Mostly coherent. And with lots of footnotes.
b_twin_1
Eeek. I’m so conflicted. I want the rest of the week to go sloooooow for you but I want it to go fast for Jodi.
It was less than a fortnight ago that I finally really noticed that Jodi’s frelling* novel** is coming out on the SAME GLAMFARBING DAY THAT SHADOWS IS DUE. How frigglegobblasting unfair is THAT?
http://ya-sisterhood.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-reveal-incarnate-by-jodi.html ***
* * *
I rang handbells tonight—rather to my own astonishment. What’s worse is that the other three ringers are getting steady enough that It Was Decided—not by me—that it was time for some evil fiend or other to start calling bobs—you remember bobs (and singles)? It’s not bad enough you have to learn the frelling method line in the first place, or rather, in handbells, lines, plural, and each pair has a different set of lines with a different relationship between the two bells so in a minor method with six bells it’s like learning three different methods and in a major method with eight bells it’s like learning four different methods, at the point when you’re beginning to get through a plain course more often than you aren’t, someone starts calling bobs. Bobs mix up the order of the bells so that what bell two or three was doing is now being done by (say) bell five or six—which also changes the tune, which is a clue you’ve come to depend on without realising you’re doing it. Bell methods are all basically canons, you know? Everybody rings the same pattern, it’s just each bell starts at a different place in the pattern.† But how you swap places when some ratbag calls ‘bob’ ALSO VARIES. Ohmigods, he just called a bob, do I run in, make the freller, run out, am I unaffected, can I just burst into tears and dash out of the room?††
I won’t say we did it well.††† But we were doing it.‡ And I noticed something. The big boys, which is to say Colin and Niall, are always handing us peons great steaming heaps of . . . twaddle, for example that it’s actually easier to ring on eight bells than it is on six. Don’t make me frelling laugh. Counting to six is sordid enough. Eight bells means two more chances to go wrong. Except . . . if you live long enough to be ringing on eight at all, to have (more or less) learnt all four of the plain courses on the four different pairs of bells for your method, in this case bob major . . . they have a point. Things don’t happen quite as fast on eight bells as they do on six, because eight bells have to ring in each line before anything else can happen in the next line. Calling it ‘more time to think’ is a bit extreme‡‡ but . . . well . . . we did stagger through a short touch.
I find it pretty funny that bell ringing is one of the things keeping me sane right now. But with the counter-computer effect there’s also the feeling that I need to go on believing in myself as a bell ringer while I get used to this no-home-bell-tower thing. So I scrape myself off the seat of my chair and go ring. Last night was one of Wild Robert’s wandering monthly spectaculars‡‡‡, this month, crucially, at a tower I could find in the dark, so I went. And it was okay. It was good.§ And maybe my new footloose status is an opportunity to ring for Wild Robert more often. . . .
ENOUGH WITH THE CHAT. BACK TO SHADOWS.
* * *
* . . . says the author who HATES ALL AUTHORS who have books coming out till she gets her frelling manuscript FINISHED AND TURNED IN.
** FIRST novel! For anyone coming to the party late, this is Jodi’s FIRST EVER PUBLISHED NOVEL!!!! A brand new shiny fresh just-published book is always a major chocolate, champagne, velvet, rhinestones^, heavenly choirs and beautiful young man/woman driving the Rolls event, but your first book . . . well. Despite the ghastly ravages of Menopause Brain I totally remember the whole run up to BEAUTY’s publication.
^ Really good rhinestones. Possibly attached to All Stars.
*** I think it’s a really good trailer too. Mostly I don’t like trailers. I know they’re all the rage and anyone who is anyone has trailers^ but mostly I don’t like them. I like this one.
^ I don’t have trailers
† While you’re singing ‘row, row, row, your boat’ the person ahead of you is singing ‘gently down the stream’
†† This is fairly easy to do with handbells. It’s a little harder to perform effectively in the tower.
††† Some of us did it better than others.
‡ And I kept thinking of things I have to go back and do to SHADOWS in the next five days while we were ringing plain courses, so maybe bobs were a good idea. WHA’? WHA’ YOU SAY? What are you doing in my sitting room? Why am I holding the leather strap-handles of two little bronze bells?
