Perfect timing

From gypsyam­ber just as I was think­ing “I’m bored and grumpy”:

1. What edu­ca­tion system (monte­sori, steiner, public, private, homeschool­ing etc) would you choose for your child and why?

Great ques­tion. None of the above, but unfor­tu­nately the system I like the best isn’t avail­able here. The school I would choose for my child is the Sum­mer­hill Anarch­ist School where the kids are involved with determ­in­ing the cur­riculum and each person, teacher or child, gets an equal vote in the school Meet­ings to work out what’s hap­pen­ing. Kids can choose to attend classes or not, but mostly they do and many of the school’s gradu­ates have gone on to study at Uni­ver­sity with no problems. 

Since I don’t have that option here and I don’t like Eng­land enough to move there, I quite like Montessori as it focuses on the child’s devel­op­ment and encour­ages multi-age learn­ing based on devel­op­mental plane not arbit­rary age. Steiner wor­ries me because it act­ively dis­cour­ages read­ing until the child is 8 or some­thing. I learned to read start­ing at 18 months and was read­ing by myself aged 3 and while you could argue it’s why I have such thick glasses and am some­what oddly social­ised (although I’d say that’s a long bow to draw), the joy I have had from books over the years have really been worth it. I can’t ima­gine what first grade would have been like without books. But I digress! I used to think a lot about homeschool­ing but now I’m an adult with a career I think homeschool­ing would drive me and the child crazy… Private school, no way.

2. I’ve found when living in another coun­try, there are some quirky aspects to the cul­ture which are not gen­er­ally men­tioned else­where, but which are incred­ibly useful to know. Did you find such aspects in Spain and what were they (not all if there’s a lot, just a couple;-) ?

Yes. Every­body smokes in Spain, all the time, even around preg­nant women. And a ‘stand­ard drink’ is about three nips of alco­hol served in a high­ball tum­bler with the mixer handed to you on the side. I can’t think of any others off the top of my head.

3. Is there a type of crys­tal which seems to to be ‘yours’ and if so, why and what is it?

Yes, amethyst. Amethyst is my favour­ite colour (purple), is sup­posed to be Aquar­i­us’s stone, is about the mind and to some extent about spir­itual con­nec­tions. Garnet is deep blood red and about pas­sion, so it’s my other stone.

4. How does your life path now com­pare to the path which you ima­gined for your­self ten years ago?

Ha ha ha ha. I thought I’d be edit­ing the Good Week­end and have a five-year-old.

5. Who were your biggest influ­ences during child­hood and how?

Huge ques­tion. My mother, def­in­itely. She’s a lib­rar­ian by train­ing (hi, Mum!) and she’s the one who taught me to read with a spe­cial “Teach Your Baby to Read” kit. We played Scrabble a lot and Boggle and she used to give us pop-quiz tests over the dinner table. She always dealt with me as an adult, although I some­times resen­ted that, and I had so many amaz­ing freedoms as a teen­ager I never appre­ci­ated at the time but look back on with grat­it­ude and awe.

I had a second grade teacher named Mrs Pat­ter­son who influ­enced me. I seem to remem­ber really pulling out the stops for her, play­ing word games and going an extra step. And Mr Sproul in fourth grade, who showed me that maths could be fun. I’m going to go out on an odd limb, and say Helen Lawson-Wil­li­ams, because she was my rival and we always took it in turns to be first or second in the year and so she pushed me to do better… although I hate com­pet­i­tion now… and fun­nily enough I still know her and we just had dinner last Friday. She’s an amaz­ing person.

It’s really hard to answer this one. Clearly, though, you say ‘child­hood’ and I think learning… 

Okay, ques­tions for you:

1. What is the most beau­ti­ful thing/place/experience in the world?
2. Ban­quet. 10 people. What’s on the menu?
3. You’ve recently revealed a large love affair with a few cam­eras you own. What hap­pens when you’re behind that view­finder? How does it change how you see?
4. How do you say “Why, yes, I would like to kiss you, you stun­ning woman’ in Japan­ese? (and assum­ing there’s no way you’d be so force­ful about it in Japan­ese, what’s the re-trans­la­tion of all the other bits back into English?)
5. What is one of your favour­ite memor­ies of a grandparent?