A couple of people had questions after last week’s post.

Do you think a 7yr old could handle this? With parental guidance, of course. Or would it be way over her head?

I’d say it totally depends on the kid. The math would be way too hard, but I can see some seven-year-olds enjoying the graphing and the detective work. My Rose is 9 1/2 and had no interest whatsoever in the project last year or the year before, even while her big sister was jumping around the room with excitement over discoveries. Today, for the first time, I noticed Rose hovering on the fringes of the discussion. Our group is mostly the ten-to-twelve-year-old crowd, Jane’s peers, but one or two younger sibs have joined in.

I think if I were doing it alone with a seven-year-old, I’d pick just one or two of the ten mystery classes to work with.

I am new to Journey North and trying to set up an every other week
class like you describe above. Can you tell me a little bit about the
structure you envision for the "class?" I am picture mostly group
discussion, sharing of data, etc. Do you intend to offer any actual
lessons? How long will the every other week class last? Is an hour
appropriate? My class will be composed of 5th through 8th graders.

Well, our every-other-week Shakespeare Club has become a meet-EVERY-week club for Journey North. However, most of the kids will probably skip a week or two somewhere along the line. Today we were missing two families, which was fine. They’ll do this week’s graphing at home, or catch up next week. I am very low-key about this kind of thing—I have to be, or else the structure & planning would intimidate me right out of doing it at all.

So here’s how we’re working it, more or less. We have about 11 kids participating, give or take a younger sib or two. Almost everyone shows up at our house for lunch, for most of them are coming straight from other activities and I wanted to make things as simple as possible for the moms. They bring their lunches and wolf them down so they can play for a while before we begin.

When everyone is here and has eaten (and that includes me!), I round the kids up and we crowd around the kitchen table. (And may I interject here another gigantic whoop of gratitude for the wonderful BIG new dinner table my parents gave us for Christmas? I can’t imagine how we’d have pulled this off with the old one.)

Last week, the first week of the project, I began by trying to set the stage a little: we looked at the globe and I emphasized the mystery element, the ten classes of schoolchildren hidden who knows where around this globe…and we talked a little about latitude and longitude, looking at the lines on the map. We looked up our own hometown latitude and noted how relatively close we are to the equator.

Then we looked up our local sunrise and sunset times for the previous Monday (all the photoperiod data relates to the Mondays) and worked together (with Jane at the chalkboard) to calculate our photoperiod. We did it both as a subtraction problem on the board and just by looking at the clock and figuring the minutes and hours.

Then I passed out the graphs (we had printed them out in advance), one for each kid, and we graphed our hometown photoperiod. Nice simple beginning. We divvied up the ten Mystery Classes (again, one for each kid, with two kids sharing a class) and that was that for the first meeting. We are still working on our scenes from Shakespeare Club, so we practiced those for a while and then there was a snack and free play time.

Today was more Journey North, less Shakespeare. (We will keep working on our scenes for a few more weeks and then perform them for the parents.) I think today’s meeting set the pattern for the whole project. Again, we worked on hometown photoperiod first, graphed that, and then everyone pooled their Mystery Class photoperiod findings and graphed all ten locations. This was a busy, noisy, jumbly activity. Another mom helped me help the kids who needed help. (You follow that?) We took one Mystery Class at a time, graphing everything together. Some of the kids had already calculated their photoperiod, but most had not, so we just did figured it out as we went.

It went pretty smoothly, though there was certainly some confusion in places over how to read the chart, which class # were we doing now, etc. I imagine it’ll get a bit less jumbly as we go: these beginning weeks present a lot of hands-on activity that is new to most of the kids. Only two of our group have done Journey North before.

All this figuring and graphing took under an hour, I think. I know we were finished quite early in the afternoon, and then of course the kids stuck around for some play time. Our Titania and Oberon performed their scene for us, which was delightful (and included a cameo by Beanie as Puck).

I won’t be teaching any formal lessons during the project, but I’ll pull in other resources as we go…there are some good books about longitude, for example, and some fun websites that show what part of the earth is in daylight at any given hour, things like that.

Honestly, I’m very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person. The main thing is for the kids to have fun, and I figure the less they have to listen to me yap, the more fun for them. Today they were all giggling because I kept getting the times mixed up and announcing (authoritatively) the wrong answers, and the clever twelve-year-old girls at the other end of the table had to keep correcting me. Which is why I keep clever twelve-year-old girls around, of course!