The problem with turning a book in unfinished is that it’s . . . unfinished. I know it’s unfinished, Merrilee knows it’s unfinished, my editor knows it’s unfinished, the janitor’s boyfriend’s dog knows it’s unfinished. But I want the storyline to read roughly the way it’s supposed to even if I use ‘ecphonesis’ three times in the same paragraph^ and the scene with the eggplant and the philosopher really should come out altogether. So I keep making notes of the things I need to stick a temporary storyline patch on, to get it through (I hope) its exam next week.
^ I don’t think I do use ecphonesis three times in the same paragraph. Maybe twice.+
+ I mean, I use ecphonesis, usually rude, frequently. But I don’t often hang around to label it as such.
‡‡ If you’re bungie jumping off the Chrysler Building instead of the Empire State, the 200 feet it’s shorter isn’t really going to matter if your bungies break: you’re still going to die.
‡‡‡ Where several people said to me, hi, Robin, how’s it going at New Arcadia?, and I said, ah, hmmm.
§ And I was still holding my line when everyone else went horribly wrong in the Cambridge. Wild Robert was, of course, mad to be trying to ring Cambridge at all with the people he had available, but this is Wild Robert’s way: and you will probably find you can ring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with Wild Robert’s beady eye on you. I was, for example, ringing Cambridge despite havoc in other areas of the ringing chamber—and I’m pretty sure the woman who was the most out of her depth went home saying, you know, I got through three leads of Cambridge, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but that’s Wild Robert. . . .
DAYS LIKE THIS SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A DOG.*
So let’s have an Ask Robin to distract me.
I’ve been wondering what was the first ever memorable story you wrote/wrestled with? I don’t mean the first one you had published, but the first one you can recall pouring your heart and soul into and deciding that you wanted to be an author/writer from that point on.
Never. It is a revelation to me every day that I’m a professional writer. I’ve become enough used to it that I no longer wake up every morning [sic] expecting to find out that I sell shoes** at Wal-Mart*** but I do still wake up every morning amazed . . . which is not a bad thing really. It’s not only a rush, it keeps you at it. How did I get this lucky, you know? Stop mooning around and keep working. Yes ma’am.
I’ve always told stories. Before I knew that’s what I was doing, I did it.† I told stories before I had words, and certainly before I could read and write: and yes, I can remember a few of these, but I’m not sure I can describe them. Once you have words it’s hard to go back. But story-telling for me is just part of my experience of living in the world. Everything is part of a story. It’s only a question of whichever way the fragment you’re contemplating chooses to run, and whether you have the time and inclination to follow. How many of you wander around humming random hums? Hands up, please. I bet there are a lot. You don’t do it to do it, you just do it. You’re built that way. You just find yourself doing it. Some of your hums may be fragments of other people’s real composed music, but some of them are just playing with sound.†† And you may go on to nail down a hum on a piece of paper and create (or try to create) a proper piece of music around it, but that’s later, and that’s something else, and it doesn’t discount or disparage the hums if you never turn them into best selling power ballads. Story-telling is like that for me.††† I tell stories anyway. That I can write some of them down and make people pay me for them is a bonus.
* * *
* Or a hellhound. I had a am-I-coughing-in-my-sleep^-or-is-that-a-hellhound-yowling-to-go-out-NOW? morning. Plus delightful clean-up duty. Plus the guy with the very long squeegee who does my first^^ floor windows showed up^^^ and I didn’t dare let him into the back garden, which was reserved for urgent hellhound activity.
And then there was the continuing to stream, the continuing to cough, and the continuing to not get enough sleep. Whimper. I just don’t get the coughing. How can bodies be so perverse?
And then there was going to the vet. And this time our client was Chaos, who has a Vet Phobia, and turns into the heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper every time he is dragged across that fell threshold, so that was even lovelier. He has a Vet Phobia, as I’m sure I’ve told you, because some arrogant little chickie of a wet new post grad vet and who didn’t have a clue what was wrong with him gave him one of those full-spectrum antibiotic jabs that are known to hurt, how dare you be stochastic and PAINFUL with my dog??, and then got all shirty when he screamed, and said that whippets were ‘wimpets’. She’s lucky she got out alive, but I didn’t find out till later that she’d chosen her treatment because she had no idea. Oh, and this is after she had told me that I ought to get them neutered. That that’s what responsible owners do.
