Eclectic Parent

One of my sister-in-laws once exclaimed that we homeschool by google. I was explaining what we do and she suddenly figured out a way to explain it to everyone else. Going with the flow, dancing along, surfing through life. Exactly. Not that we look everything up online, but that we flow from one subject to another like surfing the web. You know, when you search for when to plant your garden and end up downloading new songs because one link flowed into another into another into another like all water eventually flows into the ocean.

As we sat waiting for our post-St Patrick’s Day parade lunch on Saturday, we were telling them that grandma would be watching them while mommy and daddy went to a concert: Flogging Molly. It’ll be our 3rd annual Flogging Molly concert for St. Patrick’s day. D points out that flogging means hitting. Evidently feeling quite detail oriented, I explained that it is used to mean hitting now but that specifically it means to hit with something like a whip. Which led to a discussion of how it was strongly associated with the British navy in the 18th and 19th century. After talking about how much it would hurt, how many lashes they thought a person could receive and how it just wasn’t very nice, they decided it was a strange name for a band.

From there, we started naming other bands. We were surprised when D named the Black Eyed Peas. And in that surfing information way, D bringing up the Black Eyed Peas brought up the Yes We Can speech remake by will.i.am, who’s their lead singer. After a brief interlude into politics, he explained that at art they’d played songs and guessed if it was the Rolling Stones, the Beatles or the Black Eyed Peas. Never could figure out if the teacher was doing it or just some of the kids, but an excellent exercise.

After our brief explanation of the figure out the music game, we were back to band names. The kids started naming bands they knew that either had strange names or names that meant something - the Beatles for instance, which led to giggles about picturing little bugs playing instruments. There are bands named after the person who forms them: Dave Matthews Band. Bands that sound like they are named after a person, but aren’t: Jethro Tull (actually Jethro Tull is named after a person, but not someone in the band - an 18th century inventor). Some times the band’s name doesn’t give a hint of the kind of music they play. Names like The Kinks, The Who or The Band don’t really tell us anything about their music; but Anthrax, The Screaming Trees or Smashing Pumpkins bring to mind something loud or crazy.

But does the feel of the name has to match the feel of the music? While we were talking about how bands come up with names, daddy brought up R.E.M., meaning rapid eye movement, which was randomly chosen from a dictionary. After we explained that rapid eye movement was associated with dreaming, D wanted to know if their songs were about sleep. And eventually we meandered back to why Flogging Molly was called Flogging Molly. For years the band frequently a pub called Molly Malone’, which was a huge support. The felt, as they played there every week without getting very far, they felt they were “flogging.”

Not a bad way to take up the time between ordering and getting lunch.

(more music tomorrow: Bopping Along To A Different Drummer)