Southern Hemisphere Physics Experiment

Silly season is back.

I really meant to run this experiment as soon as we got into our apartment in Sydney, but I guess I needed somebody as, well, daft as myself to give me that extra push. We're staying with Simon and Leah Pett in Brisbane right now (some of you in DSI may remember him), and guess what? Simon fits the bill perfectly!



The more detailed, and let's face it, boring details that confirm our findings can be found here.

Soon to come: If I am standing on the Southern Hemisphere, do I fall off? (Hint: no)

Home Schooling on the Move

It was Sunday night. The girls were already tucked into their pull-out sofa bed, but not yet asleep.

"Tomorrow's Monday", I whispered to Sara after kissing her Goodnight.

"Yes", she replied sleepily, "That means lessons".

Lessons are the hour-long exercises in Maths or English that we do on weekday mornings, but sometimes allow ourselves to skip. Everything else can be learned in the museum/zoo/gallery/shop/street.

Letizia picked up some advice about home schooling: on any given day, ask the kids what they'd like to do. When they ask for Maths, we take out their workbooks that we brought along and see how they cope. If something new turns up that appears to create confusion then we might need to work on that. If they want to do English lessons, then we get them to work on a blog entry. This entails a rough draft, just to get ideas out on to paper. We don't care too much about spelling or neatness of writing until the second draft. In the background, every day they are reading from Enid Blyton or JK Rowling.

This is the routine we have settled into since our arrival in Sydney (the spells on the road are more ad hoc) and it seems to be working out. if anyone else out there (including Nina and Sara's teachers) hae any advice, we'd love to hear it.

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Cork: More Lectures on China

According to this UCC page, the recent lecture series on China and the Chinese continues in the Central Library on Grand Parade, Cork City. This week the topic is "Women in China Today and Yesterday" on the 6th of March. Next week it's "China Today".

Oh the Irony!

I forgot to mention in my last post about something that cropped up during out conversation with the principal of the school. If I'm going to support Nina and Sara's Irish language education while we're away, I'm going to have to hit the books myself.

So basically I've been breaking my arse trying to learn Chinese over the last year or more, and Letizia has been studying Spanish. And it turns out that in order to leave Ireland and travel around the world I'm going to have to learn Irish all over again!!

Ah well - maybe I was only waiting for an excuse. Aoife - if you're out there: Heeeeelp!!!!

Taking the Kids out of School

My wife and I met the new principal of my daughters' school to inform them of our plans. Any concerns that we had about being met with an inflexible, bureaucratic response were immediately removed. "Can I come too?" was her first reaction to our description of our travel plans. She was very enthusiastic about our idea, and full of advice on how to best manage the girls' education, and very keen on our idea of the girls staying in touch with their classes by blogging.

To cap it all, we really knew we were doing the right thing when we heard the principal telling us that the girls would be learning a whole lot more out there on the road than they would in the classroom!

Of course I walked myself into the job of putting together the school's new website! :-)