She’s gone on to make some other veterinary surgery a joy for everyone, but I am left with a hellhound with a vet phobia.^^^^
Chaos is also one of these dogs that after you have broken up his pills into tiny crumbs and mixed them in carefully with the nice drooly chicken scraps, carefully eats all around them because of course they are a non-food-stuff and are in his bowl in error. So then you get to wodge up all the crumbs into a mushy glob and shove it/them down his throat. DOGS. YAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Handbells, this evening, for some mysterious reason, were relatively successful. Niall even started making calls. I don’t DO calls in bob major. It was another situation, as it so often is, that the other three have rung MILLIONS of touches of bob major in the tower, and they tell me eagerly, oh, it’s just like bob minor EXCEPT WITH TWO MORE BELLS! Yes, and driving a car is just like riding a bicycle except with TWO MORE WHEELS! Oh, and an engine. Spare me. I can, in fact, get through a course of plain bob major in the tower (probably), because I ring it on handbells. It’s EASIER in the tower.
^ which would not be the first time. I’ll take any sleep I can get.
^^ American second
^^^ His schedule is known only to himself, although I believe it has something to do with prophetic dreams, tea leaves and the curious incident of how many times the dog in the night-time barked.+
+ Maybe it had the streamings, and needed to go out. The original silent hound evidently had excellent digestion.
^^^^ Today’s vet was another recent vintage grad but . . . golly. Not only was she sweet to my hopelessly neurotic hellhound . . . well, if I were thirty years younger and single, I’d ask for her phone number. I think I could work out the gay thing as I went along.
** I think I could get into selling All Stars.
*** But not at Wal-Mart.
† I personally believe that the human critter is hard-wired to tell stories like we’re hard-wired to learn language. But story-telling may get squeezed or belittled or misunderstood out of the functional part of you, like other bits of our potentials got squeezed out of those of us who are convinced we cannot possibly do maths or hard science or whatever else.
†† And as jumping-off places other people’s work is the greatest. I’ve said many times that I learnt a lot writing appalling Tolkien pastiche.^ I am one of the humourless frumps who say no to ‘fan fiction’ but as a private learning experience that never sees the light of any computer screen but your own, trash my stories with my blessing, and may you go on to write your own books that will make me laugh and cry.^^
^ Infinitely direr than the bad Kipling pastiche for some reason. Probably because Kipling is not forsoothly. On the other hand, I learnt not to be forsoothly from Tolkien.
^^ Or distract me from coughing and no sleep. Any book that can do that is better than the Pulitzer Prize.
††† I also wander around the house humming.^ But it took formal voice lessons to get that started again. I used to hum random hums when I was a kid, but it was disruptive or impolite or whatever, and I was taught to stop. Of course kids have to learn to behave appropriately, but I wish we as a species or at least as a culture could learn better methods to teach kids, for example, that singing off-pitch is also the precursor to singing on-pitch,^^ or that if you want to tell a story about a flying dragon you don’t have to worry about the frelling physics of frelling flight right away, or even about how Marigold got back from Madagascar/the grocery store so quickly. It’ll come. Go with what you’ve got.
^ Or I did till about a fortnight ago SIIIIIIIIIGH.
^^ I know. We’ve had this conversation in the forum.
Oh go away with that Christmas
Today I was roused out at about 8:30 again* . . . this time by the postman.** Two postpersons. I heard the first one [gender therefore unknown] and put a pillow over my head but I wasn’t quite asleep by the time the second one showed up and started hammering in that brisk, you-love-me-really manner that delivery persons are unappealingly prone to. So I did my slither-into-dressing-gown-front-door-key-grab thing and stumbled downstairs. Unnnnnh. One of the parcels wasn’t even about Christmas—and the one that was about Christmas was boring back-up stuff to the main event, which has already arrived.*** Now that’s just unfair.
There were handbells today just like any Thursday instead of three days before Christmas.† Hellhounds and I hurtled back to the cottage because I was desperate for an excuse to get away from my computer earlier rather than later—usually I throw all of us into Wolfgang at the last minute and hope to arrive before my visitors do††—which meant we were outdoors in daylight twice today, even if this latter was a fainting, fading, twilight sort of daylight. Better than nothing. Including the seeing what I’m tripping over and/or what canine effluvia I’m picking up. The electric torch clenched between the teeth mainly casts shadows, all of which look alike.
