Really? I liked making dioramas a lot. At the very least they got me to think in a 360 degree sense what the life of Abe Lincoln or whoever would have looked like.
They did not teach me to use commas.
But how else would we use up all the shoeboxes?
I made a rattlesnake out of pipecleaners for my desert scene!
I don't think I ever got to make any dioramas as a kid. My older siblings' classes made them, and I remember looking at them with AWE.
Also, one wrong word about the National History Museum dioramas, and I will, um, think up something with which to torment you.
Are you saying that learning how to convey information in a variety of media is a useless skill, Becks?
National History Museum dioramas are exempted, both for being awesome on their own and for inspiring Hiroshi Sugimoto. I'm strictly talking dioramas of the shoebox and pipe cleaner variety.
Maybe dioramas make more sense when combined with a trip to the National History Museum.
I built the Athenian acropolis out of sugar cubes and chalk once. It was fun. But then it tipped! And broke. But I already had been graded.
I got a free copy of this book recently. I can't wait to sit down and really start not reading it.
My rattlesnake will get you, Becks!! sss, sss.
I once made a giant topological model of the great state of California out of home-made play-doh! (That project nearly killed my mother, I am now remembering.)
Oh, and once we made a model of a cell out of cake and candy. But that's not a diorama, just a model; forever, the word 'diorama' will presuppose the existence of a shoebox.
7.--That photo is pretty awesome, though it would be funnier if the buzzards were dining on a human.
12, whatever, you also dissed my group work. :)
5: To wit.
Dioramas for class? Major incentive for having children. The drawback to dioramas is in the assignments: teachers call for representational work of limited scope and sculptural range. I'll have to bring this up with the PTA.
On the other hand, I did have a really great experience with a craft project in school. In math class, we were assigned a project to build bridges out of toothpicks and glue in teams of four. We got different roles in the project, like architect and supplier and accountant. I was the architect for my team. Our bridge turned out to be the strongest of them all. I used lots of triangles in the design. (It was maybe 16 inches long and held up over ten pounds of canned vegetables strapped around the middle.) I did not get to take the bridge home. That sucked.
This was not a diorama.
I made a medieval castle out of sugar cubes in elementary school. While fun, it did not, to my recollection, inspire me to learn more about castles than I otherwise would have.
18 cont: This was in the 4th grade, incidentally. And I was expected it to be a horrible experience, as with most group work. (:P, heebie.) I was pleasantly surprised.
18: Bridges! Those were fun, too. (Good call on the triangles.)
To be serious for a half-second, isn't one of the pedaegogical goals behind diorama-building to get kids to overcome engineering problems?
The kid has a vision: four gun-slingers in a saloon. And then the kid has to figure out how to get them to stand up straight (retrofitting with an extra layer of cardboard on the back?), and whether it might not be easier to paint one or two of them onto the background.
Pipecleaners are wonderful, but to give them some oomph, not to mention stability, you've got to use some other materials, but what and how? And, oh my goodness, gluestick does not, in fact, hold down cloth! What did the instructions on the side say?
And so forth. (A nightmare for parents, I'm sure.)
Honestly, I think it's because the alternative is trying to get a bunch of kids to write essays about different climates and geological epochs, and who wants to grade those?
I'm generally for any activity that engages kids and gets them in the flow. Dioramas are a good way to spike a few kids' interest who may be generally not into school.
Either that, or it's a conspiracy by the pipe-cleaner lobby.
24 - Oh yeah, that's awesome.
I think a lot of my contempt for dioramas comes from the fact that my parents both were very hands-off with my education and refused to help me by making those trips to the craft store. So while my classmates had help with their projects and the benefit of pipe cleaners, paint, glitter, etc., mine were The World's Sorriest Looking Dioramas because they were made from whatever paperclips or whatever I could manage to scrounge from around the house. My teachers assumed that I had the same parental intervention as the rest of my peers and, thanks to being evaluated on that curve, I always got a crappy grade.
You may now all charge me whatever prorated amount I should have paid a therapist to bitch about this.
Oh god -- anybody whose on the site now should leave and go turn on channel 21 (WLIW) and listen to the Rolling Stones. Fucking amazing.
