The miseducation of Zoe and Heidi
6-8 May, Ian
When we told people about our plans to take a
year out travelling virtually everyone's first question concerned the girls'
education. It's very early days yet, of course, but I can give some preliminary
thoughts.
In southern Africa we were moving around too much in the day and getting to bed too early in the evenings to get into any real teaching routine. For all the formal learning that they missed, the girls learnt what a gemsbok, a secretary bird and a damara dik-dik are, that lions can sometimes attack and kill elephants (and that male lions are lazier than lionesses) and that leopards are more solitary and harder to find. Etc! I have managed to run through some maths with the girls: we have done a pretty thorough job of long multiplication, though barely anything else. Given that this accounts for only one side out of more than a hundred in the (excellent) Key Stage Two maths book, we'll need to be quite energetic over the coming months. (I may be Old School but it seems to me that getting the girls rock solid on multiplication and division merits more time than, say, rotational symmetry or showing them how you can glue cubes together to make different shapes. Nonetheless, I am determined to get through all of the topics over the months ahead.)
Paula has taken over literacy teaching, which is very helpful for me, and a nice break for the girls. I'm continuing to read The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, although this has slowed a little since we have proper shelter and electricity, which together boost episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to being an evening alternative. Once we're through the No1LDA I have a couple more books of an informative nature that I'd like to try (I'm not naming them for fear that they'll then be jinxed). On the subject of literacy, I read in one of the curriculum books today the unqualified assertion that the tablet PC and speech recognition software will "render typing skills redundant" within ten years (published 2003). Do you agree with this? Although it's an interesting claim, I don't buy it myself; we'll see.
On Friday afternoon I went over to the American Language Centre in the ville nouvelle and registered for our Arabic lessons, which start tomorrow. David came by while I was form filling and we picked up Paula and the girls and had an impromptu drive out to the mountains followed by dinner. As we left town we drove through a rural Mediterranean landscape of olive groves and cypresses; the many donkeys we saw grazing by the road looked a lot happier and healthier than their urban counterparts. We carried on until we reached a small Berber town. By this time the sun was setting and there were beautiful views both across towards the pink skies in the west and back along the valley towards the evening lights of Fes. We had dinner at a country restaurant called Les Trois Sources, which, with its good wines (actually the best since we left home) and fine seafood, was as French as it sounds. For starters we shared plates of "haricots de mer" (small clams) and crevettes, both tasting very fresh and done in herb butter.
The next day we possibly paid the price for this, with Heidi in particular laid low by gastric illness. The handouts from the American Centre talk colourfully (guess I should write "colorfully" or even "colorsomely") of the abundance of "intestinal flora" lurking in water in the medina. We wont know whether it was this or the seafood that affected us, but Heidi seems to have recovered today and it was no worse than the type of sickness we knew to expect. Hopefully our wider education process will extend to our digestive tracts, making us more robust as the year progresses.
With Heidi temporarily laid out sick, Zoe and I ran a few errands around the medina and took mint tea and Sprite in one of the many hygienically challenged / corporeally educational cafes. Looking at the passers by, the contrast between the dress of local and foreign women was striking. All of the local women covered their legs and arms, and most of them covered their heads, too. This we expected. What was more surprising was how few of the western women that walked by dressed any differently than you might expect them to in, say, Benidorm. I don't know whether this is because it simply doesn't occur to them that it may be culturally inappropriate or because, having given the matter consideration, they think that it's just not reasonable these days to expect women to wear anything other than short skirts and string-strapped tops in the north African heat. (Paula, by the way, has, even within the constraints of packing one bag for a whole year, managed to devise a wardrobe for our time here that is less provocative.)
More worrying than this, are the insidious initiatives by certain US Christian groups to proselytise the locals. I'm told that this is currently being done both under the banner of industry liaison and rock concerts. Apart from being anti-Islamic it's also illegal, and stands every chance of inciting outrage and anti-westerner violence. As Bertrand Russell commented on the subject of drowning witches in ponds, what you make of this comes down to a question of fact: it's reasonable behaviour if and only if you really think that God will condemn non-Christians to an eternity of literal hell. But what sort of world view is this? Can't anyone do something about these people?
Walking around the souks here is totally fascinating and I'll write about it at more length sometime soon; it's exactly the sort of experience that you'd hope it to be. If I wanted to, I could integrate it into the girls maths programme: it has been shown, in a fascinating book called Symmetries of Culture, co-written by an ethnologist and a mathematician, that cultural artefacts such as vase and tapestry patterns, are amenable to group theory, and that distinctive pattern groups identified by the classifications of group theory are used consistently within each culture. Interestingly, Arabic cultures tend to use a very high number of the available patterns. Even more interesting is the revelation that some ethnic groups, such as american indians, use patterns on artefacts that they produce for sale that are not isomorphic to the patterns that they use on the same artefacts when made for their own use. But this isn't featuring in our syllabus, even when we're done with long multiplication. I will, though, by pleased if the girls know a thing or two about zellij, and that, as I learnt myself from David on Friday, Arabic has different plurals for two of something, three to ten of something and more than ten of something.
We have also learned a card game called Backpacker - it has its own colourful deck - that we can enthusiastically recommend to other travellers. Our card table is shown in the photo, taken from the balcony leading to our bedroom.