Abigailmm
Rejoice, for the longest night is past, and the sun is returning!
Yes. Totally. I am more conscious of daylight every year—every winter, when I am a year older than the last time I had to do winter. I’ve been hanging on a bit better this year than some by making a deliberate effort to have the hellhounds’ longer hurtle as near to midday as possible—it’s way too easy (especially for someone who keeps unsocial hours anyway) to hurtle briefly in the morning so as to get back to my desk sooner, and then do the longer hurtle at night when I have no brain left and might as well be outdoors shambling around after hellhounds. But I begin to feel as if I live underground or at least in the Arctic Circle—I would so not be a happy bunny living above 66°33’ north—and I know vitamin D is a wonder drug, but handfuls of the stuff is not as effective for me††† as a regular hour of midday daylight. As midday as you can get, this time of year, when the sun gives the impression of slinking around the horizon and looking for hedgerows to hide behind.‡
AJLR
I think there must be a bit of herbaceous plant in my ancestry because this time of year I’m a sere and crumbled being, just waiting for the sun to come back. Why didn’t we evolve with a hibernation option?!
Hibernation, yes. And in return, during the long days of summer, we don’t need to sleep at all. Think of all the GARDENING we could get done.
I took a couple of the biggest [non-rose] thugs out of the cottage garden this autumn so now standing in the kitchen door waiting for hellhounds to pee and come indoors again without sampling any of the dangling indoor-jungle foliage I keep looking at all this freshly available space. If I didn’t have A NOVEL TO WRITE and 1,000,000,000 more doodles still to do . . .
PamAdams
|
I am still doodling, of course, but I admit the factory conveyor belt has slowed. Nothing else is going to get there before Christmas |
Ha! Mine just arrived yesterday. And when I opened Deerskin to read a random page, I found myself in the chapter where she saves the puppies. ‘All still alive?’ So naturally, I had to keep on reading…..
Oh good. One of my nightmares at the moment is worrying about things that don’t arrive. There are a number of wistful people inquiring if theirs have gone out yet and the answer, I’m afraid, is usually no. ‡‡ But I’m challenging over three decades of bad postal karma by having run this auction/sale at all and I’m hoping that the sheer chutzpah of the assault will amuse the evil gods of such matters, and let me and my envelopes pass. Not to mention the doodle shop Blogmom is constructing for the future. One thing at a time.
Which at the moment is going to bed. . . .
* * *
* jmeadows
. . . a couple weeks ago there was a strange barking that kept me up half the night, too. Maybe it’s the same dog! I haven’t heard him since, so I guess he could have made it to England. . .
I hope he is well on his way to Indonesia. I’m sure he and komodo dragons will get along really well.
** Isn’t it charming the way the advertising says, ONLY £17.52 FOR THIS FABULOUS ITEM THAT NO ONE SHOULD BE WITHOUT IN OUR MODERN HIGH TECH WORLD!, and you think, okay, I need a Christmas present and the price is right . . . and then it turns out that to make the dranglefabbing thing work you need a spinglefropper for £123.19 and a zadazdad for £94.82, and if you’re wise you’ll also get the extended warranty for £1,377.40. Feh.
And then before you regain your balance and sense of cynicism they start deluging you with emails for bargain accessories.
*** It SHOULD be written in LETTERS OF FIRE all over both the post office and all local delivery system head offices that IF THAT VICIOUS COW AT ROSE COTTAGE ON THE MOUTH OF HELL CUL DE SAC ISN’T IN, LEAVE THE THING. Or prepare to lose body parts when she comes after it. Gah.
† I do have to fetch the Christmas stuff down from the attic at Third House. . . . soon.
Exchange between husband and wife in response to last mention of Christmas stuff on the blog:
From: PeterDickinson@famousBritishauthor.com
To: RobinMcKinley@crankyAmericanauthor.com
Subject: Brilliant Idea!!!!!!
Why don’t you put all the Christmas decorations up at the cottage?
From: RobinMcKinley@verycrankywithnosenseofhumourAmericanauthor.com
To: PeterDickinson@funnyfunnyfamousBritishauthor.com
Subject: !!!!!!!!