Becks, that is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Oh, man, I loved making dioramas. I fondly recall a diorama I made in the fourth grade about amphibians. My parents didn't do homework help, either, and certainly didn't take me to craft stores. Luckily, there was enough random crap in the house to put together a decent diorama.
31 - To be fair, they were really busy.
I built two intersecting barrel vaulted corridors out of sugar cubes and icing in eighth grade to illustrate how the vaults insected. Another kid stepped on it before it got graded.
27.--I couldn't remember how to spell it and decided to shove as many possible vowels in as possible. Did I go wrong somewhere?
Yeah the ligature goes before the d, not after.
I love it when you talk dirty...
Did any of you guys see that performance of "Salt of the Earth" just now, or the "Sympathy for the Devil" that preceded it? Yikes, those were scarily great. I may be buying this DVD.
The ligature goes on the clarinet!
And the fuck to oboe!
And-a one! two! one, two, three, four!
We don't all get that channel, Clown.
And the fuck to oboe!
I'm thinking of doing a double reeds–themed show in honor of discovering that the station just got some audiophile recording of the rite of spring and a cd with an oboe quartet.
You know, I think that either schools should explicitly teach the skills the lack of which makes diorama building so excruciating*, which I'm not sure is possible to do well, and *give* you (or sell at cost) the resources you need, like a package with construction paper and glue and pipe cleaners and glitter and this and that, or they should *always* give you an option to do a project that doesn't require those skills/resources.
* I thought "excruciating pain" was redundant, but merriam webster says that it's not necessarily so.
I had to look diorama up on wikipedia as I'd never heard of them -- as a school thing -- before.
Clearly Scottish education is impoverished, although we did get lessons in deep-frying, fortified wine-based alcoholic beverages and the use of improvised edged weapons ...
42 -- is it my fault you don't live here with all the cool kids?
I heart oboes. I do not, however, heart ben's podcast. I don't know what happened, ben. I re-downloaded the files, and they play fine in iTunes but not on my iPod.
That's weird, but at least they play fine somewhere.
WLIW -- now playing monks (or ersatz monks) Gregorianly chanting Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven".
(Not recommended as highly as the Rock 'n Roll Circus.)
I (my mother) did a diorama of La Guardia Airport. I gave up at midnight, I have no idea when or if she ever got to sleep that night. I learned nothing beyond a reiteration that she loved me. That's always good to know.
a diorama of La Guardia Airport
Holy hell. Were gigantic and impossible part of the assignment?
When I did my student teaching, I noticed that diorama-like craft projects were no longer only a grade-school thing, and I had mixed feelings about that. The seventh-grade history class did craft projects almost every week, most memorably the state seals incorporating themes from Minnesota history. (Student here spend a year on state history, which isn't nearly as bad an idea as it sounds.) Their final project was a board game.
On one hand, I don't think those projects really instilled any detailed knowledge. And they certainly seemed to become more about the drawing than about the information. But it seems like the information that was learned would be retained better. Honestly, my firmest memory from seventh grade history was that our teacher distinguished between nationals of India and Native Americans by referring to the latter as the "woo-woo Indians". Which involved making sort of a sotto voce war whoop and struck me as culturally insensitive even then. So I'm not sure that I would have lost anything by designing a state seal and actually remembering what I'd put on it.
My other encounter with student craft projects was in a crash English program for newly arrived immigrants who spoke no English, many of whom were refugees. These poor students would be tracked into regular ESL and then into regular English-language classes as soon as possible, and yet we spent several class days folding up tissue paper into little crumples and gluing the crumples onto paper--about two hundred crumples could be used to make a very nice American flag. We displayed the flags on the wall. Many of the students had been pretty much considered adults in their birthplaces--one of them was seventeen and had been a professional barber in, I believe, Kenya--and they weren't really impressed with that project, although they did it.
I simply can't believe there's not been a stronger outrage against this diorama travesty? Where's the hate, people? Where's the adolescent alienation?
53 -- while seventh grade was 7 years ago for me, I still remember that year of MN history... it was pretty bad (but maybe not as bad as it sounds, depending on how bad it sounds).
I'm with Becks. Busy mom + crafts projects = I spent most of middle school waiting for high school, where one only writes papers (or so I was falsely led to believe! luckily college has been diorama-free, so far).
