, except that it's as real as anything.
A 1933 horse-drawn float that seems to be made of flowers. I thought "Rose Bowl"?
But I could see (even in the smaller image that was in the e-mail from Retronaut) "Ecclesfield." For all I know, there's an Ecclesfield, California. So I googled it. Found "Ecclesfield parade," and all in just seconds.
Ecclesfield is in South Yorkshire, near Sheffield. I read about hospital parades, which were held there from the 1890's to 1936, and looked back at the photo. I could see "Ecclesfield Parade," but there was another word on the left. I got a magnifying glass, and it says "Hospital."
Now I know how hospitals were funded before the National Health program, and I have more pictures in my head of England. Nice.
Hospital Parades
The link says they were paper and flour paste on a wire frame. I wonder what they did with them afterwards. Maybe left them at someone's farmyard until the weather dissolved them?
When I was a kid I worked on a float once. We were wiring paper flowers (paper napkins made flowerish with a fluffy fold and a piece of wire) to chicken wire. I suppose (never thought about it until today) that at the end of it all, they cut the wire off the truck, rolled it all up and took it to the dump.
One thought leads to another, if you let your thoughts gallump along. :-) Retronaut has sparked a LOT Of thought! Here's their entry (introduced in the e-mail): http://www.retronaut.co/2011/12/vintage-big Vintage Big. All they cared about was that it was a big camera, in an old photo. That's enough.
I read a hymn in a new Methodist hymnal (and took notes so I could look it up). I knew the tune, so I could hear it in my head. The notable thing was that the text was pretty much a prayer asking God to help people reconcile faith and science, mystery and proof.
The tune I know it to is here (let the intro stuff go by before the real melody starts):
Here's the arrangement and words I grew up with, from The Baptist Hymnal of 1956:
I can play that on the piano. I'm likely to make a few mistakes but it still feels good.
I read the new text while waiting for a Christmas concert Holly was in. It's called "Praise the source of faith and learning," by Thomas Troeger. The hymnal was The Faith we Sing, 2004.
That's Holly with the short hair in the front row, black dress with sleeves, above the first poinsettia.
This morning I checked the overnight/international e-mail. Hema Bharadwaj and I have been having an exchange about Ganesha, because Marty did his final project in an Eastern Religions class on how to set up an altar to Ganesha. Hema sent a link she liked about the origin of Ganesha and some regional variations and symbolism. The final paragraph is this:
Thus various symbols with potent metaphysical themes telescope into the form and narrative that is Ganesha. They speak a profound truth in a language that bypasses the rational mind and connects intuitively with the soul. It is this silent language that we – a generation bombarded with unsubtle ‘Breaking News’ – are longing perhaps to hear. That is why we are so drawn to him, going to the extent of turning him into celluloid cartoons and plastic China-made dashboard displays. And Ganesha does not mind, so long as we appreciate the realm of his mother, and aspire for the realm of his father. (http://devdutt.com/decoding-ganesha/)
His mother(Shakti/Pavarti) wants to accept life and death in the real world; his father (Shiva) would prefer a spiritual life of renunciation. Ganesha melds those, and understands both.
I was excited to read this on that page, too: " Ganesha’s rat may be depicted in films as a cute mouse but it is a bandicoot..." I was in India a month and didn't see a single monkey, but the last night, on the way to the airport, I saw something running in the raised, wide median between lanes on the highway in Mumbai. I saw more than one. In Albuquerque it might've been prairie dogs, living in the dirt next to a freeway, but it was nighttime and this wasn't Albuquerque. I'm glad I saw them, and I'm glad that Hema and Pardnya believed I had seen them, and said "bandicoots." So I didn't see monkeys, but I did see bandicoots (fleetingly), and now I understand why sometimes (in English) I read that Ganesha has a rat, and sometimes I read it's a mouse, because as far as I (and probably others in the western-English-speaking-world) knew, Crash Bandicoot was nothing more than a video game character.
I've seen Ganesha's rodential friend portrayed sleeping, pulling Ganesha in a chariot, giving him a ride on his back, playing chess with him... On a wikipedia discussion of symbolism, there was this statement: "Martin-Dubost notes a view that the rat is a symbol suggesting that Ganesha, like the rat, penetrates even the most secret places." That's kind of cool. In Christian parallel, that's like The Holy Spirit. Kind of.
This morning my mind wandered through the events of the day, a coming road trip, and the literal meaning of the word "tractor." I had never thought of it. Traction. Retract. A tractor is a thing that pulls!
