One Room School House

I never went to a One-Room-School-House but I taught in one. Before I got there, it seemed impossible to teach nine grades at a time but it wasn’t. We did nature study together, and along the brook and down at the shore, the big ones looked after the little ones. Most of the time, everyone worked on his own and they went to each other for help as much as they came to me. When stories were read to the little ones, the big ones listened. By the time anyone got to higher grades, they’d heard the work before more than once, and the next arithmetic or grammar wasn’t a surprise. Friendships were across the grades and any would-be bully wouldn’t have gotten far.

Now, I wish I’d stayed longer and kept track of them better because they were my friends and I suspect they turned out alright. They didn’t have the advantage of school buses, sound systems, audiovisuals, specialist teachers for each subject, cafeterias, career files. In fact, they didn’t have any advantages at all. The heating system was two oil drums and the plumbing was outdoors. But they did learn to work by themselves and to help each other, they learned to make the most of the resources available, they certainly weren’t alienated or lost among two thousand others milling through corridors. Today you hear of the advantages of smaller units, independent study, students helping students, teachers being friends, guides and advisors. It sounds very much like my one-room school of quite long ago.

Languidge

Of course I know that is not how you spell it; after all I have three university degrees and parts of several others, including a Doctor of Education at Columbia University in New York City, Riverside Drive. But it is how I choose to spell it, currently, if not the day after tomorrow. Face it, if languages were fixed and proper, how would we have families of languages, like Romance and all that? Actually, new words, and I do believe new languages, are being spawned more right now than ever before. There are technical phenomena, that have no precise words, happening at an increasing rate, not to mention the increasing speed of worlds of communication clashing their local usages, forming shells of languages, joining the old areas of languages, and what could be expected but new stuff, including grammar (though that seems to be genetic, in forms anyway). Perhaps our greatest philosopher was the inventor of Humpty Dumpty, even though Queen Victoria did not know his correct name. “Words mean what I mean them to mean, neither more nor less”; this cannot be improved upon. Leaving to one side that each of us does not always mean the same thing by a specific word, let alone a synonym, how could language not change with use?

Perhaps the clearest statement about language may be “You know what I mean” from Wonderland, and this is true even when we do not want the other person to know what we really do mean. If I sound mean about all this, this is in keeping, as nice-sounding words often mean something really mean, if I make myself clear.

My Unter Mind

We know that a large part of our brain or at least our nervous system operates without our attention. Our heart, our digestion, our liver and our kidneys go it on their own and it is best if we leave them alone to do what they know so well how to do.

Then there is our conscious mind, where we turn to alcohol to keep us from worrying about it worrying too much. In between, somewhere, is the part of our nervous system which we program, sort of, and of it I speak. There is an extremely good memory, so we can ask it to look after some things. I can go to sleep and know that I will wake at the time I intend to do that. I can postpone decisions and I will be smarter later. It will turn me away from matters which to others and to me make sense, but deep down my committee knows to stay away. I believe it is where all the experiences, for better or for worse, are kept for later use as advisers. The advice to ’sleep on it’ is always good advice. It comes out in folk sayings like ‘look before you leap’. It seems to be totally against any method of instant decision making. I think it spots the faulty premises (or lack of any). Generally, it is hooked into folk wisdom, and remembers it far better than I do. It is a personal form of Aesop’s fables, designed to avoid so many of the classic mistakes. By nature, and thank God, I am a postponer, and I intend to trust my Unter Mind, though of course, I do not understand it.

Investing in fat pays off

In the ⅓ of the world’s population of humans which are starving or close to it, fat people do not exist. Fat is storage for when food is scarce. Nutrition is another project because small amounts of many elements and compounds are needed for good health. In our own ⅔ of the world’s population, many people are too heavy and far too many are actually obese. There are causes for our fat overload, and money to be made in urging us to put it on and lots of money to help us get it off. As I am saying, it pays (someone) to put it on us, and it pays (us and them) to take it off. Either way, we live on the fat of the land.

The energy we use comes from burning carbohydrates in the blood with oxygen in the blood. The oxygen comes from the air we inhale, and the carbohydrate is one simple sugar, glucose, which is mostly broken down other carbohydrate. Starches and complex sugars must be ‘digested’ to become the simple glucose, and all is well. All is well unless there is a surplus or a shortage of glucose which must stay within strict limits. Too much, and glucose is stored mostly as fat, too little and some stored fat is released to provide glucose. These mechanisms include insulin and glycogen from the Isles of Langerhans in the pancreas.

Back to fat and the ‘fat cats’ who profit as it goes on or comes off. First, we are certainly not saying that what comes under a chemical definition of fat is bad, for some fat is so good as to be an absolute necessity, as in the production of cholesterol, itself an absolute necessity and a lurking menace.

My rule is one page per blog, so I must stop. But I will return – 30 -