52: "Gigantic" was definitely part of the specs. It eventually ended up being 4 huge sections. La Guardia also ended up being for mixed civilian/military/NACA (now NASA) research use 'cause it took all the plane models I had hanging from the ceiling.
Not helping with homework is respectable, even correct, but refusing a trip to the fucking craft store? Careless or near-abusive. I mean, what, was the craft store in some other city? Did the family not make weekly trips to a mall or a shopping district? Jesus. (obv., not really intended as an attack on Mr & Mrs Becks, who have raised a lovely daughter).
But I'm not hating on the dioramas because I loved them. I was a model-making geek who ended up an architect (the first 4 semesters of archischool are 75% models).
But seriously, is it so bad that only 98% of school is either writing or math? Does it need to be 100% to satisfy those intimidated by glues so fearsome that they're edible?
55: Why was it so bad? I was surprised by how interesting and detailed the materials were and how well much of it was tied in to broader themes in US history. Of course, this was in a lavishly-funded first-ring suburb of Minneapolis.
But it's true that the other seventh grade class spent the whole time reading alound, round-robin-style, from the textbook.
(I actually like the idea of a year of state history--not from a sort of state-nationalist perspective (aux armes, citoyens de Minnesota!), but just because it allows you to study history in a different way than when you're dealing with vast sweeps of time and space.)
My father tells me that when he taught freshman comp as a grad student, one of the actual English professors had students make collages for an assignment...so college need not always be craft-project free, I guess.
I think a strong argument could be made (if one were the type disposed to making those arguments) that dioramas give a big additional advantage to already advantaged students. Students who don't have the parental involvement (or inclination) for craft projects are unfairly penalized for it.
To be hyperbolic, dioramas = classism.
Not helping with homework is respectable, even correct
What? If your kid is struggling, or doesn't understand something you just tell them "too bad'?
But seriously, is it so bad that only 98% of school is either writing or math? Does it need to be 100% to satisfy those intimidated by glues so fearsome that they're edible?
It's not as if there are only three things that can be taught in schools, writing, math, and dioramas.
57: I guess my concern with the drawing/crafting assignments is that they tend to require neither significant craft/drawing skills nor substantial information or analysis. So kids spend a lot of time doing something where standards are low or unclear--and those projects eat up a LOT of time, or at least they do in every classroom where I've seen them.
Even now, I'd like to design a state seal with scenes from Minneapolis history. (So what's holding me back? Only laziness.) I don't mind drawing instead of writing, but in my experience it's a lot easier to get an A on a drawing than on an essay.
My parents never took me to the craft store either, and my French teacher reduced me to tears in sixth grade because she accused me of not actually trying on my exceedingly-complex-craft-project-of-English-words-with-French-roots.
62: S/b "Minnesota", although what happens out there in farm country is almost always either dull or disturbing and doesn't really belong on a state seal anyway.
If your kid is struggling, or doesn't understand something you just tell them "too bad'?
Survival of the fittest. Nature knows best.
I don't think dioramas offer a bigger advantage to upper-class kids than ordinary homework assignments like essays do. Parental involvement or proof-reading an essay? Huge.
OTOH, 29 reminds me of something that has always puzzled me about teachers (profs too). They're pros, generally adept at catching on to BS long before the students have a clue that they're not getting away with anything. And the good ones do apply at least an internal curve to make sure that brilliant students don't get straight As through slackerdom while poor students are discouraged into despondence. But then you get situations like Becks, in which a student clearly has NOT gotten the adult help of her peers, isn't a total slacker/idiot, and yet the teacher blithely acts as if the student must have willfully turned in shit.
I know teachers are overworked, etc., but this just seems like a professional failure - if you can't assess a situation, then you shouldn't be handing out grades.
Yeah, these projects are crafts, but they don't actually have any standards appropriate to craft projects. They're just busywork. I'm against pretty much all homework, myself. Homework should not be part of any child's public school experience. And dioramas are an egregious case of homework.
Uh, how big a portion of you guys' grades was diorama quality? I don't recall it being that big a deal. Unpleasant for those who were not dioramically-inclined, to be sure, but there were a lot of kids who hated (e.g.) writing, too, and there was a hell of a lot more of that. But then, I liked doing dioramas.
