I Read The Class and Now I'm Depressed about the State of Public School Education in America

Texted this to my own exceptionally bright, perfectionist kid. Nobody has ever called me subtle!

The Class: A Life-Changing Teacher, His World-Changing Kids, and the Most Inventive Classroom in America by Heather Won Tesoriero
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this book, and this book makes me sad.

The Class is written with such compassion and gentleness when it comes to the stories that it tells about the central protagonists, the real children involved in one specific science class in the wealthy, high-class community of Greenwich Connecticut. Tesoriero clearly spent quality time with these kids, and was likable and trustworthy enough to be invited to their promposals and told all the fun little details about their daily lives that, in turn, give her writing life. Her tone when telling their stories is comfortable, a bit gossipy (but in a nice way), but always, always kind and respectful. It would be so easy to typecast a kid as a “character” in her book, so easy to lampoon a kid’s silliness or naivete for laughs, but this never happens. Instead, Tesoriero uses small details that she’s witnessed about the kids’ interactions to illustrate their personalities in a way that feels completely natural and true, and I love how thoughtful and careful she is.

Here's an interview with Tesoriero in which she gives an excellent overview of her book. It's a little long, but you get all the main points and some of the more interesting little details that brought the book to life for me:

The novelty of Tesoriero’s topic is what makes me sad. Tesoriero writes about a unicorn of a science class: an exceptional, privileged teacher of exceptional, privileged children who attend an exceptional, privileged school in an exceptional, privileged town located in an exceptional, privileged part of the country. I haven't looked up how their school district is funded, but if it's property taxes as is usual, they should have plenty of money. Even so, one of the premises of the science class is that the teacher, Bramante, has the skills and the connections to stock the classroom with professional-quality, niche lab equipment that would be otherwise out of the reach of even the most well-funded school, so again, other than in this unicorn situation with this unicorn teacher, wealth is a barrier to recreating this exceptional classroom and these exceptional results.

I'm interested in education philosophies as they connect with education access, and in my amateur research, whether you want the crunchiest, earthiest education or the STEM-iest, most academically rigorous education for your kids, the kicker is ALWAYS money. Here's a short video talking about Montessori and Waldorf and the issue of money to show that these exceptional experiences, wherever they lie on the spectrum, are ALWAYS expensive (and in my short time in the Montessori system, I can tell you that all the other parents but me were R.I.C.H.):

In The Class, the children’s level of achievement is exceptional mostly because of their privilege, and while Tesoriero does acknowledge this privilege, as do most of the children, she completely leaves alone issues of equity, or how on earth this kind of program could ever possibly be reproduced in other schools, or what it says about the overall environment of public education in America. That’s likely because this particular scenario is clearly inequitable, can’t be reproduced in most other schools, and has only dismal things to say about the ways that public school education is, overall, failing the majority of America’s children. All of that is deliberately not the scope of this book, but the book’s very existence begs those questions.

It was interesting, then, to see the small inequities that DO plague the lives of these exceptional, privileged children. Kids who should have won specific science fairs don’t win them. Kids who do win are cyberbullied. One kid, who is clearly THE most exceptional kid, is denied admission to Harvard, but another kid, depicted as entitled and wasteful of some of his many opportunities (but still exceptional! Because privilege!), but also described as wealthy, with parents who are both Harvard alumni and active donors to Harvard, is offered early acceptance. But even though I might want to mock the pettiness of any slight in the shadow of such overall overwhelming opportunity, it’s impossible to, because Tesoriero treats these setbacks with respect; these are children, their setbacks are real to them (if so out-of-scale as to be wildly unreal to me, ahem), and these are the life lessons they’re learning.

But seriously, though--don’t worry about the kid who didn’t get into Harvard; he got into TONS of other schools, and ended up turning down a $267,000 scholarship to Duke, one that would have included room and board and study-abroad, to attend Stanford. As a parent who’s currently got a range of side hustles going on to try to cash-flow as much of my own kid’s college tuition as possible so she can graduate as debt-free as possible, it’s a big challenge for me not to put my petty hat on for that scenario. 