As I mentioned on Lilting House the other day, Jane and I are reading Richard Halliburton’s travel narration, The Royal Road to Romance.

Halliburton is a funny guy, writing in a rather purple style to make
fun of his own overblown romantic notions of adventure—and yet, though
he mocks himself, he’s serious, too. For this young Princeton grad, the
lands across the sea beckon with a siren song full of promise and
mystery and adventure. His writing reminds me of L.M. Montgomery.
By the time he and his college roommate finally land jobs as
entry-level seamen (having first been forced to grow out their sharp
Ivy League haircuts and lay hold of some scruffy clothes, salting their
speech so as to pass for actual sailors—albeit with a "hire these kids"
letter from the president of the shipping co in their pockets, just in
case the disguise fails), the girls and I were hooked.

We are still only just getting started, but Richard and his roommate, Irvine, have made it across the Atlantic and, after a bicycle journey from Hamburg, have decided the first Big Adventure on their agenda is the scaling of the Matterhorn. Never mind that they have never climbed a mountain before, nor that the mountaineering season is over, nor that they have no equipment. The same confident air that allowed them to charm their way onto the sailing vessel described above lands them a couple of Swiss tour guides who don’t realize they’ve got total newbies on their hands until halfway up the mountain.

The wind caught me as I clutched the rope, blew me like a pendulum away from cliff wall and over the sheer five thousand foot precipice. My eyes went blind; my arms ceased to exist; my head swam in half-consciousness. Once more Adolph had to come to the rescue…

Amazingly, they make it to the summit. Halliburton, breathless from his exertions and near-death experiences, won’t let us catch our breath either. He paints us a picture of the magnificent view and we find ourselves longing to stand atop those heights ourselves, greeting the winds at the top of the world—and then the next moment he’s making us shriek with laughter.

The abyss beneath us, the bewildering panorama about us, cast a spell that awed me to silence. I began to believe it awed Irvine too, for I saw him clasp his hands and look out over the six thousand foot chasm with an expression that assured me he was in tune with the Infinite.

"Oh, Dick," he whispered in such unusually solemn tones that I awaited some great inspired utterance about the sublimity of nature and the glory of God.

Breathlessly, tremblingly, I listened.

"At last," he continued in a far-away voice, "after talking about it and dreaming about it all these years, at last, I can actually SPIT A MILE!"

Shortly thereafter, Richard proves he had the makings of an excellent blogger:

…I, clinging to the wooden cross that marks the Swiss-Italian border and scrounging into the snow to keep from being blown away, got out my inseparable note-book, and with frozen fingers laboriously inscribed a thought or two on the wind-whipped page.

"If you fell from here to Zermatt," he snapped impatiently, "you’d write scenic impressions in that confounded note-book on the way down."

Our friend Keri is traveling the world at present. As we read Halliburton’s narrative, Keri is constantly on my mind. Richard the recent college grad is (at this early stage of his memoir, at least) playing the starring role in his travels. Keri’s letters are ensemble pieces; she is a compassionate and shrewd people-watcher, a woman keenly interested in the customs and personalities of the people she encounters.

Her letters are a treat.

If I’m ever asked what traveling tip was the most useful to me, it
would be that I learned where the 5-star hotels are located. Usually
the staff can speak the basics of my language. After a few days feeling
totally adrift in China, I went to the lobby of a swanky hotel, and the
girl in the gift shop helped me with the map, taught me to say hello,
please, thank you the correct way. Sometimes it’s worth the cup of
expensive coffee for a place of understanding.
 
In India, they must use old British text books, as "kindly" is usually
substituted for "please." As in, "Would you kindly follow me." Also in
India, "thank you" is never said. A few people even asked me why I said
it so much. This at first struck me as rude, but the whole vibe of
India led me to see that gratitude isn’t expected by doing the right
thing, such as answering a person for directions, or a transaction at a
store. With that said, my gratitude was always appreciated.
 
The other night I was walking down a very busy street here in a
touristy section. A young Asian man stepped aside for me to pass, and I
thanked him in Thai. He shook his head. I tried it in Laos, Vietnamese,
and Khmer. Shook his head no. Said it in Chinese. No. Said it in
English. In an American Southern accent, he said, "You’re welcome,
ma’am." He’s from Texas. 