I'm down with the no-homework plan, though. And as for 66, it's mostly that not all teachers are good teachers. Sad but true.
66: Are you nuts? I did an entire presentation in high school that was utter and complete bullshit from A-Z. I'm pretty sure that the teacher didn't realize it. Either that, or she thought it was really entertaining. Because I made an A+. My topic was "The effects of the Mojorovichic discontinuity on anatidaephobia".
"So kids spend a lot of time doing something where standards are low or unclear..."
This is refreshing to me, because the educational system is so grades-driven. Having flexible standards once in a while, where a student gets out of an assignment whatever they put into it, is really nice in a Montessori idealistic way. And ultimately it's important to plant the idea in students' minds that they may be able to find a job they enjoy; that there are other incentives than grades/salaries.
I had a number of friends who had awesome state history modules in middle school or junior high. It sounds to me as though it could be done well--by a teacher who really knew what he or she was doing. I proofread a masters thesis on political and ethnic tensions in Minnesota during the late 1800s over Prohibition. From an intelligent presentation of some of those primary documents, a teacher could get a class to study historical methods, political philosophy, urban mapping, early feminism...
Done poorly or without enthusiasm, local history units could suck, though. A lot.
anatidaephobia
One of my favorite Far Side cartoons.
I loved my New Mexico history class in middle school (I think I've mentioned this here before). New Mexico history is very interesting.
60: No, of course you help a kid who's lost. Since we're talking about parents who basically build their kids' dioramas, I took it as a given that we were defining "help with" as "do."
I agree with 65 to 59. To use class stereotypes, will the mechanic father be able to provide more useful assistance on a diorama or on an essay about the Federalist Papers? I think dioramas - and other non-text, non-math projects - provide opportunity to precisely the students who didn't get flash cards in the crib and 30 minutes of reading time at bed every night (the latter is less class-dependent, but is probably close to universal in upper-middle households and much, much less so in working class and down).
61: Well yes, it's not just 'reading, 'riting, and 'rama-ing. But most of the objections to dioramas apply to just about any non-writing, non-math project. Drawing? Native talent. Collage? Dependent on parental collection of National Geographic. Collecting leaves? Supervised time outside and/or access to nature. Etc.
66: I'm not trying to idealize teachers. I just mean that, when I became a peer of teachers, I realized that many/most of them have well-tuned BS-detectors, simply by virtue of experience. They may not always call BS, but you'd have to be pretty stupid/detached not to learn anything about the deceptive methods of 12 year olds over the course of 20 years teaching them.
And I know, stupid/detached does describe a big % of 20 year veteran teachers....
I made a Pembina oxcart model for one of my Minnesota-history assignments. No diorama though. I also reconstructed a snapping turtle skeleton fished from turtle soup.
71: My problem is that the craft projects usually aren't for pure fun/artistic development or for the sake of information. A lot of the kids in the class I taught saw them as a time-waster, neither really creative nor really intellectually challenging. They didn't like doing them.
In fact, I actually took a hippie-type class for two years of junior high where we all designed our own projects. I mostly loved it, but it was one of the most unpopular classes on the roster with most students.
Craft projects and self-directed learning don't work well in a non-craft-based, non-self-directed environment. They're rarely well-planned and they often come across to the students as rinky-dink bullshit because they aren't graded rigorously and they don't ressemble anything else on the syllabus.
This isn't an argument against craft projects, actually; it's just an argument against bad ones that are poorly integrated into the curriculum.
Prohibitionwise, my great-great-grandfather was implicated in the murder of a prohibitionist, but he walked. He was seen having a beer with the jury afterward. Frontier justice was crude but effective, against prohibitionists anyway.
78: If only you could have given a talk to my seventh graders. The other big hit of our semester was a prairie fire which caused multiple fatalities, and I think a potential murderer would have gone over very well.
77 - I do think that dioramas miss the point with a lot of kids. But I think that's a worthwhile price to light up a few kids who may be out to sea on most schoolwork. Multiple learning styles, that kind of thing.
You people are crazy. Dioramas are TEH SUCK.
I can only assume that the reason you don't all realize this is that you aren't yet the parents who have to drag ass to the craft store, supervise the godforsaken mess-making, deal with the frustration and tears, "help" with the engineering/fine motor skills thing, and then figure out how to get the goddamn thing to school the next morning.