I’ll be a little more petty about the kid who worked out a deal with the high school to basically allow him to test out of all of his classes for his final two years while he lived across the country in an apartment his parents rented for him and worked on his multi-million dollar invention. The super fancy international science fair thing he got invited to disrespected him, I guess(?), so he just didn’t go, and then they asked his mom for $600 to reimburse them for what they’d spent on his no-showness. THEN the bougie high school that had been essentially not making him go there for the last two years threatened to withhold his diploma because he didn’t take the wellness class he said he’d take, and OMG, would Yale withdraw their acceptance if he didn’t have his high school diploma? Nvm, they sent his diploma to him anyway. 

Just… you know, in my house, the most recent money/attendance blow-up with my own teenager involved her getting called into her part-time job on a night that she had ballet class, and I was pissed because I had to ask the ballet program if she could make up the class on another night rather than simply skip it, and they were weird about it but nevertheless, I persisted, because I paid fifteen dollars for that stinking class and fifteen dollars is FIFTEEN DOLLARS!

Okay, I’m taking my petty hat off again.

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I Read Pitch Perfect and Compared it to the Movie

Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“It is Saturday evening, April 30, 2005, and the stage is empty save for twelve women dressed in identical black pants, buttoned-up black shirts, and red ties. Evynne describes their look as ‘sexy stewardess.’”

So begins the non-fiction book that’s the basis of one of my favorite film trilogies, Pitch Perfect!

I do like this type of non-fiction, and I’ve read several similar titles (Pledged - Secret Life Of Sororities and The Class are two recent books that come to mind), but for me, quite a lot of the charm of the book Pitch Perfect is picking out all the little references that show up in the film Pitch Perfect. I already knew (Thank you, Dr. Google!) that all the competitions were real competitions, but it was super cute to see that Divisi, the female a cappella group from the University of Oregon, IS the Barden Bellas! The movie picked up so many Divisi details, from their “sexy stewardess” outfits with “unfortunate-looking green-and-yellow scarves” to the attrition in numbers that led to their desperation early one fall semester to pick up new recruits, ANY recruits… and then in walks a plucky new girl. When I found their album, Undivided, on Spotify and played it? 

It was like the Barden Bellas were singing to me! In later parts of the book, there’s a very node-like tonsillectomy! There’s a weirdly mean rival group! Even Divisi's much-touted performance of “Yeah,” when I found it on YouTube, had some similar choreography to the Bellas’ show-stopping number at the end of Pitch Perfect.

Here's the famous Divisi number, "Yeah," at the 2005 International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella:

For a fun comparison, here's the Bellas' Pitch Perfect performance:

The chapters on the male a cappella groups didn’t excite me nearly as much, although I still found them interesting to read. Yes, the album Code Red by the Tufts Beelzebubs is impressive--

--and it was interesting to read about the controversy, but… then there’s another whole discussion of their next album, Shedding, and how IT was made, and a list of all the awards that IT won, and we’ve just really gotten into the weeds of collegiate a cappella album creation here.

The chapters on the Hullabahoos were more compelling, probably because Rapkin depicted them as being a LOT more fun… or a lot more of a hot mess. Whichever. Like, a Hullabahoo member literally peed on the Beelzebubs’ car?!? A Hullabahoo knocked into the CEO of the major company they’d been flown out to perform for. The Hullabahoos were invited to sing the national anthem at a Lakers game--and then piddled around their hotel for so long that when they finally left they got caught in a traffic jam and THEY MISSED IT. Just, OMG you guys.