There is a Chinese word, it sounds like "laiwhoia", but is carried out
as a long word. This means, "Heads up, we have a white person here."
I’d hear this if I was in a crowd, waiting at a traffic light. People
there wouldn’t stare at me, but give quick sneaky glances. It was
polite, actually. After awhile, I’d hear it and could feel all the
little looks I was getting. A few times, I wouldn’t hear the word, so I’d play around and say it myself. It never failed to have everyone around me laugh. The best
thing, is when you can joke around without a shared language. There’s
something pure about it, in a way.

I would love to have been a fly on one of those streetcorners, watching the laugh ripple through the crowd. Keri also wrote about sharing jokes without language in an earlier letter, during her time in Hanoi. 

Two young girls approached me and in pretty bad English asked if they could stand with me. I said yes and they quickly hopped up the ledge next to me and started talking. They are both 20 and in university there. Both came from small villages. They were very happy to practice their English and I was happy to learn more about their world. So every night we’d meet for a few hours. We always sat in the same spot and they’d each keep one hand on my leg. I think they thought I’d unexpectedly run off! If other people came by to join our conversation, they’d each grab my hand and talk a bit faster. They said that not many tourists want to spend time talking to locals. I enjoyed talking to them much more then seeing the pagodas and museums of Vietnam.

It’s odd how even without a common language people will tease each other and make jokes. We laughed a lot. While they didn’t have a smooth flow of the language they could rip off a very sophisticated sentence.

It reminded me of a time when Michael and I came out to visit you in Long Island. I think Jane must have been 5 maybe 6. I know Rose was alive, but I don’t think Beanie had come around yet. Jane was holding a toy, a horse, with the horn and wings. Pegasus. Michael asked her what it was and she didn’t reply right away. So I said that it was a magic horse that can fly. Jane nodded and then went on to talk about the myth and story of Pegasus in great detail. Michael looked at me like I was a total idiot. I looked at Jane like she was totally brilliant. I realized then if I keep my mouth shut people are sometimes formulating some smart thoughts and pulling the words together and eventually will say something much more smart than, "It’s a magic horse!!!"

That’s how these girls were. They would stop and think for a few minutes, then ask a smart question, or explain a cultural difference in splendid detail. Thanks to Jane I was quiet enough to let it happen.

Keri plans to stop off here for a while when her trip is over. I intend to be quiet enough to hear the rest of her stories.

There’s a new project underway here in the Lilting House, and Jane and I are very excited about it. I suppose it was natural that we should yearn for something fun to replace the happy hours we’ve been spending on the Journey North Mystery Class, now that (sob!) that project is over for another year. (Although Jane and her pal E. do plan to have one last hurrah with it, finishing off their graphs and discussing the big reveal.)

We’ve been hanging on the adventures-around-the-globe of our beloved friend Keri, who (thanks to a great wireless connection) was able to email us a long, juicy letter about her travels in China and is now in Tibet. Tibet! We flew over there on Google Earth, but she doesn’t show up on the satellite photos. Yet.

Keri’s voyage inspired us to look up a copy of early-20th-century traveler Richard Halliburton‘s book, The Royal Road to Romance. When it first arrived, we couldn’t resist jumping right to the Thailand chapter, since that’s where Keri was at the time. But this week we started it properly, from the beginning.

Halliburton is a funny guy, writing in a rather purple style to make fun of his own overblown romantic notions of adventure—and yet, though he mocks himself, he’s serious, too. For this young Princeton grad, the lands across the sea beckon with a siren song full of promise and mystery and adventure. His writing reminds me of L.M. Montgomery. By the time he and his college roommate finally land jobs as entry-level seamen (having first been forced to grow out their sharp Ivy League haircuts and lay hold of some scruffy clothes, salting their speech so as to pass for actual sailors—albeit with a "hire these kids" letter from the president of the shipping co in their pockets, just in case the disguise fails), the girls and I were hooked. This is going to be a mighty fun read.

And to pile on the fun, we discovered a nifty Google Maps feature that lets you plot a course on a map, with annotations. Thus our new project, the Romantic Journey of Richard Halliburton, a Work in Progress! Ain’t the internets swell?