During a quick session on adjectives and nouns, we used the word “thing” when referring to a noun. MasterKAF then interjected with a fact that was news to me. A Thing was also an early form of government dating back to Viking times. MrsDTB was not so sure and now finds herself eating humble pie as MasterKAF found the following article to prove his point. https://www.historyonthenet.com/viking-law-and-government-the-thing
Summary of Back In Time For School – Episode One
We watched Episode One which is summarised by the BBC as follows:
“Starting at the very close of Victoria’s reign they discover how national attitudes to class, race and gender filtered into the classroom, before entering the turbulent years between the World Wars. They experience lessons that seem bizarre by modern standards – from musket practise and mother-craft to deportment and duck herding – and take part in activities that we all remember from our own school days – the classic 80s cross-country run, the day Encarta enters British classrooms, and perhaps even master the puzzling gadget that was the 1960s slide rule.
Their experience begins in 1895. The smell of coal burners wafts down the corridor, and a portrait of Queen Victoria hangs proudly in the school hall. Our class discover what it was like for the lucky four per cent of children able to attend school in this period, when education was still seen as a preserve for the rich, but a handful of schools offered affordable places to ordinary families for the first time. In this age of Empire, the class comes to understand just how much attitudes have changed, and are shocked to discover that Victorian notions of Empire and citizenship are very different to modern ideas. School dinner is a silver-service affair, presided over by the teachers, whose authority is absolute. Alien to our 21st-century pupils’ eyes and palates, the menu offers them fish pie with a tapioca pudding, a meal the Victorian schoolchild would have been grateful for, at a time when many pupils worked part-time to support their family’s income and food supply – as some of our boys find out. With the advent of flash-photography powder, their chemistry teacher introduces them to a new scientific formula with an explosive bang, and one of the pupils is disciplined in an era-appropriate fashion by having his left hand tied to the desk.
With the death of Queen Victoria in 1902, the pupils and teachers enter into the Edwardian era. Segregation is common place in schools at this time, so our pupils are separated for gender-specific learning. While the boys enter into the possibility of the professions by learning Latin, the girls are tasked with more ladylike lessons – making beds, cleaning and putting up wallpaper, as they are taught the art of the housewifery. In 1904, the class and teachers gather with friends and family to celebrate Empire Day, a pageant common in schools throughout the Edwardian era. With students playing the roles of Peace and Britannia, their classmates flank them with banners proclaiming the reach of the British Empire, before singing the national anthem.
Towards the end of the era, the threat of war means the boys are trained in musket practise and learning to fight. The building desire for democracy has begun, and the girls come to understand how important the vote was to British women, as they learn the art of self-defence Suffragette style. As their time-travels draw to a close in 1914, and the pupils reflect on their Victorian experience, the school holds a prize-giving ceremony. A mark of academic achievement, which seeks to imbue the children with a sense of pride and responsibility, in order for them to fulfil their roles in society, in the testing and troubling years that will follow.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bx7lxt
Here are our thoughts following the programme:
- Only four per cent of children able to attend school in this period. Feels disgusted mainly, but a small part relieved as school didn’t sound so nice.
- Most children left school at 11 to go to work.
- One of the pupils is disciplined in an era-appropriate fashion by having his left hand tied to the desk. Literally something he was born with. We feel this was inhumane and insane.
- Girls were taught the same as boys up until 1902 when there was a change in the school system. Science and maths were very important subjects but replaced by Latin for boys and Needlework for girls. Children were now taught separately according to gender.
- Empire was a key topic in Geography. Empire Day was celebrated by 55,000 schools and 7 million children across the globe. We remarked on how racist attitude was taught as fact and how shocking that was.
- We had a change of monarch in 1901. Edward VI, the son of Queen Victoria became King. We think the children would have been upset by her death. We read more about mourning in the Victorian period here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/understanding-grief/201812/death-and-mourning-practices-in-the-victorian-age
How to combine Greek Mythology, modern technology and English writing skills in one blog post!
MasterKAF has been working on a great article as part of his Classics studies on Ancient Greece. We spent time researching the myth of the Trojan horse and being as he loves all things tech, it was not long before we were making comparisons with the
The meaning of the Trojan Horse, then and now. Discuss.
The legend of the Trojan Horse, told in the Iliad, by the Greek poet Homer gives an account of the war between the Mycenaeans and Troy (in modern Turkey). Iliad technically means “Troy Story” in modern English, no need to thank us for that pun, thank this particular video from Overly Sarcastic Productions instead! After 10 years of fighting, Agamemnon’s army finally defeated Troy by trickery. Greek soldiers hid inside a wooden horse, which was given as a gift by the “defeated Greeks” and towed into the city by the triumphant Trojans. At nightfall, the Greeks emerged to capture the city. Today a Trojan Horse is usually a digital construct designed to look normal and harmless, it’s often disguised as legitimate software so it can easily infiltrate computers, often private computers. Here are some further contrasts and comparisons between the ancient and the modern.
