Interesting Monday: An anarchic curriculum

Pictures: Hwa Young for Madlabuk.

If it was back to school for everyone last week, this Monday night had something of the anarchist’s curriculum about it, as the first “interesting Monday” took place at Madlab in the Northern Quarter. Wanting this great space to be for a wider community than hardcore coders, the idea of “interesting Monday” was hatched – probably on a dull Monday some time over the Christmas period. A cross between the “school of everything” concept, and a “TED for everyone else”, I was pleased to be asked to speak at the first event. “We think you might have an interesting topic,” Asa Calow emailed me.

First class was cookery. Fresh with his new Bible, “Dough,” Guy “I never cook” Dickinson was extolling his new found ability to bake bread. Fresh baguettes were handed out, whilst he showed us how to mix flour, water and yeast, and how to knead the resultant dough. After an uninspiring time with a Panasonic breadmaker, Dickinson was enthusing about the real thing – and the rapt audience included a couple of other bread enthusiasts who chipped in with their own take on making the perfect loaf.

I think we were all quite surprised that our first presentation wasn’t a talking head or a Powerpoint but something as primal as a man with a bowl and a bag of flour. The only powerpoint of the evening was a necessary one though, as Asa Calow talked us through the “maths of knots.” Mathematicians have a way of describing the world which is almost, but not quite, incomprehensible to non-mathematicians; and as the coolest dressed maths teacher that you’d never had, Asa did a great job in introducing us to the (only in maths) concept of the “unknot” (a circle), as well as describing the typology of knots, and how mathematicians had unravelled their secrets. The maths of knots was used in untangling DNA to quantum physics, and the Boy Scouts were not mentioned once.

My own topic, Victor Gollancz and the Left Book Club, had come about because when I’d first read about it – in a history of Gollancz publishing – I’d been fascinated. In 1936 the left wing publisher Gollancz created the subscription book club “The Left Book Club” to distribute political books to a wider audience. Some fifty thousand people joined up, and in the political ferment of the thirties, “left book clubs” sprung up throughout the country; though congregated mainly in the more prosperous south, the biggest group existed in Manchester. They published George Orwell (“The Road to Wigan Pier”), Arthur Koestler, and the first ever Western interview with Mao “Red Star Over China”. Over the next few years the club was a key conduit for political thought that indirectly helped lead to the 1945 Labour government. There were some interesting parallels with today, where an underwhelming left wing government hasn’t managed to engage with a politically interested citizenship.

If left wing thirties political though and knot mathematics had got the audience wishing for home time, the final session was Aliki Chapple’s “drama class”, where, clearing the space we undertook a number of exercises around “non-verbal communication.”

Exercises commonly used with actors were tried out on the bashful audience and an evening that none of us knew what to expect from, turned into something very interesting indeed. The next Interesting Monday is in February. All are welcome.