When you teach at home there is also the influence of other members of the household. Today, the Long Suffering Husband popped his head round the door.
"I thought you weren't coming home?" I said
"I'm going now but your Dad has fallen over and your Mum has tied him to a chair, Leaving now,"
he answered.
I noticed that my pupils eyes seemed a little larger than usual but we just got on with playing music. After a little while, a little voice piped up, "I love listening to conversations," and I noticed that she'd gone a little pale. I had to point out that my Dad had decided not to play golf because he's a bit tired and my Mum had suggested he didn't go out. I'm not sure she believed me. Later on she gave me an origami crane that she said was meant to bring her luck but as it hadn't she thought I should have it. I didn't ask. It's probably wise not to ask if you are being cursed.
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| Gift or curse? |
Another pupil, who is friendly with my daughter told me about a snapchat she had received. It was my daughter's second day (but first official day) in her new job and she has been covering the events around the 800 years of the Magna Carta celebrations. I'm a bit surprised by this, as on my first day at work I made tea. We discussed the Magna Carta for a little while, both agreeing that we didn't know very much about it that wasn't from Robin Hood. I told her that I'd looked it up and seen that it had a clause in it that gave a widow the right to refuse to marry and the right to stay in her home for 40 days after her husband died. We agreed that although women still didn't have true equality we were both grateful for the Magna Carta because the idea that you could be given to another husband as part of a house deal was, quite frankly, disgusting. Then we started talking about how the Magna Carta probably wouldn't have affected our ancestors, anyway, as they were unlikely to have been Barons or free men. My pupil said that it was funny to think that we had family around at that time. I suggested that they might not have been in England,
"Who knows? Eight hundred years is a very long time ago. Even you probably weren't around then," she said sticking her tongue into the side of her mouth and ducking. I laughed and we played some Mozart duets.
In school the other day a child had asked me if I knew Mozart. One of the new elements of the music curriculum is that children should develop a sense of the history of music and so I introduced a timeline to the classroom where we put the pieces of music we listen to. This particular class are very keen on it and after we'd had the usual Mozart discussion (Does listening to Mozart really make you smarter? and How could any 4 year old write music?) they placed Sonata in C Major in the Classical Period at 1788.
"1788! That was 227 years ago. Do you really think I could have known Mozart? Do I look like I'm 250 years old?"
"Well, I don't know," said a small boy, "Me and my mum saw you this morning and she said you looked very old and tired."
It's true. I look old and tired. I know that because when I was in Tesco last week a man came up behind me.
"Excuse me, could you help me?" he asked.
I checked that I wasn't wearing blue and had been mistaken for a member of staff but I was wearing a pink dress.
"Can you help me choose which flowers are the nicest?" he persisted.
"Why, what have you done?" I asked
He insisted that he was entirely blameless but his wife needed some flowers.
"Oh, well, I, err, don't really know. I don't know your wife,"
"I thought you'd be able to help because you look tired like she does and she would go out with pencils in her hair too."
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| The best place to keep pencils |
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