Simultaneous equations still aren’t over yet, and this Monday I worked my way through the third Hall & Knight chapter of them! I read two books of the Odyssey and summarised them (look out for my summary post and analysis – I’ve nearly finished the Odyssey!), and I had Maths with my Masterclass tutor Damian in the evening. There were only 12 of us because of half term, but I think it was better that way as we could move on quicker and get more done than when there are one hundred and three!
It isn’t often that I drop a classic, but this Tuesday I just had to abandon Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. There were, I suppose, so many commas, those instruments of punctuation, in the British language, that is, throughout every sentence, in The Turn of the Screw, if you can remember, with your photographic memory, what it is that I’m talking about, and I bet, though I’m not much of a gambler, in the true sense of the word, at any rate, that you don’t, because of this insane, “insane” meaning, in this case, not mental, but, rather, senseless use of the comma, that instrument of punctuation that I mentioned earlier, in this narrative, that is, for it isn’t often, at least for me, that I use a comma, but Henry James, the author of The Turn of the Screw, certainly did, for he used them, with wild abandon, in every sentence of his novel at least fourteen times, so that, by the time you had finished the sentence, the sentence, mind you, that I mentioned a moment ago, you had no idea how the first part of that sentence bore any kind of connection to the first.
Hopefully you could see that the above awfully worded paragraph was a joke on James’ part.
Anyway, I abandoned The Turn of the Screw because I just couldn’t get through it. Every sentence, every word, every blasted comma was jarring and you couldn’t read the book smoothly. Instead, I moved onto Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which is absolutely amazing. I won’t talk too much about it, though, because that’s what my upcoming review is for!
On Wednesday─my no-Maths-or-Physics day─I started a Massolit course on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a book which I read a while ago but really loved. My professor, John McRae, is absolutely hilarious. He’s from Glasgow, and at least three times a lecture he has to say something offensive about people from Edinburgh.
The next day, I finally started a slightly different topic in Hall & Knight─problems leading to simultaneous equations! Then I finished all the questions in my IGCSE textbooks on the Electricity topic. After some doing some yoga/weightlifting with Tilly and William, we had a webinar on Weimar Germany in the evening with a WW2 veteran. It was really good and I can’t wait to attend next Thursday’s online session too.
On Friday, I was spared Physics, because the three of us started a course on Utilitarianism, an ethical theory that Tilly’s been studying in her A-Level, on Massolit (this site has such a huge amount of cool stuff!).
At the weekend, William and I gave the rest of the family some presentations. William did one on the Black Death, something he’s been learning about at school, and I presented a PowerPoint on the Lord of the Flies, one of my all-time favourite books!