Not to mention figuring out where to put the fucking thing when it comes home, so that it won't break or get sat on by the cat. Oh, let's put it in the middle of the kitchen table! Where we can look at it! And move it every time we clean or set the table, then put it back, then move it, then put it back, before eventually it gets retired to a shelf somewhere in the kids' room to collect dust with all the other crap kids become emotionally attached to.
Shorter rant: if you want to teach kids engineering, give them legos or tinker toys or something. Problem solved.
Maybe you should just have kids who don't get weirdly attached to lame dioramas for school.
Or take the teaching moment that's obviously there, and explain about how all things must pass.
I think my desert diorama lasted ten years before we finally pitched it, and the rattlesnake, into the void.
My mom is a sentimental pack rat. She still has all the acceptance letters from when I was applying to college.
B, I hear that PK's school has joined a diorama-enrichment pilot program.
"More and better" is their slogan. Sure, one or two dioramas will not accomplish much. But ten or twenty dioramas will change a kid's life. Guaranteed.
80: I think it might be helpful for kids such as I was to talk about why a model or a drawing would be useful and how it expressed information differently than prose. I enjoyed doing projects like that, but they never seemed like "real" schoolwork since they were so easy and I knew they wouldn't be graded with any rigor. But in retrospect, I think I could have gotten a lot out of them if we'd talked about it more. Of course, that was the case with about 85 percent of my pre-college education anyway.
84, 85, 86: You forgot "circumcise that poor child before all the other boys make fun of him." You guys are slipping.
Keegan made me a diorama for my birthday a couple of years ago. It was of the opening jumpball of the UNC-Illinois national championship game with little origami players and officials and the ball suspended from the top of the box.
91: Probably not. We were playing the "mama, ask me what I'll do when I have a kid" game in the airport the other day, and when I asked him if he wanted to have a kid with a woman, with another man, or maybe by himself, he thought about it and said "with a woman, because I just think that would be more fun."
Of course, if I followed your advice in 84/85, he'd just marry a rattlesnake, since a reptilian lack of emotion would be what he'd be used to.
Yeah, a big part of the reason I hate dioramas is that they seem to be the school trying to fool itself into thinking that its curriculum actually has some real redeeming merits, some real attempt at providing some genuine intellectual stimulation as opposed to a bunch of meaningless rote learning. And in my experience, it's just a meaningless, fake, hypocritical gesture. At better schools, that might be different. If the curriculum was *actually* based around getting students to think creatively, then dioramas wouldn't suck.
92: And do you still have it? And where is it? Hmmmm?
Collecting dust. Still, I admit the sentimental factor there would get to me too.
95: It's not so much schools fooling themselves as that a lot of assignments or curricular development gets created by people who know what their goals are, but then is either filtered down or adopted by people who don't keep up with pedagogical literature, or who see other teachers doing it and adopt the thing without really thinking it through. Which is, of course, a larger problem of pre-packaged curriculum and assignments; one does better work as a teacher when one thinks through the goals and methods of what one's doing. Unfortunately, we're not as a society overly inclined to provide teachers with the ability or opportunity to do that much.
98: Well, if you read my 95 as meaning "the actual methods used to teach at the school" rather than "the methods nominally used to teach at the school" then I think my comment holds. (And I think "curriculum" is used in both senses.)
I don't know what happened to the dioramas that got made around the Mormon household, but if the fate of our paper dolls are any indication, they became kindling, which is, in the long run, okay.
"I think dioramas - and other non-text, non-math projects - provide opportunity to precisely the students who didn't get flash cards in the crib and 30 minutes of reading time at bed every night."
I suppose dioramas level the playing field in the same way that a "collect a stool sample" project would, but, like the stool sample, I can't say what kids actually learn from making them.
I kinda like it that your family of origin is the Mormon household, JM.
We're a terrible example of a Mormon household, though. I suppose it could've been the JM family household?
102: Arguably, they require students to think about, visualize, and/or research the subject they're dioraming. They also let students who are hands-on types think about a subject in 3-d, which for some learners is a much, much better way of internalizing a lesson. Plus, art and craft skills are themselves worthy of instruction, and depending on the materials used, you might get in some chemistry or physics as well. I think the basic idea is integrated or interdisciplinary learning, which is a cool idea.
