Fantastic Little Chicadees II

I have raised my kids right. Today one of my fourth years brought a panettone in for the class. She was like "Is this the stuff you brought for us last year?" and "It is from Italy, so is it right?" Turns out that she was thinking of pandoro, but that's all right. Later this afternoon I located and found pandoro to bring before Christmas break (my own tradition). But I thought, how fantastic that she saw something Italian cultural, recognized it, and brought it in! I was impressed.

A bit too much ink still smudging the top, but not too shabby for my first attempt at printmaking!

Fantastic Little Chicadees

I had the best time yesterday with two of my little chicadees at the Virginia Museum of Art's Teen Renaissance Symposium. And my two little chicadees were so good. We left the school around 9am and they threw everything they had in the back of my car and I looked at their empty hands and said "I notice that there are no notebooks in your hands." So I pulled out some new notebooks for them, admonishing them to use them for this symposium and for other fantastic lectures that they will have the opportunity to attend in college--lectures that maybe have nothing to do with what they are studying, but that will be interesting and that will broaden their minds anyway. I also asked them to think of questions they have and to write them down. We all piled into the car and soon arrived at the museum.

The first session of the day was on Michelangelo and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was based on findings by a Dr. Meshburger reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oct 10, 1990 that the red cape around God and the cherubs in the Creation of Adam resembles the cross-section of a brain. We then listened to some Renaissance music and danced a Renaissance dance. After lunch, there was a fantastic lecture on Fibonacci's number and the Mona Lisa, a lecture on feminism in Shakespeare, and a commentary on the work of Durer (a special exhibit of his engravings is currently at the museum). We also made intaglio prints (my first attempt, which I will post). Dinner and a lecture on Leonardo's view of the body and soul. I had a blast. The kids had a blast. The kids were renaissance dancing in the parking lot. It was a fantastic day.

Amilynne and Vincent

I just got off the phone with Amilynne and she had the best news: this weekend, she saw her first Van Gogh. There was a special exhibit that came to her museum with lots of cool artists, but of course the Van Gogh was really what mattered. She said that she stood in front of it for 10 minutes and cried. I did the same the first time I saw a Van Gogh--the resident one at the Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. When Ami was telling me about it I was the biggest geek but I cried too. Standing in front of a Van Gogh just evokes such strong emotions.

It's one of those things that you really just have to DO. Van Gogh has to be seen in person, becasue he is all about the paint. And no matter what, a flat reproduction can't get the fantastic effect of the paint across.

I have to admit, though, that it was quite fun this last summer before Amilynne had seen a Van Gogh to tell her about the fantastic Van Gogh exhibit that came through here. A couple of years ago I got us a pair of matching Van Gogh books, and all of the paintings from this exhibit were in there, so over the phone I was all "...Now if you'll turn to p. 128, I saw that one too..."--she was green with envy. Her eyes even turned green. Permanently.

Next we just need to take a trip to New York to see the Starry Night.... We might need 15 minutes of weep time in front of that one.

Who am I kidding? The must is that my sister and I just plain must museum hop until we're dead. It's all so much better in real life.

Electric Coconut

Today I was administering a test in another teacher's classroom. This classroom belongs to an English teacher, and the walls were plastered with definitions of literary terms and parts of speech. As I looked around, I really had to wonder why parts of speech are so foreign to my students. The information is there for them.

The first thing that hit me, though, as I walked into the room was an overpowering coconut/vanilla smell. Woah! The teacher had a plug-in air freshener in the wall. By the time I left 90 minutes later, I was heady with coconut. I wondered how the students, still in the room testing, were faring.

It's unfortunate, though, that as strong as that coconut scent was, once I left the room I left the smell. If I had been in a room of cigarette smoke, I would have stunk like cigarettes all day. I do wonder why it is so hard to make a pleasant smell stay.

Catapults

Last night the Simpsons had a catapult in their intro: the couch in front of the TV was attached to a catapult and they ended up catapulted over a mountain range. I laughed. I do love a good catapult. It all started with seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 10th grade English. I laughed so hard that I fell out of my chair when that cow came flying over the castle wall. Then again, a couple of years later, I was watching Saturday Night Live and they had one of their fake commercials for the Yard-A-Pult, a personal size catapult that gets rid of nasty things like baby diapers, hot coals, and dead pets by flinging them over the fence. Once again: laughed so hard that I rolled off the couch.