Ian
In southern Africa we were moving around too much in the day and getting to bed too early in the evenings to get into any real teaching routine. For all the formal learning that they missed, the girls learnt what a gemsbok, a secretary bird and a damara dik-dik are, that lions can sometimes attack and kill elephants (and that male lions are lazier than lionesses) and that leopards are more solitary and harder to find. Etc! I have managed to run through some maths with the girls: we have done a pretty thorough job of long multiplication, though barely anything else. Given that this accounts for only one side out of more than a hundred in the (excellent) Key Stage Two maths book, we'll need to be quite energetic over the coming months. (I may be Old School but it seems to me that getting the girls rock solid on multiplication and division merits more time than, say, rotational symmetry or showing them how you can glue cubes together to make different shapes. Nonetheless, I am determined to get through all of the topics over the months ahead.)
Paula has taken over literacy teaching, which is very helpful for me, and a nice break for the girls. I'm continuing to read The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, although this has slowed a little since we have proper shelter and electricity, which together boost episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to being an evening alternative. Once we're through the No1LDA I have a couple more books of an informative nature that I'd like to try (I'm not naming them for fear that they'll then be jinxed). On the subject of literacy, I read in one of the curriculum books today the unqualified assertion that the tablet PC and speech recognition software will "render typing skills redundant" within ten years (published 2003). Do you agree with this? Although it's an interesting claim, I don't buy it myself; we'll see.
On Friday afternoon I went over to the American Language Centre in the ville nouvelle and registered for our Arabic lessons, which start tomorrow. David came by while I was form filling and we picked up Paula and the girls and had an impromptu drive out to the mountains followed by dinner. As we left town we drove through a rural Mediterranean landscape of olive groves and cypresses; the many donkeys we saw grazing by the road looked a lot happier and healthier than their urban counterparts. We carried on until we reached a small Berber town. By this time the sun was setting and there were beautiful views both across towards the pink skies in the west and back along the valley towards the evening lights of Fes. We had dinner at a country restaurant called Les Trois Sources, which, with its good wines (actually the best since we left home) and fine seafood, was as French as it sounds. For starters we shared plates of "haricots de mer" (small clams) and crevettes, both tasting very fresh and done in herb butter.
The next day we possibly paid the price for this, with Heidi in particular laid low by gastric illness. The handouts from the American Centre talk colourfully (guess I should write "colorfully" or even "colorsomely") of the abundance of "intestinal flora" lurking in water in the medina. We wont know whether it was this or the seafood that affected us, but Heidi seems to have recovered today and it was no worse than the type of sickness we knew to expect. Hopefully our wider education process will extend to our digestive tracts, making us more robust as the year progresses.
With Heidi temporarily laid out sick, Zoe and I ran a few errands around the medina and took mint tea and Sprite in one of the many hygienically challenged / corporeally educational cafes. Looking at the passers by, the contrast between the dress of local and foreign women was striking. All of the local women covered their legs and arms, and most of them covered their heads, too. This we expected. What was more surprising was how few of the western women that walked by dressed any differently than you might expect them to in, say, Benidorm. I don't know whether this is because it simply doesn't occur to them that it may be culturally inappropriate or because, having given the matter consideration, they think that it's just not reasonable these days to expect women to wear anything other than short skirts and string-strapped tops in the north African heat. (Paula, by the way, has, even within the constraints of packing one bag for a whole year, managed to devise a wardrobe for our time here that is less provocative.)
More worrying than this, are the insidious initiatives by certain US Christian groups to proselytise the locals. I'm told that this is currently being done both under the banner of industry liaison and rock concerts. Apart from being anti-Islamic it's also illegal, and stands every chance of inciting outrage and anti-westerner violence. As Bertrand Russell commented on the subject of drowning witches in ponds, what you make of this comes down to a question of fact: it's reasonable behaviour if and only if you really think that God will condemn non-Christians to an eternity of literal hell. But what sort of world view is this? Can't anyone do something about these people?
Walking around the souks here is totally fascinating and I'll write about it at more length sometime soon; it's exactly the sort of experience that you'd hope it to be. If I wanted to, I could integrate it into the girls maths programme: it has been shown, in a fascinating book called Symmetries of Culture, co-written by an ethnologist and a mathematician, that cultural artefacts such as vase and tapestry patterns, are amenable to group theory, and that distinctive pattern groups identified by the classifications of group theory are used consistently within each culture. Interestingly, Arabic cultures tend to use a very high number of the available patterns. Even more interesting is the revelation that some ethnic groups, such as american indians, use patterns on artefacts that they produce for sale that are not isomorphic to the patterns that they use on the same artefacts when made for their own use. But this isn't featuring in our syllabus, even when we're done with long multiplication. I will, though, by pleased if the girls know a thing or two about zellij, and that, as I learnt myself from David on Friday, Arabic has different plurals for two of something, three to ten of something and more than ten of something.
We have also learned a card game called Backpacker - it has its own colourful deck - that we can enthusiastically recommend to other travellers. Our card table is shown in the photo, taken from the balcony leading to our bedroom.
Ian
Posted: Mon - May 9, 2005 at 12:28 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM