No regrets

...as my musical namesake once sang, but i think it was a cover.

Anyway, here's the latest vid:

A couple of things about this.  The children are currently taking a rather dim view of home education.  Since we sort of "did it for them", this might be thought to lead to some degree of distress on the part of Liz and myself, but no.  Not for me at least.  This may be because my rationalisation circuits are very advanced, or it may be because i have good reason for being fine about it.

The reason i think i'm fine about it is that there are several prominent examples of adults whose parents focussed on raising them full-time who later went on to say they wished they'd gone to school, but who are successful because they didn't.  One of them had a weekly column in a national newspaper at the age of sixteen and the other wrote a play which was put on in the West End, also while she was in her teens.  The second person is particularly remarkable because when she chose to go to school, quite late on in her adolescence, she was rather disappointed that the teachers weren't interested in what they talked and that the lessons came to an end abruptly with no opportunities to explore further.  My take on this is, well, what did she expect?  She chose to go to an institution where education is structured in that way.

So there's cognitive dissonance there as well.  In spite of the facts that school was not up to scratch in her own judgement, and that she was successful in an artistic and creative sense as well as in a worldly sense, that is, by a wide range of standards, as a result of being home educated, she still wished she'd been to school.   This strikes me as odd.  However, i think there's a healthy and honest explanation for this, which also applies to the children.  They are trying to feel good about their life choices and breaking away from their parents' lifestyle, and as such it's to be expected that they are positive about being at college.  They are also academically successful, engaged in college life and motivated to learn the explicit curriculum.  They were also given the choice at every point to go to school if they chose, and they never did so, unless you count the decision to go to college early.  As such, it makes perfect sense and I have no problem with it.

Here's the other video:

This is about comfrey, a herb banned for internal use in the UK.  I've basically said all i want to in the video, so i'll talk about making it.  This is in my father's front yard.  I felt somewhat self-conscious doing it due to people walking past, and i'd rather there'd been more comfrey cream in the tub when i filmed it.  You might also notice that the first video is slanted.

Just on the subject of YouTube videos, two things have just happened.  One is that i have a new camera, so if i can get the computer to work with it, the quality of the videos should improve from now on - Daniel's advice is that only HD videos get watched much, and since he's an avid YouTube viewer and a digital native, i trust him on that.  The other is that yesterday, someone only one degree of separation from a subscriber to the Other Channel commented on one of my videos.  This is slightly disconcerting, but might resolve the weird audience asymmetry problem between the two, where one is just slapdash and unpublicised but gets hundreds of thousands of views, and the other is meticulously planned and promoted and gets hardly any.

The Village That Raised Our Children

More splurging today i'm afraid, due to starting this post on the mini-tablet, which rather unhelpfully just saved this locally and i'm now copying.  At least that means this had a first draft for once.

Yesterday i briefly mentioned my slight unease at continuing to see myself as part of the home ed community now that the children are both at college, because now i no longer home educate in the commonly understood sense, although of course i still home educate because everyone does and it isn't even home education and so on, blah blah, you know the spiel.  One possible danger of course is that i could lose touch, to the extent that i was ever in touch in the first place, with approaches apt to appeal to children.  There are, however, a couple of reasons why that might not be so.

One of these is that i may only ever have been in limited touch with the needs of children anyway, and in fact due to my moderate but not total commitment to autonomous education, this could be said to be unnecessary in any case, though a varied life wherein one is able and willing to include children is probably important.  Against this might be set the fact that many children with this way of life spend so little time actually at home as opposed to hanging out or sleeping over at other children's homes or doing other stuff with them that their inclusion in the lives of other children and adults might make this less important.  We have a village which raises children in this community, both physically and virtually present, and we are not just families doing things in isolation unless it either suits us to do so, we are unlucky or we have been artificially isolated by a hostile social climate as engendered by, for example, local authorities scaring people into hiding or insufficient publicity regarding the reality of this approach to parenting.

