Perspective, July 30 chat

I'll be in the chat from Heather Booth's house in Oakland, California. At the HSC conference, one of my presentations is a new topic called "Perspective," and I will have been thinking about that. You can help me!

From the conference schedule:

Where were you before (intellectually, emotionally, philosophically)? Where are you now? Where might you be next year, or in five years?

Ideas for reading might be the TV pages or about food, if you don't have other ideas. There are two pages where I collect people's tales of personal change:

Thoughts on Changing
and
How Unschooling Changes People

If you're reading this by e-mail and you need a path to the chatroom, click on the title to get to the blog, which has a tab up to the left with the link and password.

Etiquette, manners, customs (July 23)

July 23, the day before Learn Nothing Day, we will discuss the WHY (mostly) of etiquette, manners and customs. Partly that might be about expectations. Who gets to say how things go in a public place? How can a mother set a good example for a child?

There was a discussion just this January about etiquette and manners. The transcript is here: Etiquette, and Manners and Courtesy. I'll try to go another direction with this one.



If you're reading this by e-mail and you need a path to the chatroom, click on the title to get to the blog, which has a tab up to the left with the link and password.

Math and geography

Geography and math—differences, measurements, terminology, surprises, oddities.

A few things to consider: Metric system, counting in 12s (dozen, gross, 360-degree circles (180, 90 degrees. Crore and lakh. One billion people in India. They went with the American numbers on that. Britain gave up their definition of "a billion" when I was already an adult.

Rs. 16 Crore Bugatti India’s Most Expensive Car Say HOW much? But you can get a Tata for just 1,96,141 rs. (That comma IS in the right place, for Indian numbers.) That's less than two Lakh!

One favorite project of U.S. homeschoolers used to be to collect post cards from every U.S. state. Because of the extreme differences in the populations of states and the number of unschooling families, the lists of participants would have maybe 200 or 250 families in California and Texas, and two in New Mexico, and one in Wyoming. (I'm using a real memory for this one). Many states had fifteen or twenty participants!

The rule was to send a postcard when you got a postcard. When I pointed out that I would go broke if I answered every postcard, the organizer explained condescendingly to me that no family would send more than 49 post cards. I tried to explain, but she said if I didn't return a card I would be removed from the project. Well, then! The families organizing such things were thinking only of geography, and not of mathematics.


If you're reading this by e-mail and you need a path to the chatroom, click on the title to get to the blog, which has a tab up to the left with the link and password.

Connections galore

This connects last week's chat with this week's.


What's the connection? :-)

If you're reading this by e-mail and you need a path to the chatroom, click on the title to get to the blog, which has a tab up to the left with the link and password.

July 9, Word Origins

Wednesday, July 9, for the benefit of Karen James and anyone else who thinks it might be interesting to know whether a word came from medieval French, or ancient Germanic tribes, or somewhere else, and why…

A game. A game with dictionaries (online or otherwise). If you like words and you have a dictionary that has etymologies, have it handy. Oxford English Dictionary is a bonus (IF it's an edition with word histories). American Heritage Dictionary is perfect, if (as above) it has at the ends of words something that looks like <ME <OE (which would mean (from Middle English, from Old English) or <Fr (from French). Any dictionary might have that.

If this is making your eyes roll back, never mind. You can play without a book, too. Just a few people need books. Or if you have two internet portals, keep your best-keyboard option open to the chat, and with the other you can find words for the game, or look up to see if the plays are correct.

Karen James has developed a curiosity (perhaps temporary) and I want to stop filling up her facebook page. I would rather fill up two hours of chat.

9:30 my time and Jill's (Mountain Savings Time) Wednesday morning. Yours… maybe the same or different. Time notes

The discussion, on Karen's page, for anyone not already spooked by the whole topic: https://www.facebook.com/karen.james.1023/posts/652456298157523

If you're reading this by e-mail and you need a path to the chatroom, click on the title to get to the blog, which has a tab up to the left with the link and password.