Trivia

Carousels, merry-go-rounds... American-made carousels go counter-clockwise. In the UK, they call that "anti-clockwise," and theirs go clockwise.

Is that worth knowing? Maybe not, but I think it's interesting.

Where I live, in the U.S., horses don't have names on them, except at Disneyland, pretty much. The "King Arthur Carrousel" in Disneyland was made in Canada, over 100 years ago—before Disneyland. I don't know whether the Canadian builders used two "r"s in the name, or if Walt Disney liked the alternative spelling. If you think any of this is interesting, you can read more here, about the one at Disneyland.

I took the photo above, at a fair in England. Lol is a nickname for Laurence, there (and old guys are named Laurence, not so many young kids), so that horse was named after someone who was called "Lol" instead of "Larry," and not named after laughing out loud.

How many small facts and connections can one person hold? I don't think there's a limit.

It's easier to learn a thing if you already know something else kind of like it. Connections!

It's All Information
photo by Sandra Dodd

Philosophical cookies

What makes "a watermelon cookie"? These didn't taste like watermelon. They weren't made of watermelon. The term here is all about their appearance.

Watermelon is usually considered to be healthy, but tourists and host families in India are reminded that if someone should not drink "the local water," that they should also avoid watermelon, as that fruit takes in and stores some of the potentially dangerous (to visitors) elements of local water.

These cookies have nothing to do with India, or with bad water, except wait.... I just connected them, in a way.

Some parents might cringe (or worse) at the idea of my joy in something involving sugar and food coloring, but as I'm already talking about memories and connections, I can remind readers that parental disapproval (especially when it's overblown or overstated) does more damage than sugar-coated food-colored sugar with chocolate chips ever could.

I learned the watermelon cookie recipe from a younger friend, when she asked me if I could make them for her wedding reception. I did. She had horses. My daughter, who was eight years old or so and learning to braid, was able to help groom and braid the mane of one of those horses, and work some ribbons in there somehow. Later she did that with people, and My Little Ponies.

My granddaughter wasn't born when all that happened, but now she has helped make those cookies. She might never meet Sarah, who had watermelon-cookie memories from her own childhood.

Connections and memories involve people, places, newnesses, learning, amusement, trivia, and thoughts about the meaning of life, and of reality. The more naturally people can see and appreciate those things, the better life and learning will be.


Report on the making of watermelon cookies
Photos by Sandra Dodd—
this one is a link:

Who reads how

Written when my kids were teens:

Kirby reads like a lawyer. He can skim a rules book or instructions for a game, and explain simply and clearly to others. If he forgets a detail, he'll be able to find it easily.

Marty likes humor and history.

Holly's main reading is on the internet, but she likes name books, and other non-fiction and trivia. One thing she doesn't use the internet for is definitions and spellings. She likes my old full-size American Heritage Dictionary, and will sprint upstairs to look something up on the slightest excuse.

Three Readers—SandraDodd.com/threereaders
(It's all one paragraph in the original.)
photo by Sara McGrath

It's all information

Respect trivia.

For school kids, "trivia" means "won't be on the test."

In the absence of tests, where all of life is learning, there IS no "trivia." There is only information.

Principles of Learning (chat transcript)
photo by Sandra Dodd, of tile in Austin
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Different and ever-changing needs

"'Unschooling' bed time and meals is about responding to each child's different and ever-changing needs."

—Holly Blossom

Learning that children's needs are different and ever-changing is the path to mindful parenting. If a parent can be aware and responsive in one area, it's easy to expand into others. Some parents understand it first with "academic learning" (before they accept the connections in all learning). Some understand it first about food, or clothing. It will all connect, though, the same way the trivia children learn will coalesce into a body of knowledge.

The Holly Blossom quote is from writing newly added to the Bedtime page.
photo by Ester Siroky

Little bitty bits

The whole world is made of little bits of information. Yesterday, at my house, Holly asked who first did "Dream Lover." I was thinking someone like Dion, or Bobby Vee, and while I was thinking she said "Bobby Darin," and I said no, not first.

Spoiler: I was wrong.

She pulled the computer out of her pocket, looked the song up, and played the beginnings of a couple, on Spotify. "That one!" I said, to the one by Dion. It listed Ben E. King, among others, so we figured (falsely) that it was his first, THEN Dion, then Bobby Darin.

Does it matter? To us, it does. To music history, and royalties, it matters. As to political correctness and the basis of assumptions, it ties in to all sorts of socio-political, economic, maybe geographical aspects. Trivia is what knowledge is made of. Enough little bits form a rich whole.

We could each explain why we thought what about whom, in all that. Those explanations would lead to other trivia, stories of other songs, writers, and musicians.

Any interest can lead to all interests. Let curiosity flow.

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These will (while they're there) link to recordings at YouTube, but if you have Spotify or another music service, you can find recordings by these and many other people. There are other songs with similar names, too. I will embed Bobby Darin's version, because he wrote it, but it's not the one I knew as a kid.



"Dream Lover," Bobby Darin (composer), April 1959
"Dream Lover," Dion, November 1961
"Dream Lover," Ben E. King, February, 1962

Notes on Wikipedia and SongFacts:
"Dream Lover" is a song written by Bobby Darin and recorded by him on April 6, 1959.
Dream Lover by Bobby Darin

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Trivial posts about trivia
(or profound reflections on very real learning)

Something old, something new...

Something old, something new; Something borrowed, something blue. That's traditional advice for a bride, to create good luck by what she wears to the wedding. For those in places where that little verse is foreign, then it's history, and cultural trivia. As an unschooling tool it could be a checklist of things to look for, when you go for a walk, or see a video, or a painting, or while folding the laundry.