One of the failures of school is that it severs the connection between adults and children and segregates them.  Part of that severance involves teachers being in loco parentis while being relatively unable to establish a natural rapport with the children, often through no fault of their own.  Now, i of course do offer science, maths and other workshops for children who are not mine, and this is potentially questionable.  It can lead to problems and is in danger of drifting towards schooling, something against which i strive.  However, it differs in various ways from teaching.  I am not waylaid by red tape and bureaucracy, by syllabi or curricula or by fear of bullying from the children.  However, i see this as being part of the village.  I must remain vigilant not to become "teachery", which is a risk in this situation.

One way in which i'm now trying to sidestep this issue is by attempting to participate in education in other ways.  To this end, i am embarking on a concerted effort to make a series of educational YouTube videos.  This project is still in its early stages and i am still learning how to put good videos together, and it is of course "no substitute for hands on" but they will improve and i also plan to link them, for people who are interested, to topic areas in the National Curriculum - it is a fact that some people do pay attention to that and i don't judge them for that although i had little interest in it myself.  For those who are interested, here are the links to the two i've made so far which have not been deleted, both about soap making:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEUmX7UpZ9w&list=UUa-j3lgC_ThPt9Ggov0yIyA&index=2&feature=plcp

and the second, which is more about the science (and how cheaply soap can be made!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1QAgdZ01lo&feature=BFa&list=UUa-j3lgC_ThPt9Ggov0yIyA

The other way in which i'm pursuing education, of course, is through writing books.  I have plans for a number of these.  So far, i've published one:  'You Could've Thought Of That', whose children's edition will soon be available from lulu.com (where the adult edition is already available here:  http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-a-ure/you-couldve-thought-of-that-a-compendium-of-ideas-which-havent-been-thought-of-yet/paperback/product-20266026.html).  The second one is of course 'Here Be Dragons', a bestiary and atlas which aims both to entertain and inform.  Also, of course i plan to continue the science and maths sessions, and if possible start new ones on other subjects such as classical languages and philosophy if the interest is there, for as long as at least one child wants me to do so.

So what am i saying?  I suppose that you can all rest assured that i will try to make sure i stay in touch with the needs of children, and that i hope you still see me as part of your village

Empty nest 1.0

Right, so he's gone.  Liz and Holly are also out.  Liz and i have both felt rather aimless today because it's bloody weird not having either of them around or needing to think of anything to do with them, although to be honest that happened quite a while ago - self-sufficient and overcome by ennui for quite some time have our children been.  So it's empty nest time, almost.  Presumably there will be a proper empty nest moment when they both really and truly do leave home, although people say that never quite happens.  Holly announced a couple of years ago that she had in fact "left home", but since she did it while loading the washing machine it wasn't entirely convincing unless we lived in a laundrette.

The thing now is to "start" as i mean to go on.  Unfortunately the whole weirdness of the situation is making it difficult to start anything.  My progress on the ebook has ground to a halt right now - i did displacement, fake work activities like making sure the text was all loaded into Evernote so i could edit it on the tablet if i needed to, but since as i said i am alone in the house, that was all a bit immaculate (=pointless).  So maybe Tuesday is the real day when i "start as I mean to go on" rather than today, but once you've had several days where you haven't started, it gets hard to convince yourself that that's what you're honestly doing.  For that reason in itself, it'd clearly be a good idea.

