Self Directed Learning Through BBC 3

Today has been one of those days that self directed learning is evident and blossomed for the twins.

The twins spent their washing up time listening to BBC Radio 3 which they have done a lot of since going to the Halle event a little while ago, I asked them why they had chosen to listen to BBC 3 today and Oliver informed me that the presenter explains each piece before it is played, which was interesting to hear.

I looked online at who they were covering today and it turned out to be Robert Schumann, who after committing himself to an asylum ended up never coming out and spending his last days there.

I read the twins the synopsis about Robert Schumann that the BBC presented and the twins wanted to know more about what an asylum was and why he was committed and why he died there, we also looked at the Wikipedia entry which lead to the kids asking lots more questions.

We looked at Asylums on Youtube to discover what they were and why we no longer have them, through a couple of useful documentaries..

They also asked about Syphilis and we talked briefly about sexually transmitted diseases which we will cover more in depth at a later date but for now we just looked at the possible reasons he could have contracted it and the use of Mercury which people were treated with as a medicine back then.

This obviously lead to the question of what is Mercury so we found the Mercury element on our poster of the Periodic Table and they wanted to know more about it so we looked at the following video:-

 

The kids used a good analogy of the Mad Hatter from Alice in wonderland and we talked about why Hatters were afflicted with madness (We also talked about how the author used history to come up with the character of the Mad Hatter) 

We used our own town of Oldham as an example, as Hatting was one of the main industries besides coal and textiles and towards the end of 1756, Oldham had emerged as centre of the hatting industry in England. Due to this little fact we thought we would look up some information on Oldham's asylums and see if there were a lot of asylum patients in Oldham, although we did not come up with any particular facts regarding patients we did come up with some interesting facts about Oldham Boundary Hospital's Workhouses and imbecile wards which you can find here. 

(The twins also asked about the poor law's which I decided to distract them from, as I want to keep this on track so that question will be filed on my to do list of topics).

There is a hat museum in Stockport that we may pop in and visit next week if we have some time during our packed schedule for next week. If we do I will update here on what we saw and learnt.

We talked a little bit about how their grandmother was in an asylum due to her having Schizophrenia and bipolar and talked about some of the treatments she would have received and one of them we know was Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and how medicine and its understanding has changed through new developments of drugs and other therapies and developing understanding of mental health conditions.

We will look more into Mercury and I will find some interesting things for the twins to do, I will update here once we have done that..

All in all a lovely day of the demonstration of the places self directed learning can take you to!..