Disposable Checklists for Unschoolers
photo by Sandra Dodd, in Corrales, New Mexico;
Sandia Mountains in the distance, with clouds

Trivial connections

Sometimes to understand a joke, people have to know three or four different things already. Sometimes a piece of humor ties together LOTS of trivia/learning in ways other things can't do.

SandraDodd.com/trivia
photo by Megan Valnes
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More than they seem

All the entertainment, office tools, art, music, trivia and humor that used to take people two or three rooms to store can be accessed with a tablet computer now, or a smart phone, or a laptop. They are lit-up windows to people, places, languages, recipes and sites to order the ingredients and cookware.

You can make photos and video, sound recordings, send art, letters, old photos, to family, friends and strangers. The Jetsons' video phone wasn't nearly as good as Skype is.

Be grateful for your wifi and the sweet things you can find and share.



SandraDodd.com/gratitude
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Ideas and trivia

Learning isn't in fancy books or computer games, it all happens in the ideas children have, in the trivial facts they fit together to come up with their view of the world—past present and future. You don't need a lesson or a unit to show a child what's wonderful about woodgrain, ice crystals on the windshield, or birdsongs. Five seconds worth of pointing and saying "Look, these trees were not native to North America" might possibly lead to an hour long discussion, or a lifelong fascination. Bringing something interesting home, browsing in an antique shop, listening to new music on instruments you've never heard—all those build neural pathways and give you a chance to be together in a special place.

Quote from the 1998 article "All Kinds of Homeschooling"
photo by Holly Dodd
of art by Holly Dodd
which happened to catch a rainbow
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Associations

Billy the Kid reminds me of my grandmother. She lived in Lincoln County, New Mexico, in the nineteen-tens and a while after, when the events were more recent and richly local. She had been places he had been, and collected articles and booklets about him.

Louise's children remember one castle by giant ice cream cones they had there, and another by lollies.

Any association that help us recall or connect ideas is a useful part of our personal web of knowledge. In school, it is possible to cheat. In school, there is "trivia." In the real world, though, learning is learning.

SandraDodd.com/reallearning
photo by Louise Mills

Canada... dude!

I'm happy to know I'm not the sole source of information for my kids.

Last night I came to use my computer and there was a dialog on the desktop, a leftover instant message between my thirteen-year-old son Marty and an older homeschooler. This was the entirety of that dialog:

Marty: You coming down?
Other kid: yeah.
Marty: Did you know Canada has Prime Ministers?
Other kid: yeah
Marty: dude

Now I will never have to explain to Marty that Canada has a prime minister. I don't know why he cared, on a Friday night in New Mexico, but it doesn't matter.

SandraDodd.com/words/words
For the record, "last night" was in late 2002, and the other kid was Brett Henry, also unschooled, who is now a firefighter in the Los Alamos Fire Department.

photo by Sandra Dodd
__ P.S. Since writing this, since taking that photo, I went to France and discovered that their stop signs say "Stop." Why, I asked my French host-mom, do they say "Arrêt" in Quebec? She said Quebec wants to be more French than France. One more bit of information that won't be on the test. Trivia.

Recent history

Sorting out news from "current events" from history isn't as easy as it once was, with the internet and with so many sources and resources. Some history isn't very old at all, while other history is archeology and paleontology.

If you think of it all as stories, people, places, things, trivia and connections, it won't matter what label school might have put on it. Have fun with history!



SandraDodd.com/history
photo by Sandra Dodd

Trivia

A huge amount of learning is taking place, and the child's internal model of the universe is starting to form up. You can help!

SandraDodd.com/trivia, in a quote that links to SandraDodd.com/piaget
photo by Colleen Prieto

Books? Old books?

The edition of The New York Public Library Desk Reference we have might be a little outdated, but the rules of ice hockey haven’t changed, nor the way in which one addresses a letter to the Pope, nor the date of the discovery of Krypton. (Some of you thought it was just a Superman thing, didn’t you? Nope--1898, the year before aspirin.) (Before the internet, people had reference books, and even then they seemed like trivia. Trivia can be the interesting door that leads to strange, new knowledge.)

SandraDodd.com/triviality
photo by Sandra Dodd

History

Museums and historical markers can be fun, but most of the history around us is unmarked and undocumented.

Every little bit of trivia gives you a hook to hang more history on.

SandraDodd.com/history
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Following a trail

Learning, collections, connections and humor can all meet when an interest is followed. This one I picked up from Marty's childhood interest in Leonardo Da Vinci.I bought a couple of nice t-shirts for Marty, a poster of inventions, a book, and we came to notice lots of riffs and parodies.

That "oooh, LOOK!" behavior was a large part of interacting and learning, when my kids were young. We still share images, music, movies and trivia now that they're grown.
SandraDodd.com/vitruvianman
image lifted, as one of several variants at the link above
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If everything counts...

So what IS trivia, then? For school kids, trivia is (by definition) a waste of time. It’s something that will not be on the test. It’s “extra” stuff. For unschoolers, though, in the wide new world in which EVERYTHING counts, there can be no trivia in that sense.

SandraDodd.com/triviality
photo by Sandra Dodd

Trivia is knowledge

Trivia is knowledge that connects things to other things, and ideas to images, and sounds to places.

SandraDodd.com/connections
photo by Janine

It's all information

Respect trivia.

For school kids, "trivia" means "won't be on the test."

In the absence of tests, where all of life is learning, there IS no "trivia." There is only information.

Principles of Learning (chat transcript)
photo by Sandra Dodd, of tile in Austin
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