Ha ha ha ha ha. Because then we’d have to have CHRISTMAS here and YOU WOULDN’T LIKE THAT. Also, your sitting room is probably more photogenic. It’s all about the blog, all the time.
. . . Scuppered by his own argument a few days previous. Mwa hahahahaha.
†† Colin^ was early. Will you STOP with the early already??
But look what Gemma brought me. Isn’t she LOVELY? Isn’t it BEAUTIFUL? Hells. Maybe we have to go ahead with the whole Christmas show after all.
Hellhound bowls and homeopathic remedy to the left, breakfast apples at the top and TEA to the right.
^ Colin wanted to know if Bronwen had had a good time. Yes, I said, she’s threatening to come back.
Niall wanted to know if she was ringing handbells. I said I thought she was ringing tunes because that was what was available where she is, and he looked distressed.+ Oh, and have I mentioned we’re ringing handbells next Thursday as well? Hey, why not? Everybody else is on holiday.
+ There may have been hand wringing. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
††† Your experience may vary
‡ Except of course for those memorable occasions when it’s shining directly in your eyes no matter which direction you’re going. I blogged about this once: entire hurtles, so heading away from the cottage, the mews, or Wolfgang, making a big circle or other lumpy non-geometric shape and ending up at the point of beginning, and having had the sun in my eyes the entire frelling way. All right, you physicists! Explain that one! This is totally a medium-sized star in a nothing-much solar system in an obscure arm of the Milky Way having a snit!^
^ Clearly the sun doesn’t like winter either, since this only happens in the winter. I’ll worry about the implications of the southern hemisphere some other blog. Presumably it’ll have something to do with the sun picking on whoever’s available when it’s in a bad mood.
‡‡ Victim of my own success. Grovelling apologies. It’s a couple of things: neither Blogmom, who ran the admin end, nor I, drawing pen poised, were anything like ready for the response we had—thank you again, everybody—but even another fangs with muffin—I mean another muffin with fangs—requires a little trickle of brain energy to accomplish. Even if I weren’t frantically trying to get a novel written there’d be an upper limit on how many doodles I can turn out in a day that would have to do with focus rather than hours I’m (more or less) awake.
Musings, including the semi-mathematical
Usual Thursday handbells today. I knew both Gemma and Colin were coming (and Niall of course—he’s not only our mad despot, he’s the one with the bells) so we’d be ringing bob major. I should be able to do bob major in my sleep* so I worked on SHADOWS right up to the last possible minute before tossing startled hellhounds into the back of Wolfgang and bolting back to the cottage to let people in before they got soaked through.**
And then I couldn’t ring at all. Bob what? What major? What? It was pretty embarrassing.*** I did settle down eventually and recall my down dodges from my making seconds, but it was bad while it lasted. By the end of the evening and after, I admit, several false starts, we even got through a plain course of Grandsire Triples with me on an inside pair, which Doesn’t Happen.
I could say that I’m old and crumbly and that I find it difficult to climb out of one obsessive activity and into another . . . and all of these things are true.† But it’s also true that I’ve always tended to get stuck on whatever I’m doing†† and have trouble shifting location, focus, and lobe of brain to something else. Stuff that you have to pull out of you, like writing stories from of the infuriating and contradictory mishmash that the Story Council has sent you, is a special and particular drain, but in my case all of the brain-energy sectors are like this. Which is yet another way that the standard educational paradigms let down both teachers and students: I was (and am) a student who needs to learn in or to a rhythm that doesn’t divide up into standard classroom slots very well—and not all subjects or teaching styles do either. †††
I can’t help going on thinking about this kind of thing because of the almighty shock to the system the last couple of months of cramming maths and physics has been and continues to be—continues to be chiefly, I think, because in fact I am getting something out of it, invisible to either the naked or the scientific eye as it probably is. Whoa. Wait a minute. Smell of burning circuits. Although the circuits are as much about self-imposed, or at any rate self-maintained, limitations as they are about over-stressing a system that was never meant to understand the origins of turbulence.‡ And I find it interesting where the worst mental scar tissue is. The physics stuff I’m trying to tease out into something I can (sort of) understand is all new—none of this was available to the hoi polloi forty-plus years ago when I was trying to find ways of not taking any hard science in school. And so while it (mostly) makes me feel dumb as a post, I don’t mind all that much. I don’t love being dumb as a post, but it’s not crucial to my life or my self-respect that I perfectly comprehend the origins of turbulence.‡‡
But maths . . . zowie. In spite of fabulous Penelope Windsor Curry and lovely Mr X, maths still pretty much scares me to death. And if I want to take one or two tentative steps farther into the intrigues of physics I need a few basic maths. But this means I have to stop throwing up any time anyone says ‘equations’ to me. Which may be the next challenge. Several of you have done a beautiful job on the forum illuminating Caitlin’s square rectangle from Tuesday night’s blog. ‡‡‡ And I didn’t throw up or anything.§ Perhaps progress is possible.