I had a lot of fun ready referencing the groups and performances throughout the book, and I’d totally have paid for an accompanying CD/DVD, even though many of the performances that I found were so impossibly corny that I couldn’t actually watch them. Is there a word for someone singing and performing so earnestly that you high-key want to die while you watch them? But the ready-reference was important research, because some groups were so awesome that I didn’t want to die watching them! “Yeah” is fun and adorable, and the Hullabahoos’ “Royals” is well-sung and surprisingly understated, considering the singers are all wearing voluminous robes in cartoonish prints.

  

While I enjoyed what I read, I really wished we could have dug deeper into the inner workings of some of these musicians, something that I totally get possibly wasn’t an option, because, you know, they’re real humans and we don’t necessarily get to own their thoughts. But some of these singers clearly had a LOT going on that impacted and was impacted by their a cappella passion, and I’d love to hear more about how an obsessive passion like that affected them. Lisa Forkish turned down her dream school for YEARS to sing with Divisi, but then later… she finally went to that dream school! What helped her decide to move on? Ben Appel was the music director of the Beelzebubs, and then all of a sudden, he had to leave the entire school to get help with his mental health. Surely, his all-consuming a cappella commitments did NOT help with his struggles… or did they? I’m very interested in the world of extreme hobbies, and I would LOVE to know.

The only real problem with Pitch Perfect, and the reason why it’s a three-star book instead of a five-star one for me, is Rapkin’s use of offensive language regarding gender expression and sex preference. There's a whole "funny" story that hinges on a homophobic slur that Rapkin himself writes--he's not even quoting anyone!--and Rapkin really needs to say that he’s sorry. Just because of that, I was stoked to see that in chapter eight, he makes fun of a poster that a Divisi member makes by hand, in which “a cappella” is spelled incorrectly--and then in chapter twelve, who is it who writes the word “a capella” in his very own book? Why, none other than Rapkin himself! Check your spelling AND your homophobic language, Mister!

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Day 8 in England: In Which We Draw the Dread Sigil Odegra, and Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach

Do you know Good Omens, the Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman joint?

If you haven't, spoiler alert! Also, you should really be consuming media more quickly, because the book is, like, 33 years old by now. Read the book, then watch the series, then read a bunch of Aziraphale/Crowley fanfic, then buy yourself some cute little fanart on etsy to celebrate your obsession. You're welcome!

Anyway, there's a running joke/semi-major plot point involving the M25 that circles London, mainly how it's terrifying and terrible because it was secretly designed by the demon Crowley to form an ancient sigil that reads, "Hail the Great Beast, devourer of worlds." Everyone who drives it empowers and becomes part of its low-grade evil emanations.

So guess what was the very first road we drove on after picking up our very first right-hand drive car and veering our way out of the Gatwick Airport parking garage, poor Matt with his hands at 10 and 2, knuckles white, me screaming, "Left side! Left side! Oh Sweet Jesus LEFT SIDE!" as a helpful reminder of England's left-hand traffic, and both teenagers actively having panic attacks in the back seat?

I think we have never been so collectively terrified in our lives.

Also, I cannot BELIEVE that they let us just... rent this car and drive away? Like, they slapped a sign by the exit that reminded us to drive on the left hand side of the highway, and then boom! There we were, zipping along in bumper-to-bumper traffic!

I will go to my grave insisting that roundabouts are not better than traffic lights and why do they have so many lanes in them and how do you know which lane to be in, anyway? We never did figure that one out...

We had yet to experience how very narrow English roads could actually be, so after we'd careened our way to Canterbury and I was attempting to navigate us to a parking lot, I kept being all, "Turn here--OMG wait don't turn there that must be a sidewalk or something! Do the next--no, wait, that's surely another sidewalk. WHY IS GOOGLE TRYING TO GET US TO DRIVE OUR CAR INTO THESE TINY LITTLE CREVICES!?!"

I'm very glad we didn't reverse our touring plans and go to Lyme Regis first. Now THOSE were some narrow roads! 