The thing it most basically pulls is a plow, that tool said to have so profoundly advanced human culture.
I wondered then whether anyone (maybe Icelanders) called them "iron oxen" or "power plows" or anything more Germanic. So I started poking around.
number:
3114
English:
cart, carriage, wagon (wheeled vehicle; not self-propelled)
That came up, when I tried to see what "tractor" was called in other languages. It's not tractor, but I was excited to see that in Italian, "carro" is something pulled by animal traction (which fit right in, and also gave me a good clue why we called our automobiles "cars." In English a "cart" is pulled by animals, but people didn't so often ride in them as they do "wagons" or "carriages."
Britannica Concise Encycopedia had some cool tractor details:
High-power, low-speed traction vehicle. The two main types are wheeled and continuous-track. Most modern tractors are powered by internal-combustion engines running on gasoline or diesel fuel. Tractors are used in agriculture, construction, and road building, for pulling equipment such as plows and cultivators, for pushing implements such as bulldozers and diggers, and for operating stationary devices such as saws and winches. The first tractors grew out of the steam engines used on farms in the late 19th century; in 1892 an Iowa blacksmith, John Froehlich, built the first farm vehicle powered by a gasoline engine. The tractor revolutionized farming, displacing draft animals and many farm workers. By World War I the tractor inspired the tanks built by the British and French.
I wondered whether maybe in carriages, pre-automobile, there was a box for the driver to keep things in. I don't know, but if anyone does know, please leave a note!
Wikipedia has an article on glove compartments. There's more, but I liked this part best:
A glove compartment is occasionally referred to as a "jockey box," especially in the U.S. Upper Rocky Mountain states such as Idaho and Montana, but is found as far south as Texas. In South Africa, it is called a "cubby-hole". In Turkey, it is called "Torpedo Compartment".
According to the BBC Four programme "Penelope Keith and the Fast Lady" it was Dorothy Levitt who first coined the phrase 'glove compartment' as she advised motorists to carry a number of pairs of gloves to deal with many eventualities.
This card came in the daily e-mail from How to Be a Retronaut, and I recognized the shape and general mechanism. I had seen one just like it many times, though not made of playing cards. Wood and canvas, steel and rubber.
Other images from that set of cards are here: http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/10/vintage-halloween-postcards, and the blog notes that they are from The New York Public Library Picture Collection. There wasn't a date, but the biplane was 1914. The card was probably made within ten years of the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, so it's not a card of a witch in an old airplane. It was a picture of the very newest, most modern technology!
The plane is in Albuquerque; I see it pretty often. The photos of the plane, I lifted from an online search, and if you click the second one, you can see more image of the plane and information on its history and why it's at the Albuquerque Sunport.
Because of the internet, they can be set beside one another all over the world on Halloween! Ta-daaa!
One of my favorite things lately is the daily mail that comes from a blog called "How to Be a Retronaut." There are several topics per day, but today two cool things arrived, and one reminds me of a stop I made in my home town a couple of weeks ago specifically to photograph the bar where my mom used to "live." (For a while she literally did live in the apartment above and behind it, but for many years she was there all the time it was open, drinking and hanging out with her friends.)
First, this teenaged photo of Robert Mapplethorpe, in a collection of photos of young artists. The shadow of his hair is awesome. They don't say whether he took the photo himself. I think that first because Holly has taken some of the best photos of her, herself.
Here's a piece of graffiti inside an abandoned factory in New York. The article isn't about the graffiti, it's just images of that factory. They say nothing about who or what, but that graffiti, in that place, is striking.
So my mom used to drink in a bar called The Mel Patch Lounge. It was one of the only bars in my hometown that was all-English. So it was where cowboys and Indians went. Most of the other bars had Hispanic owners, managers and patrons, and as they would get drunker, they would speak less English. (Generally speaking.)
My mom has been dead for several years, and the bar has been closed longer than that, but I thought I should take some photos of the building, when we passed through Española recently. It doesn't look nearly the same. :-)
Here's a picture with a good shadow in it:
My sister, who has connections with the local art scene, says it is being set up as a studio for various forms of graphic and performance arts. That's nice. And they call it "the old Mel Patch," still, informally, she said.
(I think this was to save that part of the wall for one particular purpose, not a message to all painters for the whole building; it was just to the right of the entrance, so it might have been saved for the name and address and hours or some such... don't know.)
It says "Only the best are crowned." This is very much a Catholic town.
