Much of Will’s weekend (and some of Annette’s and a very little bit of mine) was spent building a lovely model of a fort typical of the French and Indian War. At least according to Will. I am sure that they did not have forts built out of painted popsicle sticks, felt, sticks, and little pegs for guys.
Anyway, it turned out pretty cool. Here’s a link to a Flickr set of pictures. Be sure to look at the pictures individually because Will and I put in some notes to explain what different parts of the fort are and what the different guys in the fort are doing.
The last time Will did a project like this, he ended up getting what I think we all here thought was an artificially low grade. He better do well on this one….
Oh, and I am rather surprised to know almost nothing about the French and Indian War. Other than I think there was some unit on this when I was in about fifth or sixth grade.
Least you think that there has been no fun around here while the mice play at the CCCCs, I was lucky enough to attend a Detroit Tigers baseball game yesterday with Will and his fellow safety patrol members from Estabrook Elementary. It’s almost a game we missed– Will didn’t bring home the permission slip initially because, as he put it, he just doesn’t care much about baseball. “Neither do I, Will. But going to the ball game is fun!” So I talked him into it and he was glad.
I got to go along as a parental chaperone, though as far as I could tell, there were at least as many grown-ups supervising as there was children. It might have had something to do with the free tickets. It was also the first trip I’ve had on a school bus in years. Most amusing to me was that both on the way there and the way back, the kids were pretty successful at getting passing semis to blow their horn at us.
Anyway, it was safety patrol day in general at the park so there were many different youth groups on a clear but chilly day. I think it’s fair to say that the highlight for Will was hanging out with friends and eating a $5.50 hot dog. The highlight for me was shopping for but not buying and Tiger merchandise ($25 for a T-shirt I can get at Target for half that price? Thanks, no…), resisting temptation and staying on diet, hanging out with fellow parents, and discovering with my iPod that there was a wifi network in the stadium.
As to the game: like I said, I don’t really follow baseball much. But as far as I can tell, all this hype about the Tigers this year is perhaps ill-placed. This was their third loss, and as far as I could tell, they got spanked in this game.
Anyway, a pretty fun way to spend the day. I can’t very well complain about free tickets, but I think I’ll wait until the temperature is about 60 the next time I go see a game. For the curious, there’s a few pictures here.
This is the last one of these sorts of things at Estabrook since Will is one of the big kids now. I think my favorite is still when Will was one of the narrators– either the second or third grade– but this is best movie of one of these I’ve made.
Actually, it seems a little more complicated than that to me. Here’s a passage:
Thirty students answered maths problems on a computer. A feigned technical glitch meant that they had to press the space bar each question to stop the computer from giving the answers away. Crucially, before the test, half the students read a passage from the late Francis Crick’s book about consciousness, in which he argues that free will is an illusion. These students pressed the space bar less often than the students who hadn’t read about free will - in other words, they cheated more.
Okay, but wait– what if the students who read this passage and “cheated” more weren’t so much cheating as they were saying “Oh yeah? I’ll show that Crick dude. I’ll do whatever the hell I want with this and skip the space bar. No free will, my ass!”
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Much of Will’s weekend (and some of Annette’s and a very little bit of mine) was spent building a lovely model of a fort typical of the French and Indian War. At least according to Will. I am sure that they did not have forts built out of painted popsicle sticks, felt, sticks, and little pegs for guys.
Least you think that there has been no fun around here while the mice play at the CCCCs, I was lucky enough to attend a Detroit Tigers baseball game yesterday with Will and his fellow safety patrol members from Estabrook Elementary. It’s almost a game we missed– Will didn’t bring home the permission slip initially because, as he put it, he just doesn’t care much about baseball. “Neither do I, Will. But going to the ball game is fun!” So I talked him into it and he was glad.