Eventually we found a parking garage, left the car and kissed the concrete under our feet, thanked Thomas Becket for helping us arrive alive, and wandered through Canterbury to find the newly restored Christ Church Gate:

Zooming in on my photos at home so I can see all the little details is the next best thing to having binoculars!

We'd arrived a lot later than I'd planned, thanks to having no idea how to drive in England, so I dithered at first about actually going into Canterbury Cathedral, knowing I wouldn't have time to see everything. We wandered around a bit, checked out a couple of secondhand bookshops and vintage clothing stores, and then a shopkeeper gave us the tip that you could get a good view of Canterbury Cathedral through the second-floor window in the visitor's center:

The shopkeeper knew what she was doing, because as soon as I saw Canterbury Cathedral in real life, I said, "Yep, I've got to go there."

And thus my pilgrimage to Canterbury, begun four days earlier at Southwark Cathedral, is complete!

Even under construction scaffolding, Canterbury Cathedral is the most impressive building I've ever seen:

I kept craning my head to look at the super high ceilings:

Guess I wasn't the only person who walked into Canterbury Cathedral and stopped looking where I was going!

I was so busy goggling at the architecture that I barely got a single photo of the assassination site of Thomas Becket:

And I definitely almost fell down a giant flight of stairs in my desire to stand exactly centered beneath the Bell Harry Tower:

See the lovely fan vaulting! I don't know how tall this ceiling is, but the entire tower is over 250 feet tall.

It was honestly ridiculous how beautiful Canterbury Cathedral is. I was almost offended--like, how dare you just stand there and be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life?!?

And then, as if that wasn't more than enough, there was an exhibition in the crypt that had manuscript Bibles, pilgrim badges, more cool stuff owned by the Black Prince, and some excellent Gothic statuary:

And then as if THAT wasn't more than enough, we also found a library!

Here's some of us, wandering around in baffled amazement:

We really didn't have time to explore the rest of the Canterbury Cathedral site (until next time, then!), but some of us needed fuel and fortification before we got back into our Rental Car of Terror, so we popped into our first (but very much not last!) pub of the trip, The Old Buttermarket:

We even let the 17-year-old order her very first hard cider with our late lunch, thinking that a bit of a sedative before the upcoming drive wouldn't hurt, and might even keep her from having to breathe into a paper bag the entire time:

Another bit of a wander, definitely us procrastinating to avoid the upcoming ordeal because we really did need to get back on the road...

I LOVE how you can look down little streets and see the cathedral!

When I come back again one day, I'm DEFINITELY doing the Canterbury Tales live-action experience omg.

Then we bravely set forth like stalwart pilgrims and let Thomas Becket preserve us as we veered over to Dover Beach:

There was an open water swimming club practicing nearby, as well as the busy ferry port, but, as always, some of us were mainly interested in our Special Interests:

Contributing to the heft of her suitcase!

After a long walk along the beach, we all piled into one hotel room to eat Caribbean takeout and watch, in baffled fascination, this amazing 1969 British TV show about a ghost detective. At the time I thought that maybe I only thought it was so bizarre because I was soooo tired, but no. It really was that bizarre.

And apparently the TV only got more bizarre after I fell asleep, because Matt swears that he stayed up later and found a dating show in which the contestants were completely naked...

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

Tiny Julie Would Have Read the Snot out of The Baby-Sitters Club Graphic Novels

Especially if you compare that to how much fun Grown-Up Julie has reading them!

I am pretty sure that The Baby-Sitters Club (and my grandma) gave me my terrible penchant for snarky gossip. Even as the 10- to 12-year-old that I was when I first read the novels, if I'd had another kid to talk about books with I would have happily snarked away about how bossy Kristy is, how disloyal Stacey can be, and what a pushover Mary Ann often is. Also, I didn't like Mallory, and I wasn't sad when she left the series.