The horse was made of wood and contained soldiers. The horse would have been very large and everyone could see it plainly. Modern Trojan horses whereas, are not on a physical plain and are often designed to not be large and obvious and do not contain soldiers obviously!
There are at least nineteen different general types of modern Trojan malware, while there was only one Trojan horse in history.
Users are typically tricked by some form of social engineering into loading and executing modern Trojans on to their computer systems. Similarly, the residents of Troy were tricked to letting the Trojan horse in but not directly interacting with it. If they had the plan would have failed.
Trojan-Spy is another type of Trojan which can spy on your computer. Yet, in the myth of the Trojan horse, the Greeks did not spy in any way, but it did let an army sneak passed the defences of Troy.
There was a Trojan-like programme called Zeus first identified in 2007, often used to steal banking information. By 2009 it had been used to compromise 74000 FTP accounts on websites like The Bank of America, NASA, Play.com, Oracle and Amazon. Whereas, in actual Greek mythology Zeus (called Jupiter by the Romans) was the king of the gods.
A type of Trojan called “Backdoor” gives malicious users total remote control over the computer allowing them to do anything they want. It can unite a group of computers into a botnet or zombie network. This compares quite well with the original Trojan horse since it has a similar purpose. Although it would not literally result in the opening of a gate it would periodically disable the firewall to allow other malicious software in.
More often than not, in modern times when referring to the term “Trojan Horse” (especially
Yet again, gaming and learning are one and the same!
Honestly, it never gets old! Every time I think that MasterKAF and I have explored all the possible ways that gaming and learning can be combined, we trip across some more examples.
MasterKAF was telling me all about a game that helped explore the evolution of a species from cellular level right through to sophisticated civilisation. “Spore” is according to Wikipedia, “a 2008 life simulation real-time strategy single-player sandbox God game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright, released for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Covering many genres including action, real-time strategy, and role-playing games, Spore allows a player to control the development of a species from its beginnings as a microscopic organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation. Throughout each stage, players are able to use various creators to produce content for their games. These are then automatically uploaded to the online Sporepedia and are accessible by other players for download.”
It got us to talking about the evolution of all sorts of things and how the science fiction of the game compared to the science accepted understanding here on earth; it turns out there was quite a lot to think about. I did not believe that my son who often finds biology a dry-ish subject, could talk with such animation about single-celled organisms and how they could develop differently into bipedal or quadrupedal animals. Honestly, they were his words and not mine. So I enquired as to what had led on to this topic and he reminded me about the YouTube channel we found a while back called Kurzgesagt and that he often listened to their shows whilst working on his computer. If you have visited their channel before then a thoroughly recommend it.
It has meant that the prospect of purchasing a microscope and actually getting down to some actual biology just became a fun prospect, rather than the chore he thought it was going to be. I am so blessed that we can educate in the way that we need to so that MasterKAF gets the grounding he needs in a way that will leave a lasting impression. Every child should have this chance!
Top facts about Polination.
MrsDTB here! The following is a short journal entry from MasterKAF. Over to you sir…
I read a thing on Q-files, so here are my top 3 facts I learned.
The smallest flower in the world is called Wolffia, but you might know it as duckweed, yes, that annoying stuff that covers your pond is a flower.
Dandelions can self reproduce, but insects may carry the pollen from one flower to another. However, dandelions have both male and female organs on the same flower. The flowers can pollinate themselves. Thus it only takes one dandelion to reproduce itself and spread quickly over a lawn on a windy day.
Some flowers are male and female and some are just one gender. This from Q-files: “The male reproductive part of a flower, consisting of an anther and filament, is called a stamen. Pollen is produced in the bag-like anthers on stalks, called filaments. Each pollen grain contains a male cell.”
“The female reproductive organ of a flower, consisting of an ovary, style and stigma, is called a carpel. The female cells or ovules (eggs) are in the ovary, a fleshy part at the flower’s base. A taller part, called the style, sticks up from this, with the stigma at its top. Some flowers have one carpel, while others have a cluster of carpels, called a
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All About Bees
This blog is all about bees. How on earth did we decide to write about bees? We watched a documentary called Cities: Natures New Wild. There was a bit about bees and how they had to commute a long way from their nest to get to the flowers. At the end of the programme, there was a message about how we need to make our cities greener to encourage wildlife. A campaign called 10 times greener was mentioned and we decided to look it up online. It turned out that the campaign was run by Friends of the Earth, so we went to visit their website. That’s where we found out much more about bees and how we can help to save them.
