I began making sketches for Field III, a commissioned work (hi, Seth!), out by the labyrinth. They all were atrocious. (Sorry, Seth.) But I’m regarding that as a good sign: I am not content with first efforts and can in fact recognize bad composition. Whether I can develop a good composition is the next question.
Quick rant
I was behind a pickup truck this morning with a bumper sticker that floored me:
If you must burn our flag,
please wrap yourself in it first.
What is wrong with you people?
This was a brand new bumper sticker, not an old, faded tatty one. The W04 sticker was old and tatty, and I noticed a decided absence of any McCain/Palin stickers, but the brave stand the person in the truck was taking against the damned commie hippies was fresh on his mind, and apparently, fresh from someone’s emporium.
Much has been made of the resurgence of this mindset amongst the right since the election of President Obama, who is naturally going to take our guns away as well as, presumably, our white women, but to actually encounter it first thing in the morning was a bit much.
Labyrinth, 4/29/09
Painting
An odd thing happened tonight while working on Field I:
The little vertical strokes got messier, more complex, and then I started adding the little black shapes above the their usual place in the white field. All of a sudden I felt as if I were looking at a small, inchoate Last Judgment: tiny souls ripped from their frozen waste and sucked up into an even colder empyrean.
Awful. I hope it lasts.
I just remembered that I hadn’t updated my fans on what happened with Field II. It was sold for $60 at the “Tulips & Juleps” affair on Saturday night. I actually do not know who bought it. I’m trying to find out. The start of a brilliant career.
Labyrinth, 4/26/09, at the end of the day
What a glorious day! I spent the whole of it at the edge of the laybrinth, soaking up the sun, sketching in my ELP sketchbook, and working on the small improvements listed in the last post.
First of all, the easy changes I made:
Here you can see the planting of the ferns and the new position of the planter/lighting fixture.
And here, without any prologue, is the new vesica piscis of the labyrinth. Just remember, you asked for it:
Imagine this covered with Irish moss.
A different view:
And finally, the long view:
Well, it’s not a mound any more. Whether it’s any less distracting is up to the participant, I suppose.
Labyrinth, 4/26/09
I’m off to a) sketch my brains out, and b) do a little work on the labyrinth.
Some of it’s just easy stuff: planting the ferns over at the little earth dam, and moving the planter lights on the wall from just behind the north point to a more symmetrical position further east. Craig noticed that the other night, that now everything is in place, the very first lighting fixture I put up should be somewhere else. Also, a thank you is in order to Dawn and Terry: I had found a nice little hurricane lamp thing on a stand out at Target, and I thought two would be nice. Target had only one, and the intertubes said Carrollton had one. I emailed Dawn, and they brought it down last Monday. Terry claims it’s his Lichtenbergian Assignment L.08.9; I’m willing to accept that.
But there is one hard thing:
::sigh:: The mound in the conjunction of the paths. The little vesica piscis-like left-over shape. What to do? On Friday night, the general consensus was that I should get rid of it, i.e., flatten it out. As it stands, it kind of dominates the landscape. The whole thing would be prettier if it were flat.
In its defense, I meant for it to be an interruption, a barrier. When you stand at the entrance, it blocks your path to the center (even if the Path were not buried and inaccessible), a Holy Mountain, perhaps? There are reasons to leave it in place and just coax the Irish moss along to cover it quickly. Indeed, part of its problem is that it’s so ugly. I’ll try weeding the grass out first. The bits of pottery were for visual interest, but without heaping mounds of moss, they just look trashy.
At any rate, I won’t get to that until later this afternoon. If you have any interest in saving it, leave a comment. Or come by and throw your body athwart its holy summit.
Of course, if I had stayed with the old geometric style layout, I wouldn’t have this problem. There is still something very strong about this version that appeals to me. Alternate universes are a bitch, aren’t they?
Labyrinth, 4/23/09
This is not so much about the labyrinth as it is a new app I got for the iPhone called Pano. It allows you to create panoramic photos on the spot, to wit:
I like it.
In other news, last night was fabulous out there. I got back from Atlanta around 2:30 and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening just sitting and soaking up the considerable ambience. I will probably do the same thing this afternoon and night. I’ll do an update on the landscaping progress I’m making and still hope to make.
An anniversary
It was one year ago today that I stopped working on the Symphony No. 1 in G major. And since that day, I have written no music.
Yes, I’ve done a few exercises, one of which is promising, but on the whole I just haven’t been able to get back into that part of my brain. It’s not that I haven’t tried, although of course I have not tried very assiduously, it’s just that I’ve not been “inspired.”
And so I’ve piddled around, revising “Sir Christémas” and arranging “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” for two-piano accompaniment; I’m supposed to be revising the orchestral score as a standalone piece. But new, exciting work? Nada.
It’s not that I haven’t been creative, because I have. I have been taken aback at how strongly my interest in painting has elbowed its way into my brain. Probably a Lichtenbergian strategy to keep me from writing music. We got Coriolanus up and running, and Lacuna keeps plugging along on Wednesdays. I write. I sing in Masterworks.
But I haven’t written any music for a year. Maybe I can make myself feel bad enough about it to want to do something.
CRCT Festival Time
I have issues.