But I LOVED The Baby-Sitters Club, and well after I'd graduated from its target age range, you could still find me on long evenings in the public library, trusted as a high school page to be the sole staffer in the basement children's department just because the library stayed open well after any reasonable child's bedtime, reading through a couple more Baby-Sitters Club novels in between straightening the picture books and using the staff pinback button maker for my own nefarious purposes.

I've written before about that magical year for reading that was 2016, when the kids discovered so many great books, like Percy Jackson, Warrior Cats, and the new graphic novel versions of The Baby-Sitters Club, then drawn by Raina Telgemeier, still one of my favorite graphic novelists. I checked out every Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel as soon as it came to the library for quite a while, and read them as avidly as my younger kid did, but then she got VERY into listening to long chapter books on Playaway, became happily accustomed to searching the library catalog and requesting them for herself, and as I was kicked out of the kid book selection job, I forgot all about The Baby-Sitters Club.

Fast-forward to this summer, when some search term or other on the library catalog brought one of the newer graphic novels into my first ten search results, and I was all, "OMG! There are more Baby-Sitters Club books!", and I requested every single one.

So that's what I did during a recent stormy weekend. You don't need electricity to read The Baby-Sitters Club!

And remember how when I was a little kid I didn't have anyone to talk about books with? Well, motherhood fixed that problem for me, because my college student sat on the other end of the couch and burned through all these graphic novels with me, only looking up so we could cozily snark on all the kids... and, with my new adult perspective, their parents!

With my 46-year-old eyes, I'm kind of now coming to see that the flaws in each flawed character, combined with their extreme competence in their various academic, extracurricular, and career pursuits, IS the fascinating draw to this series, at least for me. Mary Ann lets her father walk all over her in an infuriating way, and can completely take over the childcare of both a baby and toddler simultaneously.  Stacey can be selfish and vain, but with a diabetes diagnosis and two major moves in about a year, wow is that kid resilient. Kristy is the world's biggest bossypants, and damn, she can organize the SHIT out of a backyard day camp!

Like, gee, do I personally happen to know anyone who considers themselves both deeply flawed in a lot of ways and also extremely competent in a lot of different ways?

Ahem.

I am also extremely impressed at how the series allows big changes. I read Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye on the couch, said, "Holy Shit, College Kid! You're not going to believe what they do to Stacey!," and flipped the book to her. She read it and said, "OMG WUT?!? What the hell?!?!" 

Spoiler alert: Stacey moves away! She's one of the central characters, but her dad's job gets transferred back to New York City and she just... moves away! And then in the next graphic novel, the kids are all, "We miss Stacey so much sigh," but, you know, Jessie's a ballet star and learns sign language and there's a whole thing with a ballet school clique and life goes on.

Like, how sad and what a bummer and it really sucks because Stacey's awesome but, at the same time, such is life, especially when you're a kid. People move away, and life goes on. It's probably great for kids to see that modeled and normalized. 

It's much the same with all the really flawed parenting, because I do think that a lot of these kids' parents suck quite a lot of the time. But... you're a kid, so what are you going to do? Even when your dad is being really unreasonable, he's the parent you've got to deal with, so if you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation, then you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation. If your mom is getting married and moving you abruptly out of the only home you've ever known you're probably extremely distraught but you're still going, so you might as well lean in and help out and rack up some good credit (Kristy's mom does NOT appreciate that kid nearly enough! One of my kids would STILL be rolling on the floor in utter hysterics if I'd tried to pull that on her!). 

In conclusion: am I about to go get on the pre-release list for the newest Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel, set to be released in October? 

Yes. Yes, I am. Although I'll probably wait to read it until my college kid is on a school break and can sit on the other end of the couch to read it right after me so we can gossip about it!

Day 7 in England: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich

The teenager woke up fever-free and without a sore throat on this morning, but we decided to have her kick back and hang around the AirBnb for the day just in case. So it was just three intrepid adventurers who attempted to figure out how to get ourselves back and forth to Greenwich by boat. It went... not well.