* * *
* And, arguably, have, since I often, and worse lately, am trying to squeeze One More Thing into yesterday while dawn is trying to come up on tomorrow.^ I have this theory that lying down comfortably^^ in bed counts. You don’t actually have to sleep. And in my case, frequently don’t, except when I’m trying to learn a handbell method or hack my way through another paragraph or two of the thickets of WHAT IS MATHEMATICS?^^^
^ Cheez crums but I hate this time of year in terms of daylight: dawn isn’t till after eight and sunset is before four o’clock.+
+ I may still be eating lunch at four o’clock. Okay, I’m a slow eater. Also I work through meals—waste that time? You want to CHAT? Are you KIDDING?—and during long pauses of frenzied thought I forget to chew.
^^ Six pillows. Although sometimes only five are necessary.
^^^ Which is too hard. Even if that nice Mr Stewart+ did the revising.
Although speaking of hard, my tiny stumbling forays into areas too arcane for me have resulted in an interesting new parabola++ of recommendations from the tireless amazon. Today they sent me a come-on for Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven H. Strogatz. What? So I went on line and checked it out. It gets five stars from all five of its reviewers, who say things like it is perfectly clear and understandable so long as you’re up on your calculus and your twelfth-dimensional Trigoflippingtropy.
Having established to my own complete satisfaction that I’d rather have my toenails pulled out by hot guppies, I went back to SHADOWS. But my apparent interest lashed amazon into new spasms of incitement. This evening they are suggesting Nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers (Oxford Texts in Applied and Engineering Mathematics) by Dominic Jordan and Peter Smith. I don’t even want to know.+++
+ of HOARD OF MATHEMATICAL TREASURES and CABINET OF MATHEMATICAL CURIOSITIES, mentioned previously in these virtual pages as excellent bathtub reading, fame.
++ I like parabolas. They’re a good example of how a nice simple pure clean graceful swooping line that would be right at home in some William Morris wallpaper and which never asked anything of anyone except perhaps a little aesthetic appreciation can be turned instantly into a ravening beast out of your worst nightmares by the addition of a few equations. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Parabola.html
+++ Down at the bottom of my recs page are the vampire, werewolf, mostly-unspecified demon and knitting books. It’s good to have eclectic tastes.
** I could do without the exciting weather. Yes, lying in bed listening to the wind trying to rip your roof off while the rain chisels away under the eaves is cozy^, but us hellhound owners are worrying about the next hurtle. We managed (mostly) to dodge among the raindrops this morning but tonight was another Tortured Hellhound occasion. Darkness, who can almost pass for a grown-up upon occasion, forged stoically on. Chaos kept trying to hide under my raincoat, the lees of walls, blades of grass, and when this did not work, reverted to standard Lump of Misery paralysis. You know Mongo doesn’t mind a little rain. Mongo is a normal dog.^^
^ Speaking of cozy under your eaves, I have to learn this, right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbB1zx0-we4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTRpvbFUwbE
^^ Well okay, maybe not normal.
*** This didn’t stop Niall from trying to talk me into ringing handbells with Titus on Sunday. Guilt. Guilt. I don’t have tiiiiiiiiiiime.
† Especially the ‘crumbly’.
†† Well, assuming interest and engagement with the subject.
††† Although it’s not like this is even a simple comprehensive theory let alone the impossibility of any practical implementation of something like it out there in the real world of schools and grades and university degrees and CVs. Because lots of people function on schedules and are happy that way. Yeep. My husband, for example. Peter is a time lord. Peter does things that begin and end at specific times. He’s spent twenty years asking me when I’m going to be finished doing x or ready to do y. He’s got used to the standard answer of I don’t knooooooooow but he’s never learnt to like it.