The real mystique is being able to throw things really really far using only physics. No gunpowder, no explosions, just gravity and torque, and CRASH! (or BOOM! or SPLAT!, depending on what you're throwing...) Total destruction.

When I was in Torino, I went to the medieval park they have down by the Po, and inside there was the coolest weapons shop, and they had a working mini-catapult. WOW. I wished so much that I had space in my luggage for that. It was beautiful, made of polished wood and all. And it would be so fun for flinging things around the house.

They also had guillotines in two sizes. But that's a topic for another day.

Life ReDesign

Sometimes I waste time thinking about what I would have designed into my life if I had started out with a bit of foresight. Nothing major--I'm not talking about warping into some weird life that doesn't resemble mine, because I have a good life and I'm quite happy with it. All the same, sometimes I find that I'm confronting a task and that my skill set doesn't quite measure up, and I think about when I could have possibly gotten the training I would need to attack said tasks head on. The skill set most often popping up as deficient is my skill with computers.

Now I'm not a complete idiot. I am a beast on Word and I'm darned good with Excel, and I make the meanest PowerPoint presentation you've ever seen. I love to play around on Illustrator and Photoshop, and I've even created (rudimentary) classroom materials with them. It's all kind of fun, because I don't know computers very well and so I can believe that computers inhabit a world with order where the right formula can get you what you want every time. It is this idealism that sinks my soul when I come up against a task that I want to figure out for myself but that just doesn't make sense, especially if it's something frivolous that I really could do myself but I just think it would be fun to make a bit fancier.

Or like blogging for instance. I would love to know enough to widen the column of writing on this page just a bit more. Why? No reason besides the fact that I think it would look better. Or I would love to be able to put together a cool web page, but I honestly don't have the skill, especially because I would want it to look good, not amateurish.

So should I ever come up with the ability to go back in time knowing what I know now, I wonder if I wouldn't make another choice--say web design--instead of what I do now. Or somehow in addition to what I do now.

It just would be kind of cool to understand better this cute little box I sit in front of every chance I get.

Breathing Again

How splendid is it to be able to breathe in again without accidentally inhaling too much political rhetoric! Sure, not all my guys won on Tuesday, but after watching the presidential race whittle down since last winter, WHO CARES! It's just nice to be able to see something different on the news (or to ignore the news altogether without feeling guilty about it).

On the downside, the people who live above me have been SO loud lately. They were shouting so loudly about 40 minutes ago that Amilynne could hear them over the phone. Now they're pounding around and stomping or dropping things on the floor or something. I usually try not to pound on the ceiling until nighttime, because during the day things are just more loud than they should be at night, but this is rediculous, and far beyond the noise of normal life. This has got to be the worst thing about living in an apartment.

The first nine weeks ends this week! Yippee! We're 25% through! And Thanksgiving's in 2 1/2 weeks! Yahoo!

Maria Full of Grace

Monday night we excursioned out to Williamsburg for a flick: Maria Full of Grace. All about a Colombian girl who decides to take a job smuggling drugs into the US by swallowing them. You would think that this would be tragic, and at times it is, but happily the movie didn't end in an absolute tragedy (although there is tragedy along the way) and that's good.

The movie also provides a glance into life as an illegal immigrant. It presents a very organized community that understands its environment and how to get by in it. What an issue illegal immigration is! I am worried that so many states are taking measures to withhold services to illegal immigrants. Of course I would prefer that all immigrants were legal, but I don't think that withholding services will effectively stem the tide of people leaving everything for a bite of the American hamburger. It will only create a wider diaspora between those that have and those who don't. How many people pushing for these reforms employ illegal immigrants to perform menial tasks an American wouldn't do?

How to fix all of this? I don't know. Giving opportunities for the poor of these countries to learn a trade may be the first step. Being willing to give legal status to the people who do our grunt work may also be a part of it. Keeping needed services from illegal immigrants is not the way to do this: it will only contribute to poverty, crime and disease in our society.