Here's our day's agenda:

• Thames Clipper to Greenwich
• Royal Observatory
• Greenwich Market
• National Maritime Museum
• Greenwich Foot Tunnel
• Thames Clipper to Battersea Park

In theory, the Thames Clipper Uber Boat is the coolest idea ever. You buy a ticket, hop on the boat, and travel the Thames to your destination. I. Was. STOKED!!!

In actuality, the routes are completely incomprehensible to ascertain, the boats are mostly unlabeled so you can't tell if you're getting on the correct one without asking, and even when we asked, the employees couldn't seem to actually tell us how to actually get on the correct boat for the correct route. It was absolutely miserable. I could have literally walked to and from Greenwich in the time it took us to get to and from Greenwich on this day. 

So what I thought you were supposed to do was check this route map to see what color route you're supposed to take--

--and then cross-reference it with the timetable to see when your boat will arrive:

We wanted to go from Battersea Power Station to Greenwich, so we wanted an RB1, but what I think we ended up getting on was an RB6? Because it dumped all of us off at the Canary Wharf stop and went back the way it came from. So then we had to figure out 1) what our Oyster cards had been charged for that trip, since we'd put money on them specifically for this, 2) if we had enough money on the Oyster cards to continue the trip with a second ticket, because there wasn't a place to top up Oyster cards at the pier, and 3) what freaking boat were we actually supposed to take to finish getting to Greenwich.

If only any, you know, EMPLOYEES had been around to offer assistance! 

We thought about bailing and just riding the Tube out to Greenwich, but damn it, I wanted my boat ride, so we turned to Plan B, generally known as Throw Money at the Problem. Matt got us new paper tickets from the ticket machine, which was a waste of money if our Oyster card tickets were still good, but the advantage was that they at least said which pier we were going to in case we got thrown off the boat early again, and we got back in line to wait for the next random boat that came by going in the proper direction. 

At least the trip was pretty (although--another disappointment--all the seats have a dirty window in between you and the pretty things)!

Fortunately, I don't think there was any way to screw up going east from Canary Wharf to Greenwich (stay tuned for the evening, when we'll screw up our westward trip!), so when we FINALLY got back on a freaking boat, that boat at least took us straight to freaking Greenwich.

From there, it's just a 15-minute walk straight uphill to the Royal Observatory!

There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to see here, but first, we had to see the Main Attraction:

It's the Prime Meridian!

Check me out encompassing ALL the hemispheres!

The rest of the day will consist solely of me finding Prime Meridian markers and insisting on having my photo taken with them.

I thought the historical meridian markers were also interesting. There were several!

Apparently, astronomers spent quite some time dithering about whether the meridian should be here, or perhaps over here five feet to the right, or maybe just scooted over another couple of feet right here. It's like moving a coffee table, only you have to remake all your plaques and inform the entire world that you changed your mind.

I hadn't come to see them, specifically, but I loved the exhibits that showed examples from the history of astronomy. Here are some children's lacing cards from the 1820s, with the lacing holes being the locations of the stars that make up the constellation:

This globe is really cool, too, because the constellations show up as shadows on the wall behind it:

There are also artifacts here from the interesting history of timekeeping and measurement of all kinds. Here's the Time Ball, which still falls exactly at 1:00 pm daily so that ships on the Thames, households across the river, and anyone who happens to be looking in the right direction at the right time can synchronize their clocks:

And yes (because I looked it up), the New Year's Eve ball drop in Times Square DOES trace its history back to this very ball.

The Royal Observatory is on a hill, so check it out--you really can see it from a LONG WAY! Probably not during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution and its coal smog, though...

Here's the original entrance, with all the standardized measurements on display for the general public to reference at any time. The clock is especially important, because it reflected the real, actual time from the official timekeeper inside the observatory (there's a replica in the gift shop that I SUPER wanted, but even before I realized that my entire carry-on was going to be full of rocks, I knew I wasn't going to have room in it for a giant analogue clock...):

Oh, look! I found another Prime Meridian marker!

