The power of the intrinsic

Philippe Petit is best known for his various high-wire feats. (The Man Who Walked Between the Towers is a nice picture book rendition of one of his most famous walks.)  In this recent TED talk he tells of his journey to unlikely accomplishment, beginning at age six when he set about mastering a series of [...]

For your young engineer/inventor/technician/designer/artist

Wow.  Look at this.

Word art

One of my favorite publishers of math materials (Key Press) has been clearing out their warehouse and in so doing reminded me of Scott Kim’s book Inversions. They’ve apparently run out of their copies, but you can get it from amazon.  Scott’s work is very cool; the inversions are word designs that flip around a [...]

Shy/present/economical/quiet

A friend of mine has a five year-old son who’s likely to wave, nod, or smile when you greet him, but not actually say anything.  It’s not because he can’t or doesn’t talk.  He just doesn’t tend to greet people with words.  This, as you can imagine, makes many people uncomfortable.  His mom told me [...]

Not an audition

Another holiday-related post, apparently… Every December my mom’s side of our family gathers around my aunt’s piano to sing carols.  When my cousins and I were young, the gathering was Christmas Eve; my mom, her sisters, and each of their families.  Now these families are stretched thinner at the holidays, with several spouses’ worth of [...]

David Macaulay’s anatomy book, and others

I posted awhile back about the power of reference and then yesterday remembered about how David Macaulay wrote/drew a book about human anatomy (The Way We Work).  He’s famous for his illustrated manual The Way Things Work and his books full of intricate drawings of buildings and other structures, which are also all great for [...]

Cause for courage

I spoke with a friend a few months ago who does hiring for a small private high school.  They had an opening at the beginning of the school year for a teaching assistant, a position with no benefits that paid less than $10 per hour.  Most of the applicants, he told me, had master’s degrees. [...]

Lessons that aren’t

Sometimes lessons (piano, art, etc.) are great.  You find a great teacher, and the results are just what you were hoping for.  Your child learns a lot and loves the learning. Often, though, lessons are not great.  Often they’re so bad that they turn an interest – something a child was excited to learn, wanted [...]

Both

Theo Jansen builds kinetic sculptures out of plastic electrical tubes.  He says he’s not sure if he’s a sculptor or engineer, and that the boundaries between art and engineering exist only in our minds.  To see his creations skittering around on the beaches of the Netherlands, it’s hard to imagine that science wouldn’t benefit from more [...]

Ugh.

From Daniel Denvir at Salon… School: It’s way more boring than when you were there I like this piece as a reminder that kids’ resistance doesn’t just point to technology, or to parents who don’t raise them to value education, or to any garden variety laziness (expressed often as, more or less, “in-my-day-we-just-went-to-school-and-didn’t-whine-about-it”).  The forces [...]