And I can prove it. All you have to do is convert your brain to the joys of base five, which is what we spent an hour or so doing in our maths class this afternoon. Although it caused initial consternation among some, I think we generally got the idea in the end. Indeed, I quite enjoyed the challenge of adding and subtracting in this strange mental universe where the next number after 14 is 20. I'm just glad we didn't have to do any long division...
Our English session was fun too. People had been asked to bring in favourite picture books, so we had fun looking at some of those. I took Where the Wild Things Are, incidentally the book I credit with having got me onto the course in the first place [1]. It's a fantastic tale with apparently simple illustrations which, as we saw, have more in them than one might notice at first glance. I'm a bit excited about the new film of Where the Wild Things Are - not sure when it comes out here but I think it's some time soon. I'm kind of pleased that such a short picture book is being made into a film - but kind of sad because it's bound to put a very particular interpretation on events which children will be likely to stick to tenaciously if they view it. Amusingly, parents have been criticising Maurice Sendak for the scariness - the wildness! - of the book and of the film [2]. He didn't care. In fact he was rather rude.
[1] I chose it for my interview task and managed, on the spur of the moment, to relate it in a playful manner to numeracy, PE and PSED as well as literacy. This went down well.
[2] This also happened when the book was first published in the 1960s. Apparently it was banned from libraries for being too scary! Sendak merely asked the bristling, protective parents why, if their children disliked the book, they continued reading it to them.
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