Once upon a time, Matt and I both read and were, for a pretty hot minute, obsessed with Longitude. So when we came upon an entire gallery devoted to chronicling the development of the ability to calculate longitude on ocean voyages, we both went SQUEEEEEE!!!!!

This below work was a star catalogue meant to define positions and orbits so exactly that ships could use it to calculate longitude... if only their ships were sitting on a perfectly flat ocean during a perfectly clear night, of course. It's got a super dishy backstory, though! John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, spent literal decades on his observations, and flat-out refused to publish them until he'd spent further decades refining and correcting. So Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley--as in, THE Isaac Newton and THE Edmund Halley--sneaked into his workplace, stole his documents, and published a pirated version. So then Flamsteed went around and picked up all the pirated copies he could find and destroyed them. This edition is the official one, published posthumously because that was the only way he'd stop messing with it:

Here's one of the timepieces made on the path to an accurate calculation of longitude. It's got dueling pendulums to hopefully counteract ship movement, and a variety of metals to hopefully counteract temperature changes:

It didn't work great.

Here's the real winner!

This watch keeps perfectly accurate time no matter how much it moves, what the temperature is, what the humidity is, or how much salt gets on it. Combine that with an accurate astronomical chart, and you'll never be lost again!

This exhibit below inspired me and Matt to explain to our college kid all about the good old days, when could call Time and Temperature on your landline. 

The teenager thought that this was absurd, and that calling to hear the movie listings and to request songs on the radio sounded equally absurd. But now we know why BBC Radio kept beeping at us every hour!

Found another Prime Meridian marker!

Even though Borough Market had been so crowded we all thought we were going to die it had also been really cool, so after watching the 1:00 Time Ball drop we left the Royal Observatory and walked over to check out Greenwich Market:

I swear to god I could take these two to the pits of hell and they would manage to find a churro stand:

I think the teenager who we'd left at the AirBnb would have liked Greenwich Market a lot, but just between us I'd rather have stayed at the museum and looked at stuff. 

After lunch, we walked over to the National Maritime Museum, where I had several things I wanted to see.

But first, the toddler playground!

They're deliberately ignoring the sign that says that only small children should ride the boats, and I'm pretending I don't know them.

There were so many exhibits that I wanted to see that we ended up just wandering, directionless, through the galleries. Fortunately, we happened upon all of my must-see sites!

This double hull outrigger canoe reminded me of Moana.

It's a real Marshall Islands stick chart!!! We learned about these at the very beginning of my kid's AP Human Geography study, so it was fun to see one in person.

The Atlantic Worlds gallery had an exhibit on Africa that felt kind of sketchy:

I mean, I guess they're not factually incorrect, but it feels very... dispassionate, I guess? Maybe that's my perspective as an American, where we're literally still having to tell people that Black lives literally matter, but I feel like the lede of this intro should have been something like "Enslaving people and trafficking them across the Atlantic, raping, torturing, and murdering them along the way and at their destinations, was all very bad, and we shouldn't have done that."

The exhibit did have a lot of artifacts from the history of African enslavement that I'd never seen before, but they also felt dispassionately presented and I didn't feel comfortable taking pictures. Like, this label shows the most emotion, and even it sounds like they're describing something from another planet:

I did send my teenager this pic of a guillotine used to execute 50+ royalists on a West Indian island, though, because eat the rich:

My obsessive reading of the Aubrey/Maturin novels have given me a taste for the Napoleonic War-era Royal Navy, so I was very stoked when our wanderings finally led us to the gallery I was most excited to see: Nelson, Navy, Nation! I outlasted even my poor college student in this gallery, as not only did I have to look at every single artifact and read its label twice, but then I had to go back and see my favorites a third time, then find something else I hadn't looked at closely enough, and then take another set of photos in case my first three sets hadn't turned out correctly:

Should I get desperately into model shipbuilding? I kind of think I should!

