“It’s one of the places I’m most proud to bring people when they visit St. Louis,” commented (more or less) one of the other faculty on our field trip to the Laumeier Sculpture Park. My hope was that this trip, combined with our visit to the Leonardo Da Vinci Exhibition, would be a nice way to demonstrate that the distance between art and science isn’t so large after all.
I believe this sculpture is called, "Balance".
I required all of my students (physics and middle school science) to identify their favorite piece and sketch it. We’ll be covering forces, balance and mechanics in the coming quarter, making this part of the spark-the-imagination part of the lesson.
Also, detailed sketches are not easy. An accurate drawing requires a lot more careful observation than even taking a picture. By trying it themselves they’d get a much greater appreciation of Da Vinci.
The large pieces are quite impressive. The brightly painted metal tank combination at the top of this post just towers over everything. However, one of the neatest was carved out of one enormous piece of wood. It’s made to emulate the distinctive, ridged bark of the cottonwood tree. The artist accentuates the ridges and valleys quite elegantly, making a wonderfully warm and organic abstraction.
Looking up at the cottonwood tree sculpture.
There’s also an indoor museum (which was closed while we were there), and, apparently, pieces are added and taken away so the park is worth revisiting. The only problem is that you’re not allowed to climb on the sculptures. This is a quite understandable precaution to protect the pieces, but, as some of the students observed, the sculptures “invite” you into and onto them. It’s a stark contrast to the St. Louis City Muesum, which is designed specifically to be played on.
A thermostat that adapts, is connected, saves money, saves energy (and the environment), and looks good too? (Image from the Nest Labs website).
There is a lot of potential for the new Nestthermostat to bring modern technology into some of the the essential but mundane devices that surround us. Its importance is not in the addition of new technology (which usually means new complexity), but in how that technology can actually make life easier, help save money, and reduce our impact on the environment by saving energy. Steven Levy has an excellent article in Wired about the project.
A key thing that students should note is the large range of expertise that went into creating this device: engineers, computer scientists, venture capitalists, and artistic designers to name a few. The ability to collaborate with diverse groups is an essential skill to master.
Just because of the large savings that can be gained, thermostats have been long overdue for an overhaul. Most buildings are heated by burning fossil fuels, like natural gas or coal, or with electricity that is produced by the burning of of fossil fuels. Similarly, cooling is also usually powered by electricity. Thus every savings in energy that results from this thermostat reduces the human impact on global warming. Because the energy savings means that you pay less for energy, saving the environment in this way means that you’re also saving money.
It’s good to see projects like this one come to fruition. We can only hope that they did a good job, that this is actually a good product, and that it is successful so similar projects will follow.
How many people were alive when you were born? How many people had lived before you were born? How many people were born while you were figuring this out?
Notes (by Natasha D.,"aged" and reflected) from our visit to the DaVinci Exhibit.
Working models of Leonardo Da Vinci’s devices, and video of his sketchbook, so inspired one student that she emulated Da Vinci’s style as she took her notes during our visit to the Da Vinci Machines Exhibition. While I’d asked them to bring their notebooks, I’d not said anything about taking notes (nor is there to be a quiz afterward) so it was very nice to see this student’s efforts. The exhibition is in St. Louis at the moment, until the end of the year.
Scan of a page of the Codex de Leicester by Leonardo DaVinci. (Image via Wikimedia Commons).Flywheel using spherical weights. Constructed based on Leonardo da Vinci's drawings. Photo by Erik Möller via Wikimedia Commons.
What I liked most about the exhibit is that you can operate some of the reconstructions of flywheels, gears, pulleys, catapults, and other machines that came out of DaVinci’s notebooks.
Da Vinci did a lot with gears, inclined planes, pulleys and other combination of simple machines, so the exhibit is a nice introduction to mechanics in physics. The exhibition provides a teacher’s guide that’s useful in this regard.
It’s an excellent exhibition, especially if you spend some time playing with the machines.
A selection of (as yet) unidentified fungi from the school campus in eastern Missouri.
It’s remarkable how interest drives motivation and motivation gets things done. We’re in an intercession right now and ten students signed up with me to do a biological survey of the school grounds. With a small creek on one side, and a fairly tall ridge on the other, the school has a nice variety of biomes.
Now, to be clear, I’m not a biologist. In fact, that’s why I was so interested in the biological survey. Everything in this area is new to me. But it also means that I approached this project as a novice. Mrs. E. was nice enough to lend me a veritable library of reference books, covering everything from the wildflowers of Missouri to the amphibians of the mid-West, but she was off teaching another batch of students how to cook, so I was on my own.