I have had one thought about all this which might be fruitful, and it's based on the idea of what some childless gays and lesbians seem to do.  There is more than one nurturing role available to us and as a result, such a person might choose to nurture the whole world, the youth of today or what have you.  Hence they might become a probation officer or teacher as a way of satisfying that role.  Now that is software in a sense.  Fertilisation provides the hardware - human bodies capable of learning.  Culture and nurture provide the software.  Liz and i are now in a sense a gay couple, apart from the minor detail that we're heterosexual.  Our role towards the children continues in a subdued way, but our role towards the world now comes to the fore.  Now we are supposed to provide the software more than the hardware.  There are a couple of organisms out there which are now considerably independent - the living bodies of Holly and Daniel.  However, they both existed as a piece of software from way before that in our minds because we were aware of various aspects of possible future children of ours before we even met.  For instance, some time in about 1977, i decided i liked the name Daniel and hence there was a possible future child of mine called Daniel Ure, date of birth unknown, possibly even non-existent.  That child would probably speak English as a first language, be male and so forth.  As time went by, that software was edited together with Liz's prototypes for children and eventually got compiled into the object codes we call Holly and Daniel.  The software is their souls, the hardware their bodies.  I hope that makes sense.

There is of course one other child in this family who has only ever existed as software:  Sophie Gray, date of birth 13th November 1999.  She has a soul but no body and she is still with us.  Here are some pictures of her:

This is a ghostly image of our phantom daughter on holiday in Sussex i think.  Her age here is something like nine.  Here's another one of her at home:

Unfortunately, due to the annoying fact that it's difficult to point a camera into a parallel universe, the shape of her face is a bit distorted, but she's there.  Incidentally, her eyes are the wrong colour in both of these.  Thus we still have a child at home, but she's disabled in an interesting way:  she is less existent than the other two children.

On a sort of combined software and hardware note, there are another set of phantom alter egos too:  the counterpart children who were never born but are everything, genetically, which one is not.  Everyone has one of these.  When the cells which eventually become the eggs and sperm which unite to create the hardware on which our souls run as programmes (or maybe operating systems if we are particularly dissociated or have lots of roles), each of them divides to produce two cells.  The other pair of cells, one an ovum, the other a sperm, has the other alleles, so for example any female will have a phantom male counterpart and vice versa, any homozygously blue-eyed child of heterozygous brown-eyed parents will have a brown-eyed phantom counterpart and so forth.  Hence, somewhere out there in the phase space of your genome, there is another person who is anyone but you:  Ivan and Daria, our non-children, our doubly non-existent phantom non-son Brutus, and the husband of the non-existent Ruth (who is anyone but me) who seems to be called George or Albert.  We all have these phantom counterparts who never existed, and of course many billions of other counterparts who never existed either, but in other ways.  Also, those counterparts Ruth and George have other children which we couldn't have because their very genomes are dormant or have been destroyed, depending on the sex.  These ghostly children can't even manage not to exist as well as the ones which don't.

However, we are not these bodies, whether or not they exist.  We are the software running on those bodies, perhaps with some differences.  We will never know what most of those differences were, and there would even be similarities where a homozygous recessive trait is inherited from both parents. Perhaps all of a nervous couple's phantom children are also nervous, for example.  Think of it this way.  You have a child.  They turn out to have an inherited genetic trait, such as, allegedly, being able to roll their tongue, but you don't find out until they're thirteen.  Now, suppose you had had the other, phantom child instead.  That child would not have been able to roll their tongue.  Similarly, you might find out your son is red-green colourblind.  Their alter ego would have been a daughter who was not colourblind, almost certainly (99.9% in fact).  However, simply because you discover your child can or cannot roll their tongue or is or is not colourblind does not alter the fact that they are the same person.  It means something to say they might not have been able to roll their tongue, or that they might not have been colourblind. It might even mean something to say they might have been of a different gender.  The point is that all that depends on the child's social identity.  They exist as a person in the world almost regardless of minor details in their genomes, although some differences have big consequences.  Therefore, I would say that our children are, metaphorically speaking, software, and that is the sense in which they have souls.  As such, they are also eternal because at the latest, taking my son as an example, he had a name by 1977 and he will exist in people's memories for as long as there are people to remember him after he has died.

To end frivolously, this makes Sophie as real as the other children in the sense that she exists as an imaginary character, but she is still our daughter.

Does that make sense?