I'm just not sure that dioramas, as usually practiced, really do those things all that well.
Collecting a stool sample also forces one off the couch, and, depending on the materials used, you might get some chemistry and physics as well.
Not to mention all the 3-d, hands-on learning. For many, collecting a stool sample is a much, much better way of internalizing a lesson.
Okay, you asked. God forbid someone should actually answer you.
I can actually easily imagine the "collecting a stool sample" thing being an absolutely *fabulous* lesson in a biology class. You could culture the thing. Great lab skills.
I don't think I asked anything. But if you think I'll stand against you on this "collect a stool sample" issue, you are sorely mistaken.
Better not or I'll throw poo at you.
I cultured a stool sample (and some other things) for a fourth grade science project. The sixth graders evaluating it were like "what's fecal matter?". I said "It's poop." Hilarity ensued.
"Hey Butt-Head. Did you know that (heh-heh. heh-heh.) 'scat' is another word for 'poop'?"
"Whoa. (heh-heh. heh-heh.) How do you know that?"
"I learned it when I did my report on feces."
I can't say what kids actually learn from [collecting a stool sample]
Who their real friends are, for starters.
In high school our chemistry class for the summer was being taught by a guy who I think got pulled in at the last minute. Didn't know a hell of a lot about chemistry, didn't regularly teach at my high school. Bio major or something. Asked him if my friend and I could do an "air pressure demonstration" for extra credit as that was the subject of the current chapter. Poor guy had never heard of a dry ice bomb. We did three on the lawn outside of class. Simultaneously put equal amounts of crushed dry ice and water in 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 liter plastic bottles. It was great.
116: That reminds me of a good friend who did his Senior-year final project on "Barn Burning." He got permission from the teacher and principal to ignite his replica barn (which really was a thing of beauty, he being a very good artist) on the practice football field. Our English class stood around and watched it burn.
(The project was actually more complicated than just burning shit; you had to come up with a song, a piece of artwork, and a physical object that related to your chosen work. I chose Invisible Man and made a large version of a water glass out of plexiglass, into which I placed a model glass eye, made from a cue ball.)
You should have just stolen a bunch of lightbulbs and brought them in.
Not that the glass eye thing isn't good too.
Heh. Shit, we already had the okay to burn things on school property—why not?
Speaking of lightbulbs, the one in my ceiling light burned out this afternoon so I've been sitting in the dark for several hours. I should probably get a new one.
I should also go to bed. Good night, all.
The decline of Western civilization -- sitting in the dark far into the night, staring blankly at the pixel screen, "communicating" with imaginary friends, touchingly confident that they are not really dogs.....
A *cough* colleague in graduate school had her lit classes make dioramas of Jane Eyre. Those things would show up in the graduate lounge at various times through the year, and she would rave about how creative they were and such rot. That they let her into a PhD program straight from middle school I count as sure evidence that the program was in decline from before I got there.
Dioramas are at least time-limited -- Science Fairs seem to take longer than most masters programs.
Woof!
35: Before it got stepped on, did you pick up on the fact that intersecting barrel vaults produce ellipses?
Speaking of lightbulbs, the one in my ceiling light burned out this afternoon so I've been sitting in the dark for several hours.
A sure sign of a college aged male is not having basic shit like light bulbs around the house.
Ah, memories.
127: Yeah, the geometry of it all was pretty much the point. (Heavily influenced by my father the architect.) And the shards left after it was smashed were big enough that it was still fairly clear.
That happened to me last weekend. All the lightbulbs in my room and one in the living room except one burned out in the space of about two hours, so I ran out of lightbulbs, and then debated until it was dark whether it was worth going out to get more.
The first year after I got separated from my first wife, I lived in an apartment where the master bath had a row of lights over the sink. They all stopped working at once, indicating some problem with the switch itself. All I had to do was call the property management people and have them come fix it. Instead I peed in the dark for four months until I started dating somebody who called to have it fixed.
I don't care if y'all are dogs. These peeing in the dark stories are making me feel so much better about, oh, say, not having made an appointment with a doc yet despite having exactly three days of meds left and needing a new prescription.
(I promise to do it today or Mr. Ogged will start hating me again on Thursday.)