Specifically, as we head into our annual celebration of the Criterion Reference Content Tests Festival next week, I have issues with the questions purporting to provide data on our students’ information skills, aka research/reference skills.
Many are innocuous, asking which word comes first in ABC order, which guide words would include a specified topic, that kind of thing. But many are sloppy, betraying outdated perceptions of how research works even at the elementary level, or worse, complete ignorance.
Here are some examples, taken from the practice questions provided by the state, and which I’ve been using in review lessons (The Evil Game) with 3rd graders:
Which do you need to have if you are going to type a story on a computer?
- a database
- the internet
- writing software
“Writing software”?? Even kindergarteners call it a word processor, for heaven’s sake. So what we end up testing is not their awareness of text generation on a computer, but whether they can synonymize an archaic and unfamiliar term with something they use on a regular basis. And of course, it seems that the test makers are unaware that kids have more than a little experience on websites provided by PBS, General Mills, etc., that encourage them to “type a story.” So, if I don’t know what “writing software” is (to practice my handwriting??), and the last time I went to the computer lab we played on the Dora the Explorer website and wrote stories about our adventures, then the correct answer is obviously 2.
To keep a list of all the animals your class saw in a month, which is the BEST to use?
- a database
- a radio
- an encyclopedia
This inclusion of databases as a technology we need to test kids on is very amusing to me, because not even their teachers know how to use one. I mean, they know how to negotiate a database like the county’s Infinite Campus student database, but almost none of them have ever created a database for regular use, nor do they completely understand why one would do so. The reason is simple: Microsoft Office doesn’t come with a database. And for that reason, our teachers are trained to use Excel’s spreadsheets to keep lists of information in. They have no clue as to how that differs from a database like FileMaker or, heaven help us, Access. Do you know how much this makes me despair?
Of course, we know (or hope) that the student will eliminate radio and encyclopedia as choices because they’re just stupid, but then we’re not testing their information skills, are we?
Which do most people use to connect to the internet?
- database
- computer
- videotape
“Connect to the internet.” You mean like when I place my phone receiver in the cradle of my mo-dem and send the AT* commands to it? Confronted with a term he has surely never heard before, a student is thrown back onto his knowledge of what he’s encountered on the internet. Internet Movie Database? YouTube? Hm, your guess is as good as mine.
Read the part of the index below. Which page should you read to find the information on the bottlenose dolphin?
God in heaven. Yes, I know that a child with even half a brain should be able to untangle that, but is there anything correct about that sample’s formatting? It looks like something an actual 3rd grader would produce.
Try this:
Or even better:
You know, like an actual freaking index in an actual freaking book.
Mr. Pope wants to make an apple pie, but he can’t find his cookbook. Which resource is the BEST for Mr. Pope to use to look for another recipe?
- a database
- writing software
- the World Wide Web
Oh, where to begin? This question must have been written in 1998, including such quaint terms as “writing software” and “World Wide Web.” Seriously, does anyone call it the World Wide Web any more? Even the major newspapers have stopped capitalizing Internet and Web. The kids these days simply call it “the internet.” So do I. And once I’ve gone on the “World Wide Web,” where will I find recipes? Let me count the ways. Databases all, and found via Google, itself an enormous database. And what if Mr. Pope has one of these? If we’ve been as thorough in our teaching of databases as these questions seem to imply is our job, this question will thoroughly confuse a student.
Which address on the World Wide Web would MOST LIKELY have information about cats and dogs?
- www.toys.com
- www.pets.com
- www.birds.com
This is not an unfair question, but at my school at least I teach the kids that URLs must not be thought of as search engines, i.e., www.whatIwantofind.com is never the way to navigate the internet. Pardon me, the World Wide Web. Still, as an internet-age version of “Which book title would be best for Topic A?,” it’s unoffensive.
Which is the BEST way to select a topic that you will enjoy for a report?
- Find the topic that looks the easiest.
- Choose a topic that interests you.
- Ask a friend what she wrote about.
All right, I’ll close with a question that I really liked and had fun going over with the kids. What we do in the Evil Game is I show the question on the Promethean Board (a smartboard kind of thing) and ask the kids to hold up little cards indicating whether or not they understand what the test makers are trying to ask them. If I get a smattering of question marks or Xs, we stop and deconstruct the question.
With this one, we actually parsed the gender-specific approaches to the problem. I told the girls that #3 was their answer. When they denied it, I launched into a sample dialog: “What are you going to write about? I’m doing koalas. Let’s both do koalas!” They giggled and copped to the plea. The boys were looking smug, until I pointed out that #1 is the boy answer. They readily admitted to it.
The really interesting thing, I pointed out to them, was that the correct answer is actually ambidextrous. For the boys, the correct answer would be “Choose a topic that interests you.” For the girls, it’s “Choose a topic that interests you.” And along with all that, I gave advice on making the correct answer work in real life as well.
On the whole though, the questions our students will face next week during the CRCT Festival regarding information skills are not up to par. The state is not getting good data about how prepared our children are to engage the information age effectively. And because, as the Curriculum Liberation Front says, what’s unassessed is unaddressed, these flawed test items produce flawed and inadequate information instruction across our state.