When I was 13 or 14 or so, one day I couldn't remember the name of that wide path paved with asphalt, for cars, outside my house. I thought and thought, and all I came up with was "trail." Okay, maybe I was 15 and I was stoned. But before long I remembered "road" and "street." They had just escaped me, temporarily.
But when I thought about "trail" I thought of "trailer" and the idea of something following something. A trailer trails behind a car (or truck, or tractor). And the trail itself is something people follow. Nice.
When I was 58, I saw or heard the root of the word "wagon" (it was being "waggon," the UK spelling at that moment) for the first time. It wags. It's like a trailer, often, but it has a single point of connection. Huh.
So "fender" came to mind. It fends off bumps or damage to or disruption of the wheels, on a wagon, or trailer, or truck. Nice. Plain old (really old) English words were just sitting there being meaningful antiques, and I had only heard them as sounds and pictures, without really looking.
A beautiful matching car and trailer spotted west of Albuquerque in August, 2011:
I like the reflection best (click for a better view of the car itself):
An interestingly parallel car and trailer I saw south of London (nearly to West Wittering, outside a butchershop where we stopped for meat pies for lunch, next to this place) in May, 2011:
In objecting to someone's new-age objection to a simple statement, I wrote something worth keeping.
My self is myself. That's what I was talking about in the first place. Live in a way so that you're being aware and honest. Integrity. No "true self" and some other self. Just the one, whole self. Whether you think I'm more evolved than you are or not doesn't matter to me OR to you. Whether you think what you're discussing is "a much deeper perspective" than mine or not, mine stands and yours wasn't the topic.
You probably assume I don't know about the whole astral plane, third level, spirit guide, children choose their parents, blahdeblah, but I've known quite a bit about it since 1967. References on request. :-)
I will state the idea that it is part of a bundle of wishful thinking that can and does distract people from being right here, right now. I don't recommend it. It justifies violence and ignorance. That is not helpful to ANYone's spiritual value, regardless of whether they think they'll live another 20 times, or another 20 minutes.
The original statement was addressed to a young man (teen) who was disturbed about a situation between others. I had originally written this:
Consider ideas. If something makes sense, good. Use the idea. Remember where you got it. Be honest. Live your life in such a way that you're not ashamed if someone quotes what you said, or tells something you did.
(Note to a young friend yesterday, but it seemed potentially useful to others.)
For young children, this might seem obvious. It's not about color, so that might be another way to look at what youngest children look at first.
The video is new at youtube, and the comments there include "the converse has laces and the rest of them don't!"
Many answers that seemed obvious to us in childhood look different in the light of years and experience. The uniqueness of any object, person, idea, plant or animal can be discussed, as can similarities to other things.
All of that reminded me of the game "SET." It's a game that seems easier for younger children than adults. When I play it, I think in words. Maybe people who are more visual will find it simpler.
In everyday comparison and contrast, there are many other factors past verbal, logical, size or color. Which of those shoes were made in the U.S.? Which fit? Which are stylish? How hot is it outside? Ah. but the question isn't about which shoes someone might want to wear. Shoe stores are about which shoes people want to wear!
The video is a good example of multiple choice questions, and a good toy for playing with how we sort and choose, how we name things, and how we interpret what we see. And the song is nice. It reminds me of when Kirby was little, and he'll be 24 later this month.
Much of the comparison/contrast that comes up naturally at our house is about musical styles and forms and versions.
Holly and I saw a quilt at an antiques mall, and I said "Stained glass window!" but I was pointing at the glass case it was in, so Holly thought I was talking about the glass (which was clear).
"Kama Chinen, from Japan, was born in 1895 and incredibly lived through three different centuries.
She was born on May 10, 1895 — the same year as King George VI.
My favorite thing in that article is the United Nations prediction that by 2050 there will be nearly one million people in Japan over the age of 100.
The article that led me to this one was the 130th birthday of a woman in Georgia (former Soviet Georgia, not former Confederate Georgia). Her records have been long lost, so she can't win the international race, as it were... but 1880. She was born in 1880. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3046794/Oldest-woman-celebrates-130th.html
Anyway... the articles are from the racy, crazy SUN, in London, and the reason I get their e-mails is that they had an article on the letter I got from David Bowie, when Antisa Khvichava was only 87 years old. For a while there were letters in response to that, so I was checking in on occasion.
I had a grandfather born before the 1900's, but he died in the late 1970's or so. Here we are in the 1950's:
Holly and I visited my friend Beau the other day. Beau can start collecting social security when she's 62, because she was born before 1950. I'll have to wait until I'm 65, because I was born in 1953. All this information is patterns, patterns, patterns. It involves government finances, family relations, and future careers in gerontological fields.