We ordered a Bee Saver Kit from the website and it arrived on Friday. The kit contained seeds for the garden, a pamphlet, a bee identification poster and a garden planner. We used the planner to choose some plants for the garden. These were Hellebore, Rosemary, Chives, Raspberry, Runner Beans and Hebe. This will give us some flowers for the next few months to attract more bees into the garden.
You can find out more about the campaign here: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/bees
Another journal direct from MasterKAF
Today, I threw myself out of our home and into town, while my mother walked there like a sane person. Then we got a bus to Prospect Park; while on the bus nothing of interest happened, but I think I saw a cute dog at some point.
When the bus finally stopped, I became a human catapult and shot myself into the park, after that I found a platform with a holding bar on it and stupidly got on it and nearly threw up due to the fact that it spun around faster than a… really fast car I guess. When other humans showed up I found another kid (his name was Harry, I think) insert slide shenanigans here after that, we went back into town.
When the second bus threw me across town at high speed I got to a place near home, since we needed to do shopping there we decided to stop and get doughnuts at Greggs, which where the best doughnuts I have ever eaten in my entire life and I need to go back there to consume more of those doughnuts! Anyway, after that we walked into Wilko to buy something (I don’t know what at the time of writing, so don’t sue me please). After we bought the “thing” we went to Smaczek and got some food.
When our trip was finally over we went home and I wrote this thing.
How Ragnarok is similar to the Christian Creation Story – discuss.
On our walk to the park on Tuesday, MasterKAF and MrsDTB got chatting about Norse Mythology.
For:
2 surviving humans after the events of Ragnarok although they don’t have the same names as in the Bible
There is a serpent in both stories, the Norse snake is called Jormungand. thankfully he gets slain dramatically by Thor. Sadly, Thor is killed by the exhaustion of the whole fight with a snake who is large enough to wrap around the whole world so MasterK says “you’d be tired too!”
Odin’s immortal warriors are known as the Einherjar. Those who survive Ragnarok may be the first group of angels along with any Valkyrie. There might also be some warriors who fought for Freya in Midgard included in the choir.
Against:
The 7 days part from the Bible does not appear in the Ragnorok tale.
Who knew that there is a ship made from toenails and finger nails in Norse Mythology?
MrsDTB didn’t for one and thus got the shock of her life when MasterKAF announced this over breakfast this morning!
This made MrsDTB feel a little queasy but also inquisitive to find out more as we had watched Thor: Ragnarok the day before. It got us to thinking how accurate both the Marvel films and the Rick Riordan books are, when compared with other records of Norse Mythology.
The Magnus Chase book is called The Ship of the Dead. Here is a quick synopsis from the Penguin Randomhouse website:
” Magnus Chase, a once-homeless teen, is a resident of the Hotel Valhalla and one of Odin’s chosen warriors. As the son of Frey, the god of summer, fertility, and health, Magnus isn’t naturally inclined to
Loki is free from his chains. He’s readying Naglfar, the Ship of the Dead, complete with a host of giants and zombies, to sail against the Asgardian gods and begin the final battle of Ragnarok. It’s up to Magnus and his friends to stop him, but to do so they will have to sail across the oceans of Midgard, Jotunheim, and Niflheim in a desperate race to reach Naglfar before it’s ready to sail. Along the way, they will face angry sea gods, hostile giants, and an evil fire-breathing dragon. But Magnus’s biggest challenge will be facing his own inner demons. Does he have what it takes to outwit the wily trickster god?”
Its fair to say that this is not our last post on the topic as we have barely scratched the surface, so keep checking back for more updates.
Gun Powder Plot Project
Master KAF and Mrs DTB have spent the last few days focusing on all things November 5th.
It started by us watching a series on the Beeb called Elizabeth I’s Secret Agents. Master KAF was very interested to learn about how the idea of Secret Agents was not a new thing and in fact, how the Cecil family, in particular, served both Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI/I. This led right into the topic of the Gun Powder Plot – very apt for this time of year, as we had also been watching many different displays of fireworks from our vantage point over the city of Hereford.
We found some great resources from the TeachItHistory website and worked through some tasks over a couple of days, looking at the evidence of what happened and to determine if the plotters were framed or truly guilty.
One thing surprised Master KAF; that differing information on the topic can come from the same source such as:
- Different opinions on how many barrels of gunpowder were used. The Parliament video said 30, then 34, but the work we did on yesterday said that there were 36. So at least we can agree that over 30 and less than 37 barrels were used!
- The Parliament video said that all those captured and tried were hanged drawn and quartered, but other accounts state that Fawkes jumped from the scaffold to ensure a quick death.
So we learned that is always important to keep asking questions and keep an open mind!