The study-for-X-minutes-a-day approach is working much better. Still not entirely at goal -- I'm still in the process of helping Sarah get into the habit of doing 30 minutes of solo-work every morning, so that I can focus on my own work. I often, but not always, get a little more time to focus on my own work in the afternoon or evening. Ideally I'd like to be studying an hour a day.
Eventually I hope to start writing down my thoughts on each day's reading, in a Charlotte Mason sort of narration. Right now, though, I'm just going to jot down what I remember about each of the books I've read this summer.
The Charlotte Mason approach to narration is (as I understand it) about your relationship with the text, so this is a little about seeing how much I remember, but also about what questions came up for me, and what subjects the text made me want to follow up on.
First up: Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction
I like these books -- around 100 dense pages on a subject, giving the lay reader a solid sense of the topic.
Prehistory -- the time before recorded history -- doesn't stop all at once. History starts gradually, in fits and starts. Recorded history starts around 55 BCE in England, with the arrival of Julius Caesar, while it starts around 3,000 BCE in Mesopotamia (although for the first many years it's almost entirely about accounting -- tracking business, counting sheep, calculating costs), and in the 1930s (I forget the exact day, but the book mentions it) in Papua New Guinea, the day a particular tribe first encountered white men when they landed their plane nearby.
The author writes about the difficulties of knowing when it's appropriate to use modern "common sense" to make logical or poetic leaps in describing prehistory, in coming to conclusions about what the concrete evidence means. What does it mean to be human? When did social cooperation begin, when did true hunting begin (as opposed to scavenging)?
For some sections of the book I jotted down new words, or information about which I wanted to pursue more information:
ambit, penumbra, proto-history
quipu, the Dreaming, Incan history, Dark Ages, Renaissance, Darwin, 19th century religiosity, Quaker history, how litmus paper works, Tim Ingold, Mbuti pygmies, Batek Negritos, cosmology, Weber (most of these weren't new ideas to me, but are all things I want to learn more about)
Why did writing disappear in Europe around 1200 BCE and reappear in the 700s BCE?
I was surprised to see the author point out that, for Biblical Literalists, there is no prehistory -- the Bible is believed to have recorded the very beginnings of existence. Obviously I knew that, but I'd never thought about that aspect before -- that that crowd rejects not just Evolution, but so much of what we know about early farming, math, cooking, building... As always, I hate seeing all religion tarred with that particular brush. I like that he pointed out that Quakers and other liberal religious folks were arguing on the side of Darwin in the debates of the 19th century over Natural Selection.
What else? Let's see... Before 8,000 BCE is paleolithic era, 8,000-4,000 BCE is mesolithic, 4,000-1800 BCE is neolithic, then Bronze Age, then Iron Age. I forget the exact years for the last 2 eras. Those are Eurocentric labels, though, based on when early humans used different materials in Europe -- we started using different materials at totally different times and sometimes in different orders or skipping some materials entirely, in other parts of the world.
I had trouble with some of his charts and graphs. Either he needed to take a math/statistics/logic class, or he needed to take a class in how to use graphs in a clear, non-fuzzy manner. I'm not sure where the problem lay.
He touched only very briefly on the ways that we see the world, that we construct the world (not just concretely shaping culture, but shaping the way we *see* culture, the way we experience the world), in our own image. Western scientists frame genetics and evolution from a selfish, survival-of-the-fittest viewpoint, while those of certain other cultures would have framed things very differently (he mentions Mbuti Pygmies referring to the forest as Mother and feeling that the rainforest gives them affection, as well as the resources they need to survive; also the Batek Negritos who see themselves as having an intimate relationship with animals, plants, and creator spirits [that description resonated with me]).
