Elf hangs out with the fourth grade.
Jun. 7th, 2007 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsYamaraashi-chan's class had a field trip to the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park for the morning, and I volunteered to be one of the chaperones. I decided to take the whole day off, and Omaha and I would do something else in the afternoon.
I arrived at the school on time, checked in, and confirmed that the background check had cleared, allowing me to be around children. I knew where the classroom was, so I started walking down in that direction. As I did so, a little kindergartner kid comes hurtling out of nowhere with her arms open Barney-like, says "Hiiiii!" and gives me a big hug. I said, "Uh, where do you belong right now, little miss"?
Just then a woman came running down the hall, grabbed the kid by the arm rather roughly, and started hauling her away, scolding her with "What do you think you were doing? You don't just go up to someone like that! You don't know that man!" I felt sorry for the poor kid. I don't think the woman was trying to protect anyone's dignity, after all.
I walked into the classroom. Yamaraashi-chan's teacher is a gentlemen of infinite patience and I wonder often what he's doing teaching public school. As I walked in, he was leading the fourth-graders in a discussion of how one finds the volume of a tetrahedron. I doubt I could do that with copy of Von Nostrand's in front of me.
My group at OSPI was introduced to my group, and the other chaperones, and then we were herded onto the schoolbus. Yamaraashi-chan sat next to me, and on the drive to the park she read her Piers Anthony while I read my Charlie Stross. The bus driver missed the turn and we orbited the park twice before he found his parking spot.
We disembarked and were introduced to our docent (def: a museum or site guide who works for free or for a small salary), who then led us through the park. First we visited Split, which is little more than a stainless steel tree which the docent swears looks great when the crows perch on it. Then we tromped across the street to Stinger, a black steel enclosure eight meters across and two high, made as if a rectangular box were turned on its side and then bent with four corners, one side short enough to permit entry. "Composed of cross sections of tetrahedral and octahedral shapes and resting on a single point, it appears to hover above the ground." No, it doesn't.
Then we climbed up to the bridge that crosses the railroad tracks and the plastic digital photographs, Seattle Cloud Cover, passing by Typewriter Eraser Scale X, which looks like a typewriter eraser five meters tall hurtling down the hill. Why? I don't know.
I took the photo at our next stop, Love & Loss, which consists of an installation of two benches making letter "L"s, a reflecting pool for "O", a curving pass (spelling out the "S"s for "loss") and a deliberately crotched tree and a table making "V" and "E". The ampersand is a glowing rotating neon sign on a post four meters high. The installation looked very high-maintenence.
The docent engaged the children in a discussion of "love and loss," and what surprised me was just how much some of these kids had a grasp of the ideas. They're fourth-graders, for Set's sake, but one of them discussed nearly losing her mother to cancer, another talked about divorce. It was strangely painful and open.
We went past Eagle, and then Bunyon's Chess, at which one boy asked, "Who's Paul Bunyon?" Oh, well, I guess not all legends deserve to be perserved for all time, and a lumberjack probably isn't considered a positive role model in our environmentally sensitive era.
We then went to the vivarium, where a tree trunk is installed on its side, nursing mosses, ferns, fungi, and tiny seedlings. The log is decaying slowly, and the automation needed to create a forest-like environment to nurture all of the plants and insects growing on it is almost space-station quality.
We then passed through Wake on our way up to the pavilion for lunch. We sat down and chowed on sandwiches. I sat with Yamaraashi-chan and her friends. The girls were conversational, the boys were, well, boys. There are two "floating" art pieces inside the pavilion called Capulas, and Yamaraashi-chan got into one of them. There were almost forty kids in the whole excursion, and keeping the fair and taking turns in the spaces. I think these are two of the better art pieces in the place: they're interactive and they feel humane as furniture, but to honor them as unique pieces of art is somewhat silly: they should be manufactured as organic space creations inside the boxlike territories we call homes.
I kinda have to agree with Mark's recent assessment of the park: "It's a beautifully groomed park, with a great location and a wonderful view of the Sound. Unfortunately, someone has dumped some ugly piles of concrete and steel randomly on it." I generally like and get modern art, but too many of the pieces in the Olympic Sculpture park are there to be pretentious. When an artist says, "My intention in a new measure of man, in terms of free space, in terms of space that is defined by not enclosed, in terms of a measureable space that flows so subtly into the infinite that it is impossible to say where the boundaries of art and nature lie," my bullsh*t meter starts hitting the red peg. And too many of the pieces here are like that: they've been valued only by the echo chamber of artists and art critics.
Yamaraashi-chan's whole classAfter lunch, I took photos with my camera and two kids' cameras of the whole class, as mementos. Then my group wanted to go down to the waterfront and view Louise Bourgeois's Eye Benches, which are six giant, unblinking eyeballs facing out from a circular fountain. Inside the ring of eyeballs, the backside of each eyeball is a comfortable bench facing the fountain. The fountain is Father and Son, which shows two figures reaching out to each other; the water oscillates back and forth, obscuring one and then the other. It's one of the few clearly communicative pieces, one of the few that tries to say something other than "look what space I can take up with the money they gave me." We talked a bit about the stages of development as an artist, the surface, the discipline, the mastery, and the expression. Yamaraashi-chan asserted that "You should be a teacher. You're a good teacher, you have a loud voice, and you know everything." I assured her that I did not know everything, and I certainly did not have the patience for being a school teacher.
