Small Wonder
This is me with a Small Wonder tattoo. In my quest for this picture, I discovered a Small Wonder fan fiction page! Scary!
2007-02-28 18:25:16 UTC
Functional Art
These are the Pink Orchid, Red Hibiscus, and Calla Lily urinals from artist Clark Sorenson. For more images, see the gallery here. This is the kind of art I absolutely love because it's useful and beautiful. Art doesn't get much more functional than these urinals. It irritates me that "art" lives tucked away in museums when we could be surrounding ourselves with art that's actually usable. Like Dr. Evermor's fantastic bird sculptures on Paterson here in Madison:
I love these weird ass things. I accidentally attended the "christening" ceremony for the birds on a beautiful summer day a few years ago. I just happened to be riding my bike by the birds at the time and saw lots of people milling about. I decided to check it out. Someone handed me a piece of paper. I was told to write a personal dream or wish on it. Then I was supposed to add my slip of paper to one of two grapefruit-sized metal eggs. When all the dream-papers were collected, someone inserted them into the birds' enormous buttholes. I'm serious. It was terrifically surreal. So these sculptures are a great example of public art, but what if they also doubled as streetlights? How awesome would it be to look down East Washington Ave and see it lit by an army of giant metal birds? And we could choose to live in works of art...
Like these apartments in Tokyo that are sort of like funhouses. While sci-fi cute on the outside, the architects designed the interiors to intentionally throw people off balance. "Each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out." The idea is that this kind of design will keep people on their toes and will consequently help them to "live better, longer, and even forever." F'real. I trip and fall enough in my own apartment that wasn't designed specifically to hurt me. I would probably end up killing myself in one of these deathtraps. But they are fantastic from the outside, no? And these are in a suburb of Tokyo! Our soul-deadening suburbs are filled with carbon copied boxes that come in varying shades of beige, tan, and cream. A public commitment to functional art might not give us immortality (or might it?), but it would be good for our souls.
2007-02-27 10:10:58 UTC
My New Tattoos
So, I have to come clean: the only reason I was making fun of those tattoos was because I was jealous. I mean, they're just so cool. What can I say? I was inspired to run to the local tattoo parlor:
Now that's pretty boss, but check this out:
Now who's cool?
2007-02-26 17:22:27 UTC
Another Serious Problem
These were taken from a photo essay at the Times on celebrity tattoos. Apparently, Rodney Dangerfield tattoos are fairly popular. Ironic tattoos are deeply stupid. Only the most moronic person will see an ironic tattoo on someone and think that it's funny. Because anyone with a shred of intelligence will think, "Oh my god. This person actually got Tony Danza tattooed on their arm?! What's wrong with people?" When I lived in St. Louis, I had this roommate who got Yoda tattooed on his arm. It was huge; it took up his entire forearm. He thought it was hilarious and awesome. That was when he became officially stupid. The idea of getting an ironic tattoo is (sorta) funny, but actually doing it is too stupid to be funny. It's kinda sad. The only reason the idea is funny is precisely because it's too ridiculous to actually go through with. Once you actually do it, you've proven your stupidity. And that your desperate to get cheap laughs.
2007-02-24 09:13:43 UTC
A Serious Problem
The New York Times published an article today discussing the dismal results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a 12th grade achievement test and “an exam commonly known as the nation’s report card.†This is really bad news and you can’t just dismiss it if you don’t like standardized tests. They might not be perfect tools, but any responsible educator will tell you that they’re useful in gauging certain skills. Curiously, as reading and math scores have dropped throughout the nation, students have been getting better grades, taking supposedly tougher courses, and spending more time in school. How can a student get a better grade, in a more challenging course, with a lower reading proficiency? How do we explain this apparent contradiction? Well, I think I can give you an idea.
When I was student teaching at a middle school, I was told, under the guise of “differentiation,†that I should give crossword puzzles as assignments to the “lower-ability†kids. I was told to do a lot of things I felt weird about in the name of differentiation. Like giving kids the option to draw a picture rather than write an essay. Differentiation is the buzzword in education right now. The public school system has almost totally abandoned the notion of segregating students within schools by (supposed) ability. There are still AP classes offered at many schools but these are the exception. When I was in middle school, the classes formed a painfully clear hierarchy. Kids in the A group were the “smart†ones and kids in the G group were the “dumb†ones, with everyone else fitting somewhere in between. This is pretty much how all public schools were, each with their own cosmetic differences. This has proven to be a most imperfect (and unsavory) system, which is why the schools abandoned it. Studies found that kids who were labeled “dumb†never rose above those expectations; they were never challenged. And strangely enough, they found that the kids in the “dumb†classes were disproportionately from minority groups. You don’t say. So this system, which reflected institutional racism among other things, needed to change. Along came differentiation, the idea that has hijacked the school system.
The new classroom is mixed-ability. Public school classrooms now contain a diverse mix of students. When I say diverse, I don’t necessarily mean racially diverse, though here in Madison that is indeed the case. I mean diverse in terms of skills. In one class you can see the entire spectrum of ability: from kids who can’t read at all to kids who are reading at the college level, from kids who can’t speak English and have interpreters to kids who have severe learning disabilities. Differentiation means planning lessons that speak to each student’s abilities. This means that each lesson is supposed to be tailored to the student’s individual needs. Since this is actually impossible if you have more than a handful of students in a classroom, what a teacher usually ends up doing is creating two or three options of varying difficulty. I’ll tell you from experience: all the Spanish-speaking kids got the same dumbed down assignments, regardless of their varying abilities. They were lumped into one group: the English Language Learner group. As if that meant they were all at the same ability level. I saw smart, bored Latinos doing word searches for assignments and it pissed me off. Everyone was bored. The teacher isn't allowed to teach to just one ability group, so the teacher can’t teach to anyone. She has been given a new role: guide the students through their "ability-appropriate" activities.
What I was taught in teacher certification school and in the modern classroom is that the teacher should provide “choices†for students and then they can choose which activity they feel most comfortable doing. This is the new rhetoric. And surprise! No one is choosing to challenge themselves. Because you have to include the “draw a picture†option for the “visual learner†or the girl with Down’s syndrome, everyone chooses to draw a picture of “Manifest Destiny†rather than write an essay on it. We end up with the exact same problem as we did with the segregated-by-abilities classroom: students are not being challenged. Except it’s worse because under the new system, no one is being challenged, whereas under the old system, at least the white “smart†kids were being semi-challenged. Well, now we'll all be equally dumb. The new classroom teaches to the lowest ability and everyone suffers. Is it any surprise that grades are higher? Kids are doing word searches and drawing pictures in English and Social Studies. And everybody keeps talking about differentiation like it’s the new religion. I’m not saying we should go back to the old system; I’m actually not prescribing anything at all. This is just one reason why I don't want to teach in public schools.
2007-02-23 11:52:34 UTC