Save the Date - Careers in Aging Week 2011
April 10-16, 2011
Below is a song from a musical that was never successful, but the song is good! Carol Burnett sang it originally, and if anyone knows where there's a recording online of her doing it, or a video, please leave a link to it! Thanks.
Claire Spencer, a friend of ours, sang it to us many years ago, and repeated it a couple of times just because we asked. She had it on an LP from her childhood. Unfortunately, I don't have a recording of Claire doing it, either.
This is Buddy Rich, a famous drummer, on the Muppet Show, not drumming. 1981:
Here's one of him drumming, same program, no drums:
Meanwhile, for the past several days, other nerds have been writing other poems, on a Facebook page created by Jeff Sabo. As those who don't have a part-time home on facebook won't be able to see it, I've brought some of my own, and the promise that there are many more and better there.
People are playing with long words. This is my 5-7-5:
Why do we think it? That big thoughts will not fit in Small words of one sound.
and what started me with the five-syllable situation:
In Beowulf's age Haiku all angled to be Alliterative
One of my favorite geek-poetry things of all is the error message haiku which have been going around for years. There's no one definitive set, I don't think, as they're passed around as office humor, but here's one site with a collection:
Because of watching this: As Time Goes By... ...I read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Cavell. There was just a passing mention of Edith Cavell, in the sixth episode of the third season, and I wanted to understand the joke.
And so I learned a fair amount about WWI that I hadn't known, and how people were being recruited with a story that turned out to have much exaggeration and some denial. But still it was heroism, and had I know this before I was in Norfolk last summer I would have wanted to see this monument. I might have passed right by it, but didn't know the story.
There are roads, schools, hospitals, buildings, people, a pub, a mountain, a bridge, a rose, a radio station, a YWCA camp, and a hill or something on Jupiter named after Edith Cavell, in the U.K., Belgium, France, Portugal, South Africa, Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia. And Jupiter. Okay, well not all those named things are in all those places. One in each, at least.
If considering the difference between knowledge and trivia, consider this, by Ronnie Maier.
Each of us is born with a crazy passion to learn. Each of us craves knowledge of our world and our place within it. We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to us, because it’s natural, and because it’s impossible to live in the world and not learn. Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing. ~ Peggy Pirro, 101 Reasons Why I'm An Unschooler
MJ helped one of my nieces with her long division homework the other day. Hearing that she had done this got me thinking again about what a waste of time and brain cells it is to learn long division.
#1 - As Pam Sorooshian pointed out in her math talk at Good Vibrations last year, the precision of long division is just not what we need out in the real world. Think about when you use division in real life: calculating the best value at the grocery store, figuring gas mileage, seeing how many of something you can use in a given time period or distribute to each person, and so on. And how do you do it? In your head, using estimates. "258 miles on 7.8 gallons, um, that's a little better than 30 mph." Done. Typically, we don't need to know that it was 33.07692 mph. And if we do...
#2 -Most of us carry calculators with us all day every day. We have calculators on our computers, in our phones, in our PDAs, in our watches, magnetized to our dashboards, clipped to our grocery carts, whatever. With a little practice, we can use these faster than we can estimate in our heads.
So, why are they still teaching long division in schools???? It is but one example of how schools have failed to adapt.
Once upon a time, it was vital for a certain group of people to know that wearing a silk shirt under armor might save your life, since the silk makes it easier to remove an arrow if you get shot. Somebody figured this out, and the word spread, and it became part of the standard warrior curriculum. Back then, knowing this technique was a matter of life and death. Nowadays, it's a quaint little factoid.
I'd rather have my kids learning about that than long division. Long division is a dead end, an exercise in tedium, a compelling bit of evidence that "math is hard" (not to mention unpleasant), or worse, that "I am stupid."
That little silk tidbit, though... Now that's interesting. I don't remember where I learned it—probably in a romance novel—but I looked it up on the Internet. It led me to Mongols and absorbency and sutures and animal rights for worms. And it led me to wonder: Who figured this out and how? Can you imagine the circumstances...? Chloe and I laughed together as we talked about it.
In other words, that little tidbit is fun. It opens doors. It engages my brain and reminds me that the world is full of things to discover.
That is what learning should be. I wonder why our schools haven't figured that out.
This is from Life Learning Magazine, March/April 2010. I don't know whether you'll be able to read it without subscribing, but you might want to subscribe, perhaps. Next month there will be an article by me.