Instead I peed in the dark for four months
Awesome.
Science Fairs
Now, preps for *those* were fun. Nitrogen Tri-iodide exploding under feet, Tesla coils attached to the contiguous metal rims of all the cafeteria tables, Mag ribbon & thermite melting steel, sodium in water, phosphorus in air, and like that.
Christ. One of my roommates is this stereotypical college-aged male. Peeing in the dark isn't for him, as he's too metrosexually vain and needs his bathroom mirror, but will he EVER think to buy lightbulb? I don't even like him enough to nag.
/cranky rant
When I was on my project in Pennsylvania, I knew I was only going to be there for a year so when my light bulbs started burning out around month 8, I just didn't feel motivated to replace them. Why bother buying new light bulbs when I was only going to be there a few more months? It was a furnished apartment -- it wasn't my stuff. My apartment got progressively darker and the last working bulb burnt out the day that I moved.
the day that I moved
Three cheers for efficiency!
The dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History were the subject of a wonderful paper by a feminist anthropologist a few decades ago: Donna Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy".
As I recall (and I'm probably inventing this) she analyzed the construction of the dioramas as instances of the construction of the (patriarchal) culture.
None of you burned-out-lightbulb-ignorers are moving in with me. No matter how much you beg. Reading is fundamental.
Reading is fundamental.
When I was settling in for a good read, I used the other bathroom.
Which is worse: peeing in the dark, or walking your kid to school only to find out that there's no school today?
I don't see what's wrong with either of those.
Today was diorama day, and B was really excited.
It depends on which day you were walking your kid to school. If you were walking you kid to school last Wednesday, for instance, and you found out there's no school today, that would be useful for planning purposes.
142: What would you do if you walked your kid to school only to find out that there was no school?
Aside from the haircut and home circumcision, I mean.
What would you do if you walked your kid to school only to find out that there was no school?
Nothing in particular. What's the big deal?
It was still dark out, and she really had to pee. Then the school was closed.
147: You people need to spend more time taking care of your own children.
What would you do if you walked your kid to school only to find out that there was no school?
Walk home, what else?
You people need to spend more time taking care of your own children.
No doubt. I am sure I am a horrible human being for a variety of reasons. But enough about me. Your comment seemed to imply that you had done something blameworthy by not knowing that school was closed today. My only point was that in the big picture, this does not seem like something to worry about.
The place we lived before we bought our current home was an enormous house in the middle of the woods that we rented with several roommates. It had some pretty serious long-term issues as a dwelling, one of which was that the wiring was terrible. The house ate light bulbs. They were like tiny sacrifices meant to appease its supernatural hunger for the pain of those that dwelt within. Eventually we just stopped trying with the really persistent lights, the ones where we'd replace the bulb and turn the light on and hear the filament pop. It was just huge and dark and cavernous by the time we left. I loved that house.
Also, dioramas: awesome. I loved making them, and I tend to be a very visual, hands-on learner and so I still remember things about those classes because of making a diorama.
And: NC requires a year of state history. That was probably my favorite class from all of jr. high.
I don't think B felt guilty so much as irritated that she didn't get the next eight hours off from being a parent.
Fortunately she loves dioramas, and had a plan for how to fill the time.
irritated that she didn't get the next eight hours off from being a parent.
Oh. Well that is perfectly understandable.
Did you carry a Coleman lantern from room to room, McManlyPants?
Okay, first of all, I got out of bed and then did the song and dance getting PK out of bed for no good reason. We could both have slept in. Second, the plans I had for today? Gonna be hard to accomplish with Mr. Pesty hanging around insisting I help him with his plans to build a mouse city. Third, dude: that walk is hard enough at o-dark-thirty in the morning; it's much harder in retrospect knowing it didn't have to be done. Not to mention the ass-dragging on the way home knowing that my usual morning schedule of "cheery cheery come on, let's go, come on get dressed, come on, eat your breakfast, come on, brush your teeth, okay, it's time to go, let's talk about subject and object pronouns all the way to school just for fun!" followed by oh my god I'm so fucking tired now it's time to sit on my ass for two hours sipping coffee and recovering from pre-noon false cheer is totally shot.
But hey, other than that? Nothing.
Or, what 154 said, only rantier. (Though it's only 6 hours on a school day, I'm sorry to say.)
