I just had the craziest day with my grandmother. My grandmother was born in a small farm town in northern Italy in 1915 (age 89). Her world was so totally different than the world of most of my friends grandparents here in the USA. She stopped school at 3rd grade due to the war and lived on a farm. They didn't have electricity in her town until after 1947. Just think about that and how it was here in Buffalo in 1947, almost 50 years after the Pan American exposition
lit up Deleware park.
She told me this story where someone from her town went to Venice and saw electric lights for the first time. They were really excited about the whole thing and went to a store where you could purchase light bulbs. They also bought some rope and brought all of it home. When he got home, he tacked the bulbs up with the rope and told his friends and family that they would be in for a big surprise when it got dark out. Needless to say nothing happend. I can't even imagine that world.
We also discussed feminism, religion, where Indians came from, cloning, gene therapy, and politics. It was great. She was so excited to learn new stuff. She told me that she wished should could have stayed in school and that she knows she could have been something. I think some of it conversation opened up totally new ideas in her head.
In the end we also talked about learning and why people are in school. I explained the difference between infering facts from understanding concepts and learning facts through memorization. I said there were so many different levels of learning and that I had mostly left the phase where you are in school to simply learn facts. I explained it like this and plan on using this comparison for the Art class I am teaching. Any kind of learning is like cooking. At the most basic level you learn what the ingredients are named and how to prepare them. Say chop carrots, dice onions, etc. At the next level you learn measurements and reading recipes and at that point you become confident following the instructions of others and producing well cooked meals. At some point you learn from the recipes you were taught, that certain flavor go well together and that certain spices can mixed to produce new flavors that compliment the standards. Say strawberry kiwi( I owe this to
(e:hodown) 's explanation of drug mixing) Then you can begin to move in the territory where you make your own kind of food and write them down in recipes which can be passed on to others. Nonna added in that it helps to have necessity in there, as it contribute to the overall speediness of learning. Say you need to eat and it's a war, and there are only things which you find in a forest. You will soon learn what is edible and what isn't. Faster than you would say you had an abundance of fresh vegtables from the grocery store.
We also talked about religion a lot. I come from an Italian Catholic family. She told me that they did not read the bible. Instead they read some other book that told them what the bible was about. That sound like major propaganda to me. In the book, they apparently said that "women were treated very badly before jesus came about." I had to question it. Which women and where?
This lead to a whole conversation about witches. Nonna asked me if I thought they were real and she remember people saying that they had "gotten rid" of the witches before her time. This lead to talks about natural healers for which she had a bunch of stories about old lady healers in her area, one of which healed her little nephews leg with a marijuana, egg white and gause poltice. She swore by it and that he was otherwise unable to walk as a child. They had taken him to doctors in the bigger cities who could do nothing a
nd then this woman was ab
le
to cure him. Was this women a witch? I told her I did not think so but that people would classify knowlegdeable or powerful women as witches in order to discredit them.
Then we got out the globe and talked about Native Americans walking to North America before Columbus and that they even had cities and governments.
We talked about early british bio-terrorism with small-pox blankets and this eventually ended up at DNA a couple hours later. All only a couple weeks after how does electricity work and was is nuclear power? Imagine if someone asked you that question? Where would you start? I started with describing what Ii understood about atoms. Then we asked my phone for more details, which totally amazed her. I had to explain the internet too before that. The phone also gave us the maximum expected lifespan of horses, 13 is considered "retirement age."
Nonna, also told me that most of the Italians in America when she came were Sicilian and that in Brooklyn, a huge sector of the population spoke sicilian and not Italian.