This is the first letter Nelson wrote with his left hand after having his right arm amputated:

Sooo... I know it's a kind of running joke in the Aubrey/Maturin novels, but I did not realize how very, very, very much everyone in England reveres Lord Nelson? They are REALLY into him! It made me realize that I am missing a lot of context for the novels, and a lot of references and imagery is likely passing right over my head. Like, now I think O'Brien is purposefully putting in similarities between Aubrey and Nelson, right?

Anyway, here's the coat Nelson was wearing when he was fatally wounded. You can see the bullet hole there at his left shoulder:

And here are the underthings he was wearing when he died. All that blood on his stockings belongs to a shipmate, though--he just fell in it:

In the same gallery, here's an unrelated photo of sailors shooting walruses. It was so fun to be in the Navy!

I'm sorry to say that I DID have to be dragged out of that gallery at closing time...

I'd sort of wanted to tour the Cutty Sark, but the ridiculous amount of time it took us to make our way all of the six miles to Greenwich that morning meant that I couldn't work it in, alas. Here it is from the outside, at least!

We were pretty footsore by this time, and we probably could have headed back to my kid and my AirBnb, but I'd seen this place on Tiktok--

--and I could not sleep easy at night until we'd experienced it for ourselves.

So we did!

On the other side of the tunnel, you get a lovely view back to where you came from:

Look VERY closely and you can even see the red ball at the Royal Observatory!

By the time we'd walked back through the tunnel we were EXHAUSTED, which was just the awesomest time to figure out how to get back on my new personal very least favorite mode of transportation ever, the fucking Thames Clipper Uber Boat OMG. If I'd had a brain cell left in my head I would have found a Tube station instead.

Determined that this time we were NOT going to fuck this up, Matt found an actual human to buy our return tickets from, and this human told us which boat to get on. So we got in line for that boat. And then that boat reached capacity, so we all had to walk back up the gangway and get in another line for the next boat... which was not set to arrive for forty freaking minutes. We should have tried to return our boat tickets and found the Tube station. But instead we waited in line, and when an employee came by Matt showed her our tickets, asked her if the next boat was the correct boat for our tickets, and she said it was.

So finally, FINALLY the next boat comes and we all get on it. We get to about here--

--and then the boat stops at Canary FUCKING Wharf AGAIN, dumps us all out AGAIN, and turns around AGAIN, because it was not the right boat.

So, y'all, I feel like a few times on this trip, some random employee deliberately gave us the wrong information, and I feel like they did this because they did not want to have to tell us bad news. Is this a British thing, or an us thing?

At least there were a ton of tourists on this boat, and we were all irritated and tired and confused, so I wasn't the only one not happy when we all got dumped off. There were a LOT of people griping, but the guy emptying the boat kept saying, "The next boat will be here in just a few minutes! Just wait for the next boat; it will be here in a few minutes!"

By "few", he meant forty.

When the next boat finally came, the guy letting us on was bemusedly very patient with me when I stopped the entire line to be all, "Does this boat go to Battersea? This very boat? I'm on the boat that will take me to Battersea?"

And hallelujah, it did!

Fine, it was worth it to be able to go UNDER the Tower Bridge, even if my view of it was through a dirty window.

...and then after all that, and then walking to our bus stop, to get the bus that would let us out a block from our AirBnb, the bus never came. It kept saying it was coming on Google Maps, then it would say it was delayed, then that bus would disappear and Google Maps would start saying the next bus would be here in five minutes, then it would say it was delayed, and so on and so on. We played that out for about 30 minutes before I was finally like, "OMG guys I think we're going to have to walk."

Well, we HAD been living just a few blocks from Battersea Park all week without having stepped into it once, so a mile walk straight through the middle was a least a good chance to take it all in...

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!