Having finished Homer’s Iliad last week, I started on the Odyssey this Monday and I’m already on Book 3! I’m using E. V. Rieu’s prose-style translation which is much easier to read than any translations of the Iliad. The storyline itself is far more interesting, too, as it follows the tremendously difficult journey home of the warrior Odysseus after the Trojan War.
As well as starting the Odyssey, I finished my Iliad Massolit courses with Emily Hauser and Richard Jenkyns this week. I worked through some really difficult simultaneous equations in my Victorian Hall & Knight textbook too, and had my Masterclass with Damian in the evening.
On Tuesday, I did even more simultaneous equations (there are chapters of this stuff!) and revised the Momentum topic in Physics. In the evening I had my Physics Masterclass with Dave, in which we were, conveniently, revising Momentum!
The next day, I made a page on this blog about my Reading Plan. It’s still undergoing construction, so some bits and bobs may be in the wrong place or just not making any sense at all, but it’s definitely a start for such a long and complex post!
I also read four more books of the Odyssey and summarised the plots of each of the seven books I’ve read so far (look out for my Odyssey book-by-book summary post─it’ll be coming as soon as I’ve finished the epic!). We also started a Massolit course on William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both created by Professor Nick Groom. (Apparently Jekyll is pronounced JEE-kill, not JEK-ill…)
On Thursday this week, my sister’s GCSE results came in! She got 9s in both English Language and Biology. I had my Maths Masterclass in the evening with my new teacher Niall (who studied Maths at Cambridge when he was 15!), where we did some quadratic equations, factorising and involution.
Matilda, William and I have been doing a lot of yoga and weights recently, especially since we can’t go outside much (no thanks to lockdown). So every day this week, we’ve been putting on some upbeat workout-y music and spending at least an hour weightlifting and tree-posing about!
On Friday, according to my bullet journal, we did “hours of yoga and weights and now my arms and legs are in painnnn!”
I think that about sums up Friday.
At the weekend, we continued our weightlifting streak, I made a massive Victoria sponge cake and learnt how to play Ode to Joy on the violin! We also started watching a progamme called the Greatest Events of WW2 in Color on Netflix, a film called The Great Debaters about some 1930s students from a black college who were allowed to debate the whites-only Harvard debating team for the first time, and a Netflix documentary about the disappeance of Elisa Lam called Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.