‡ Which is the bit of CHAOS I’m re-listening to right now.^
^ Hannah hasn’t started yet. I feel so superior.
‡‡ Or all the equations oppressing that poor parabola.
‡‡‡ And Aaron further explained why you can’t solve it by adding something and dividing it by something.
§ Yes, I asked. And I was going to talk more about it tonight only I seem to have written kind of a lot already. . . .
Maths, Chaos, Darkness and Handbells
Susan in Melbourne posted this a few days ago: http://www.theage.com.au/national/truth-finds-infinite-expression-in-words-and-numbers-20111209-1onmy.html
The novelist Geraldine Brooks* is attending a lecture on ‘Singularities in Algebraic Plane Curves’ and, perfectly reasonably I think, expecting the worst. ‘I slumped into the room, armed with a doodle pad. My plan was to sit politely and let the talk sail over my head . . . perhaps, if I positioned myself wisely, a discreet little nap might be possible.’ But she began listening: ‘This is like poetry, I thought, and I leaned forward to hear more. And when I set aside my firm belief that I could not comprehend her, something strange happened. It wasn’t that I understood her work, but I understood her vision.’ It is a different world, but: ‘I am sure though that our work, the mathematician’s and mine, is essentially the same. In her exploration of the singularity in every plane curve, she seeks a way to more perfectly describe that arcing branch, or a soaring bridge, the squiggle in the iron lace of a terrace house, the quivering S-bend of a squirrel’s upraised tail. She pushes her way deeper and deeper into the full truth of the world. This, also, is what I must do.’
As it happens I’ve only just read this, after coming home from spending two hours helping teach a mathematician to ring the 3-4 to bob minor. She’s an excellent tower ringer but she’s sweating handbells.** She can mostly ring the trebles and slightly less mostly ring the 5-6, but the 3-4 are a ratbag. Well, the 3-4 are a ratbag; there are bits of the pattern you meet for the first time ringing a plain course on the 3-4, bits that if you’re lucky you’ll never see again anywhere else. During the tea break the three of us were discussing ringing, learning***, and views of the one from the other. And since this is a sample of three, it’s obviously useless for statistical purposes, but Caitlin rings from an almost entirely different perspective, using different techniques and relying on different cues, than I do. She also loves maths and the hard sciences and hated English in school. Niall’s approach to ringing is somewhere between the two of us—and while he’s an engineer and thinks calculus is no big deal†, he liked writing English essays and I know he still reads novels because I see him doing it. And I thought this was kind of interesting. I would have expected two of Niall’s handbell protégés to be picking it up recognisably and similarly based on the way he teaches it.†† Caitlin and I speak different languages about the same world.†††
But we speak enough of some same language to talk about the weather and the excellence of the chocolate cake Penelope had left for us—and to find out that we ring bells differently, even if when we’re ringing we are perforce ‘speaking’ the same language. Meanwhile in another part of the forest, one of the things that yanks my chain about all this out-there physics and maths I’m (still) reading about is how similar the frelling creative process is, whatever name the drooling monster you’re trying to subjugate is refusing to answer to. These physics and maths bozos do things like go for long walks‡ and think and mutter to themselves . . . and are considered odd and anti-social by their friends and colleagues. Of course I know the stereotype of the mad scientist like I know the stereotype of the in-her-own-little-world storyteller . . . but I hadn’t realised we’re very nearly the same person.
* * *
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Brooks_(writer)
** Mwa ha ha ha ha ha. Okay, I’m a bad person, but I sweat handbells.
*** Ajlr wrote
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With this—and I think this is the barbed-wire enclosure that did me the most harm, and it doesn’t seem to me it’s changed that much in the last half century—goes the There Is One Way to Learn mandate, the one way being the way the Teacher teaches the Textbook, and if a student doesn’t pick it up that way, well, too bad for the student, that is The Way. |
I’m not saying it’s perfect these days, there’s still a way to go, but there is a lot (and I mean A Lot) of attention paid these days to what is called Differentiation. There’re resources (this is just one site, there are an enormous number out there), it’s part of Initial Teacher Training, and an ongoing focus of Continuing Professional Development schemes. Schools, colleges, adult ed, work-based learning providers, they all pay attention to it and it’s checked by Ofsted. OK, maybe some teachers still don’t ‘get it’ but they are appreciably fewer in number than they used to be.