On the way back, a train separated us from the rest of the park, so we had to hike up the bridge then down the other side, then climb up the hillside to get back to the pavilion.
Elf Another harried chaperone handed me her kids to watch over while she took one of them to the bathroom. Eventually, everyone convened on the outdoor patio of the pavilion, and then we were herded back into the bus. I must say that fourth graders are quieter than third graders; last year's trip to the Burke museum the bus was louder than some rock concerts. At least, I thought so until I went to that Porcupine Tree concert in which I learned how loud modern concerts really are. Yamaraashi-chan took the camera and shot this rather good photo of me.
When we arrived back at her school, her teacher thanked us all for our time and attention, and sent us on our way. I had a lot of fun; Yamaraashi-chan is nifty and so are her friends.
I arrived at the school on time, checked in, and confirmed that the background check had cleared, allowing me to be around children. I knew where the classroom was, so I started walking down in that direction. As I did so, a little kindergartner kid comes hurtling out of nowhere with her arms open Barney-like, says "Hiiiii!" and gives me a big hug. I said, "Uh, where do you belong right now, little miss"?
Just then a woman came running down the hall, grabbed the kid by the arm rather roughly, and started hauling her away, scolding her with "What do you think you were doing? You don't just go up to someone like that! You don't know that man!" I felt sorry for the poor kid. I don't think the woman was trying to protect anyone's dignity, after all.
I walked into the classroom. Yamaraashi-chan's teacher is a gentlemen of infinite patience and I wonder often what he's doing teaching public school. As I walked in, he was leading the fourth-graders in a discussion of how one finds the volume of a tetrahedron. I doubt I could do that with copy of Von Nostrand's in front of me.
My group at OSP
We disembarked and were introduced to our docent (def: a museum or site guide who works for free or for a small salary), who then led us through the park. First we visited Split, which is little more than a stainless steel tree which the docent swears looks great when the crows perch on it. Then we tromped across the street to Stinger, a black steel enclosure eight meters across and two high, made as if a rectangular box were turned on its side and then bent with four corners, one side short enough to permit entry. "Composed of cross sections of tetrahedral and octahedral shapes and resting on a single point, it appears to hover above the ground." No, it doesn't.
Then we climbed up to the bridge that crosses the railroad tracks and the plastic digital photographs, Seattle Cloud Cover, passing by Typewriter Eraser Scale X, which looks like a typewriter eraser five meters tall hurtling down the hill. Why? I don't know.
I took the photo at our next stop, Love & Loss, which consists of an installation of two benches making letter "L"s, a reflecting pool for "O", a curving pass (spelling out the "S"s for "loss") and a deliberately crotched tree and a table making "V" and "E". The ampersand is a glowing rotating neon sign on a post four meters high. The installation looked very high-maintenence.
The docent engaged the children in a discussion of "love and loss," and what surprised me was just how much some of these kids had a grasp of the ideas. They're fourth-graders, for Set's sake, but one of them discussed nearly losing her mother to cancer, another talked about divorce. It was strangely painful and open.
We went past Eagle, and then Bunyon's Chess, at which one boy asked, "Who's Paul Bunyon?" Oh, well, I guess not all legends deserve to be perserved for all time, and a lumberjack probably isn't considered a positive role model in our environmentally sensitive era.
We then went to the vivarium, where a tree trunk is installed on its side, nursing mosses, ferns, fungi, and tiny seedlings. The log is decaying slowly, and the automation needed to create a forest-like environment to nurture all of the plants and insects growing on it is almost space-station quality.
We then passed through Wake on our way up to the pavilion for lunch. We sat down and chowed on sandwiches. I sat with Yamaraashi-chan and her friends. The girls were conversational, the boys were, well, boys. There are two "floating" art pieces inside the pavilion called Capulas, and Yamaraashi-chan got into one of them. There were almost forty kids in the whole excursion, and keeping the fair and taking turns in the spaces. I think these are two of the better art pieces in the place: they're interactive and they feel humane as furniture, but to honor them as unique pieces of art is somewhat silly: they should be manufactured as organic space creations inside the boxlike territories we call homes.
I kinda have to agree with Mark's recent assessment of the park: "It's a beautifully groomed park, with a great location and a wonderful view of the Sound. Unfortunately, someone has dumped some ugly piles of concrete and steel randomly on it." I generally like and get modern art, but too many of the pieces in the Olympic Sculpture park are there to be pretentious. When an artist says, "My intention in a new measure of man, in terms of free space, in terms of space that is defined by not enclosed, in terms of a measureable space that flows so subtly into the infinite that it is impossible to say where the boundaries of art and nature lie," my bullsh*t meter starts hitting the red peg. And too many of the pieces here are like that: they've been valued only by the echo chamber of artists and art critics.
Yamaraashi-chan's whole class
On the way back, a train separated us from the rest of the park, so we had to hike up the bridge then down the other side, then climb up the hillside to get back to the pavilion.
Elf
When we arrived back at her school, her teacher thanked us all for our time and attention, and sent us on our way. I had a lot of fun; Yamaraashi-chan is nifty and so are her friends.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 05:57 am (UTC)http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/5946/5354703571af3f0ac261zr2.jpg
no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 10:21 am (UTC)Props to the teacher for being such a good one, it's hard to find them these days.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 08:56 pm (UTC)Your daughter does you justice
Date: 2007-06-08 04:51 pm (UTC)I like. (Rawr.)
Bryan.