A quote from Karen Ridd's article:
There’s a lot of giggling going on in the back seat of the car. We’re on our way home from the prestigious Golden Boy indoor soccer tournament. My eleven-year-old son Daniel has a gold medal around his neck after a hard-played final. He also has a book in his hand – not exactly standard “Grade Six” reading fare. It’s Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare – and he and his eight-year-old brother are quizzing each other on the lines that they are memorizing. And giggling.… They are giggling at how funny these lines are. I, on the other hand, have tears in my eyes, a smile that reaches to Pittsburgh, and a heart overflowing with gratitude that we are able to learn without school.
This year they'll both be in a production of Twelfth Night. Last year Ben, the younger, was in The Tempest, but I don't want to give away the good parts of the story.
Mar 24, 1603 Queen Elizabeth I died. She as nearly 70, and had been queen of England since she was 25.
From the Death of Queen Elizabeth I:
In March 1603 Queen Elizabeth was clearly unwell and seemed depressed. She retired to one of her favourite homes - Richmond Palace. Stubborn as ever she refused to allow her doctors to examine her. She also refused to rest in bed - she stood for hours on end, occasionally just sitting in a chair. Her condition became worse and her ladies-in-waiting spread cushions across the floor. Queen Elizabeth eventually lay down on the cushions. She lay on the floor for nearly four days - mostly in complete silence. She eventually grew so weak that when her servants insisted on making her more comfortable in her bed she was unable to argue with them. The end was clearly near for the great old Queen. Her Councillors gathered around her. Soft music was played to soothe her. She had still not named James as her successor but she made a sign to Robert Cecil and it was interpreted that this was her wish.
The funeral wasn't until April 28. The body was in a lead coffin, which I guess can keep Superman safe from kryptonite, and England safe from a month-old body.
In the middle of the site linked above are advertisements for wrongful death claims (just in case anyone wants to sue, about Elizabeth's death, I guess. As she was childless, though, and others benefitted from the death, I don't guess there needs to be a claim.
If she WAS childless, that is... There are hints and suggestions that she had a son, and a very bright one, too. Sir Francis Bacon.
There's a recent book out (2001-recent), not so much serious history, claiming that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a son of Elizabeth, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. That he wrote the plays, and William Shakespeare was used as a cover, kind of the opposite of ghost writing. A scholar wrote of the believers of that theory: “Oxfordians are the sub-literary equivalent of the sub-religious Scientologists. You don’t want to argue with them, as they are dogmatic and abusive.”
But women aren't having children as they're dying, though they might be thinking of their children. If they had any.
Besides just everything in the 16th and early 17th century? Shakespeare? (Even way apart from the odd theory that the they might be related indirectly by contract.) Francis Bacon? (Even if they weren't related, they did correspond in a very intimate tone, and he was some kind of genius.) Exploration of the New World and victory over the Spanish Armada?
Elizabeth I reigned for 44 years 4 months and 5 days. Five other monarchs have ruled longer. Henry III in the 13th century, Edward III in the fourteenth (and so she died with the third longest reign) and since then, George III (160-1820), Victoria in the 19th Century, and Queen Elizabeth II, 1952 to still-counting. If Elizabeth II passes George III and Queen Victoria, she will be #1, but Elizabeth I will be #6 in any case.
I recently found an interesting article about the symbolism on early German playing cards, so I put together a little video about a deck we have by the German artist Jost Amman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTBUygN8fOk
The "card spots" common in one place might not be the same as in another! In the U.S. I grew up with spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds. In Spain their club is an actual wooden club, and they have gold, cups and swords. Their playing card art can look like our tarot card art.
I don't know which kind they use in Mexico; anyone know?
The illustration of the Spanish cards from wikipedia:
These are by Adrean Clark and are on her Deviant Art page.
Comixpedia.org says:
Adrean Clark is a deaf cartoonist currently based in St. Paul, MN. Former comics/webcomics she authored are My Hands Full, The Significance of Reality, and The Dark Side of the Moon.
As a strong advocate of American Sign Language, she often deals with signing community themes in her work. Her work has appeared in publications such as SIGNews and Deaf Rochester News.
Clark is the Visual Editor of Clerc Scar, where her current comic work appears.
As Adreanaline, Adrean posts on unschooling discussions sometimes, and is in the Monday and Friday unschooling chats when she's not too busy. Adrean created an image of clear singing, following one of the discussions. It is here: SandraDodd.com/clarity
