Beyond

I hope I never lose my sense of wonder. If that makes me naive, then so be it.

Wednesday 24 October 2007

and on it goes

After a fun weekend with visitors (goaliemom and hubby) including several evenings of movies (The Holiday; Music & Lyrics; Tea with Mussolini), much general enjoyment and a morning's hunting trip for GM's hubby, D, and my not-a-girly-girl R, it's back to a so-called regular week. The weekend was stupidly warm, and I was torn between being annoyed (weather all wrong) and guilty (but enjoy it while it's here!). But today is more respectable late October weather.

School continues well as we move on to angiosperms (flowering plants), fly through the ancient Greeks (Minoans, Myceneans, and today Sparta and Athens), and continue in grammar, math & spelling. R & A are adjusting to the extra work from JPP, though R's project choice of solar panels does have her trying to get her head around the photovoltaic reactions. Learning to simplify to allow understanding is something I have had to do in teaching curious kids. It's funny, I remember a prof in my first-year zoology class saying that such an ability was needed to make science accessible to most people. Interesting how it proves true years later.

Introduced a song written for an upcoming conference on Sunday. People seemed to 'get it' quickly - that is, they weren't standing there trying to catch a melody too tricky to pick up. No deer-in-the-headlights look. That's a good thing when one has written a song for people to sing along with. I'm pleased with the outcome. The second verse was French, thanks to N's translation of my idea. I figured a song for a national-level conference should reflect both national languages.

It's odd singing in a language you don't speak. I've done it before, in both Latin (for a wedding) and Elvish (yes, really - an Enya song from Lord of the Rings for the same wedding. It was quite a wedding, I must say). The beauty of both of those is that they're not languages spoken in general. So, nobody was going to listen and think, 'wow, she really messed up that Elvish, Galadriel's gonna be ticked'. But singing in French to a group that I know includes several people for whom that is their first language, I wanted to be sure to pronounce it right. Coaching from N was a huge help there.

That's all for today, I think.


Yup.

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