All the students in the group were volunteers, but a fair chunk of them just wanted to get outside, even though it was overcast and threatening rain. To get the students more engaged I let them choose either the environment they’d like to survey, or the types of organisms they’d like to specialize in. I also gave them the option of working independently or in pairs.
The Creek
The Creek team collected a pair of amphibians. They were documented, photographed, and then released.
One pair choose to canvas the small creek that runs past the school. I’d set a minnow trap the night before to collect fish for our tank, and they hauled that in. The stream water was somewhere around 14°C, while our tank was closer to 23°C, so, to prevent the fish from going into thermal shock, we left the minnows in a bucket so it could, slowly, thermally equilibrate. They monitored the temperature change with time, and I think I’ll use their data in my physics and calculus classes.
They also collected a pair of amphibians, which we photographed and then released. They tried to catch some crawfish, but were unsuccessful, despite the fact that one of them searched for “how to catch crawfish” on their phone; unfortunately they did not have time to follow the detailed video instructions they found on the web that described, in detail, how to build a crawfish trap.
Trees and Shrubs
Collected leaf specimens PL01 and PL02.
Because of the incipient rain, we did not take our reference books out with us. Instead, we collected leaves and sketched bark patterns so we could do our floral identification later.
Berries from an (as yet) unidentified bush.
A number of students really got into that. So we have a fairly large collection, though almost all of which come from the riparian area that bounds the creek. I would have liked a broader survey, but we only had so much time.
Unidentified wildflowers.
Mushrooms
Part of our mushroom collection.
More than a few students were interested in looking for mushrooms – even one of the tree specialists came back a mushroom sample – but one student really got into it, canvasing all the dead logs from the creek, through the meadow, and up past the treeline on the side of the hill.
The underside of this fungi looks a bit like a brain coral.
And we now have quite the collection of fungi. They’re as yet unidentified, but they’re elegant bits of biota. Our fungi specialist is interested in coming back in and sketching them.
Identification
We had two hours. Not even enough time to do a complete survey, so we barely got started on identification. It will probably go slowly.
While our methods were not systematic, and our coverage of the grounds incomplete, this exercise was a good start to cataloging the local biology. I don’t know if I’ll be able to expand on the survey any time soon, but this type of project would be a great for middle school science next year when we focus more on the biological sciences, particularly on taxonomy.
Two weekends ago we lucked into some of the most beautiful fall weather for our walk-a-ton. We’re trying to replace our old playground that had become somewhat decrepit. While our objective is not quite up to the Skudeneshavn Primary School‘s standards, it’s somewhat closer than what we had before.
Most of the kids who walked around the lake were from the lower school – after all, they’re the ones who expected to “play”- but I expect it will gets a lot of use by the middle and high schoolers once it’s installed.
Some walked more than others, but everyone had a good time.
Ad from Viz, issue 52, February / March 1992 (pg. 21).
We face a lot of advertising. All the time. According to Martin Lindstrom, the author of Brandwashed, “the average American 3-year-old can recognize 100 brands” (NPR Staff, 2011). I usually discuss advertising at the same time as we’re talking about propaganda.
Guy Raz has an excellent interview with Lindstrom on All Things Considered.
The one rotated piece represents the volta of the sonnet, the moment at which the poem pivots from exploring a dilemma to developing a resolution. Volta translates from Italian to turn in English so the physical translation of that structural device is quite literally done.
— Bert Geyer (2011).
Bert Geyer's visual representation of the form of a sonnet. (Photo by Bert Geyer).
Last year, my middle school class spent a fair amount of time looking at sonnets: pulling them apart; comparing similarities and differences; discovering their poetic form; and then each creating their own.
Bert Geyer took this type of analysis to the next step. He created a visual translation of a Petrarchan sonet using color and shape to represent the patterns of the sonnet.
An excerpt. Image by Bert Geyer.
The artist’s description of the piece is quite fascinating.
The varying stains at the ends of the lines indicate rhyme scheme. I chose to use the Petrarchan format–abbaabbacdcdee. Overall, every feature of the piece takes precedent from the composite structure of a sonnet (not any specific sonnet). But the piece isn’t an exact analog. My aim through this piece is to observe the nuances and complexities of translating from one medium to another. How certain features may be reproduced in another medium, albeit differently. And how translation to a new medium has limitations and new opportunities.
— Bert Geyer (2011).
I particularly appreciate that the statement so clearly demonstrates the care and effort that went into the details of the piece. The illustration that the creation of art requires just as much thought and energy as in any other field.
This should make an excellent, spark-the-imagination, addition to any discussion of sonnets. Indeed, it can also serve as a template for how to analyze different types of poetry to look for their forms. And the meaning of all the different parts should just jump out to Montessori (and any other) students who’ve used geometric symbols to diagram sentences.
