elfs | It's Curricula Night!

I had a very interesting evening at Yamaraashi-chan's middle school. It started with my not being able to find a schedule because her mother had shown up and taken it. I found someone who could tell me where to go, and eventually found Yamaraashi-chan's first period class, Health & Physical Education.

The presentation was lame. Rather than actually give one, the H&PE teacher had a slide show using bad hip-hop music and some childish grunge font while telling us about bullying and bulima.

Next was the science class. First thing I noticed was a "For every girl who is tired of being weak..." poster. I flipped through the textbook and was amused to see a chapter entitled "Where Did Matter Come From?" The book gave a mealy-mouthed precis' of the Australian Aboriginal belief (so effectively far removed from our own culture that it was inoffensive), and then gave an equally unimpressive accounting of evidence for the Big Bang.

I was also annoyed at the teachers insistence about there being a "scientific method," and that science always follows the path of "question, hypothesis, materials, procedure, data, and conclusion." As my (real) scientist and philosophy-of-science friends are fond of pointing out, there is enormous discussion of what science is or what (if anything) qualifies as the scientific method.

The history professor was droll. "Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?" I noticed during his presentation that Yamaraashi-chan's mother had left, leaving only her new husband behind to shepherd Yamaraashi-chan and I through the rest of the process. "Mom was tired," Yamaraashi-chan said.

The math teacher looked like she had just graduated from college. Newly-minted, bright-eyed but not too experienced, she had a routine and she hoped it would succeed. Good for her. Unfortunately, she also had a slide show, although she spoke during it and gave a presentation of what we were seeing, rather than letting the slides do all the work as the H&PE teacher had done.

The art teacher was unimpressive. She obviously liked what she did, but I didn't get the vibe that she was really engaging. Still, we went through the materials she discussed (she spent a lot of her ten minutes telling us how underfunded the art department is). I browsed through one of the textbooks, Exploring Visual Design (Getta, Porter & Selleck, 2000) (Gosh, wonder why that one got my attention) and was amused by an entry in chapter two about comics that read "Cartoons often prefer not to create any sense of depth beyond the picture plane."

Leaving aside that the illustration was from Jan Elliot's Stone Soup comic-- and leaving aside the fact that a cartoon is a motion picture and a comic is stills (quick, someone page Scott McCloud!)-- do the writers of this slim tone not understand the economic reality of comic strips? They've been reduced to less that eight inches of horizontal space: you don't have room to illustrate a decent background in all that. Go look at any modern webcomic, where there's room enough for all, and you'll see plenty of depth. You can afford it when your ink is pixels, and your paper is 1024x768!

After that, we hit the Language Arts teacher, who seemed a reasonable sort.

Yamaraashi-chan's new stepfather seemed to be very cool. Very into the whole "I'm a step-dad" thing, too. Hopefully that whole new relationship energy thing will fade off eventually.