Why no school—is there some Gay Mexican holiday in California today? If so, solidarity, B. For ogged.
Fuck Ogged. If he wants solidarity, he can come over here and babysit.
It seems odd that Pennsylvania doesn't teach state history, given that about half of all pre-Civil War US history takes place in Pennsylvania, and such places as Minnesota and New Mexico apparently require it.
Do other states have the experience of every single year of history class starting in 1608 and ending somewhere between the Gilded Age and World War II before starting again at 1608 the next year, or is that also a non-exciting Pennsylvania innovation?
re: 157
Sorry your day is off to a crummy start. I thought you were making a different point.
In Maryland, we did state history, U.S. history, and Ancient/World history in 4th-6th grades, respectively. I forget what we did in middle school, though I vaguely remember doing Europe and Asia in 7th grade and the Americas in 8th. High school had U.S. history, Government/Civics, and world history from 1500-present. There wasn't a senior year history requirement.
129: I only mention it because it's an interesting factoid that the gothic architects / masons didn't understand ellipses. They tried (repeatedly) to build groin vaults using arcs at the crossing and got very frustrated when the vault surfaces didn't align.
But now these things are done at school. Progress.
I don't remember ever having a world history class before high school. We did have a class called "Social Studies" which was something like 1/3 civics, 1/3 geography, and 1/3 vague platitudes about humanity and foreign cultures. This was one of the five basic departments in elementary school (Science/Math/English/History/Social Studies). In middle school we didn't have Social Studies any more; it was
6th grade: US history, 1608 through 1900
7th grade: US history, 1608 through 1875
8th grade: US history, 1608 through 1945
Then in high school we had "World Civ" for all 9th graders, which was pretty interesting, although taught by the football coaches. The other non-US history classes were very hard and I think they were all AP classes, so only overachievers took them.
My diorama-making skills are unstoppable.
Yeah. I don't remember, really, in what grade I made that. 7th, I think. But I'm not sure. I don't know what I was supposed to learn by making it, either--except that the pueblo dwellers had pretty fucking cool houses and that putting clay on styrofoam blocks was fun.
What's funny is that my Mom kept my diorama for twenty-something years until she moved last summer. Then I threw it out. Damned if I was storing it for the next twenty.
So should I assign dioramas in my intro to philosophy course, or what?
Tell them to make a diorama of the cave.
too easy. I was thinking, like, the form of the good.
Did you carry a Coleman lantern from room to room, McManlyPants?
OK, I am stumped by this. I have no idea what you're talking about.
170: Because your house was dark and cavernous.
169: We'll be setting up the new Flickr pool for all the reading group alumni to post pictures of their Being and Time dioramas shortly.
Oh, hey, yeah - wow. My brain.
No, mainly we just tripped over the cat. Actually, we did have to carry flashlights in certain parts of the house from time to time.
The more I think about the various ways that house tried to kill us, the more fond I become of it: the gas leak, the way Roommate Joe would fall down the stairs every other morning, the spiral staircase's supports slowly detaching, the spider the size of a softball glove. Good times.
I bought some lightbulbs today. And there was light.
Tomorrow I think I'll separate the waters. Then maybe make some land.
I've heard good things about creeping things.
Emergency BLEG: I've just learned that my 7th grade son must interview a scientist -- any science -- for about 10 minutes. By 10 pm EST tomorrow.
Anyone interested?
I don't know how many scientist we have here Charley (now that Bob has left us), but lemme see if I can find one in the real world.
Isn't rilkefan a scientist? And someone else once made sciencey sounding comments.
I have no science skills and can't recommend any of the scientists I know on such short notice, but I'm replying, because I hope that my action will make this thread seem active. I hope that. Of course my commenting could just be the kiss of death.
I'm a social scientist. Which means, no help here.
Isn't Cryptic Ned a virologist?
Yes, but if you remember his subfield don't post it. It identifies him too closely, and he asked me to edit it out of a comment once before.
Didn't remember and good to know not to post it.
yeah, unfortunately, tenure politics can make young scientists (or academics of any sort) a bit skittish about being tied to their online yapping
ten minutes? i never comment, but i guess i could delurk to do that. and i'm definitely a "hard" scientist....