Well . . . unfortunately I think you’re suffering from Making a Difference Syndrome. The problem with being on the cutting edge of Making a Difference is that you can see the difference being made . . . in your vicinity. It is human nature to see what’s up close more clearly and in more detail than what’s at a distance. I can give you a really embarrassing example from my own life. The obesity epidemic that so much journalistic ink and pixels have been spilt on includes not only humans but increasingly [. . . sic] our domestic fauna.^ Overweight pets happened to be topic of the week a few months ago and I read a whole raft of articles about it and I thought (my brow suitably furrowed), it can’t be that bad, I rarely see a fat dog when we’re out hurtling. It took me several days for the penny to drop—DUUUUUUH, that’s because the dogs I mostly see are the ones that are getting regular walks.^^ And, I guess, people clued in enough about their critters to give them proper exercise are probably also more likely not to overfeed (or overtreat) them.^^^
The teachers I know bear with Ofsted first because they have to and second because it’s better than nothing. CPD, eh, it’s only as good as the individual modules.# A friend who is an excellent and inspirational teacher took early retirement a few months ago because she couldn’t bear the paperwork caused by well-meaning but crippling initiatives to regulate teachers for their students’ benefit. She is not alone—as I’m sure you know. But I’m questioning where the points on this continuum cluster.
I’m willing to believe that what’s wrong is different than it used to be—and I’ve no doubt there are resources out there that weren’t available when you and I were still on the wrong side of the desk##, due to the efforts of people like you and your team. That the teachers who still don’t get it ‘are appreciably fewer in number than they used to be’. . . unh. I wonder. I still know bright—or off the wall, or both—kids who dislike school and are failing to learn what they are absolutely capable of learning, because of bad or blinkered teaching.###
^ And if your plant life is producing a jungle of foliage and no flowers, you may be overfeeding it.
^^ And I think the reason the penny eventually did drop is because I’m aware of dogs that I’ll see regularly for a while . . . and then never again. Some of them no doubt moved away or their humans’ schedules changed and they’re taken out at different times or different places. But some of them, I’m grimly sure, are sitting at home, because their owners forgot that a Dog Is for Life, and Not Just for Christmas.
^^^ Supposing of course they have dogs that eat.
# I think of all the homeopathy seminars I’ve taken that gave me CPD credits, if I’d been trying to stay registered. The credits received have no relation to the quality or usefulness of the teaching or the information.
## I mean aside from the fact that you and I grew up in the typewriter age.
### There’s also the Elizabeth Blackwell Syndrome, or, If She Can Do It, Why Can’t You? If Elizabeth Blackwell could get through medical school, then why can’t you? If Marie Curie could win a Nobel Prize (twice), then why can’t you? When I was a young oppressed science-illiterate struggling-feminist girl, these questions bothered me a lot.
† Gleeeeeep
†† Another thing I’m conveniently leaving out so I can make my point is that Caitlin is not merely an excellent tower ringer but another of these super-advanced models. She can ring anything. So she already has very well established ways she’s used to ringing and learning ringing—which are not always as useful as you’d expect learning handbells for the first time. But . . . Colin is another tediously excellent tower ringer, and did heavy computer things before he retired. Another maths person. And he rings a lot more like Caitlin than either Niall or me.
††† And her eight-year-old, advanced-maths-placement son was sent home with some maths problems this week, one of which she couldn’t do. You have a series of squares, one each of which has sides [insert measurement system of choice, I think it was centimetres] of the following lengths: 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 18. You want to make a rectangle of these squares—and it has to be a proper rectangle, no leftover bits and no overlaps. What size is it? What is/are the equation or equations for this?
She and her son ended up cutting little bits of paper into squares and shoving them around till they made a rectangle. And they did make a rectangle, but even working backwards she wasn’t seeing how to solve it as a problem.
As a mathsless English major and writer of fantasy novels where lately she seems to be finding herself anthropomorphising chaos^ I still don’t see why you don’t add something up and then divide it by something else—I know areas are different from straight lines, but even so. Anyone out there feel like explaining it to a level I might attain?
^ I wonder where that idea is coming from.+
+ ::Gentle snoring from hellhound bed::
‡ I have yet to see any mention of hellhounds however. This must be an error.