Models and miniatures

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, there is a chapel. It once belonged to a Catholic girls' school. It was built as a half model of another chapel in France, but after it was being built, they realized a half-sized stairway wouldn't work. Mystery and adventure ensued.

There is much history, physics, artistry and varied purposes in such things.

Toy soldiers were quite the rage in England at one time. That led to kids who knew military tactics as well as some kids know their favorite video games now. That led to lead, though—lead based paints on lead figurines, and there's some biochemistry involved that they didn't know about yet in those days. (Some were tin, and now they're other metals, or plastic.)

Follow those trails, and things you didn't know were even out there will connect to things that are already in your own knowledge and experience. Connections
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a detailed miniature carousel

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If you click the image above, you can see my other photos from my visit to Hollycombe Steam Collection, on their music box day, in 2013. There were collectors of mechanical music devices, and of miniature fair rides.

This is a first run of a trick Vlad Gurdiga has arranged for my site to do—a tool for using folders as slide shows. Vlad's pretty great. For me, the photos loaded quickly on my MacBook, semi-quickly on an iPad, and a subset of them loaded, after a while, on my iPhone.

The first photos are pub lunch in Liphook, animals on the property near the car park, some of Hollycombe's collection of wagons that travelling-fair workers used to live in, and of various things inside the park.

Expansive Connectness

When I was sixteen, I was in a humanities class taught by Sam Jamison, my chorus teacher. I remember how it felt when I realized that science, art and history were all the same "subject," and that it included people and language and music. It was a feeling of expansiveness, of blossoming. I remember exactly where I was sitting. Whatever he had said, or whatever connection I had just made from something I read or saw in that textbook changed my life right then and there.

When I was an English teacher, I always tried to include connections and references to other subjects, hoping to induce that awakening in my students, or at least to give them the parts they needed to assemble that during an idle moment sometime in their future.

Subject Areas and Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Work at playing

Usually it looks like we're just playing around. When it doesn't look like we're playing, I work on it. Unschooling works best when we're playing around.

Jubilation and Triangulation
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Perspective and math

Two responses to a newcomer's question: "How do you approach math?"

I wrote:

The real answer is not to "approach math," but to learn how to see all of the patterns, measuring, relationships, weights, game play, sports stats, poker hands that are math in its natural environment.

Jo Isaac wrote:

The question you really want to ask is how do you deschool enough that you know you don't need to 'approach math' at all.

The longer answers are on facebook here.
photo by Sandra Dodd

Pre-electric recordings

Before electricity, and even before wind-up/crank record players, there were music boxes, calliopes and player pianos. Music met engineering centuries ago, in many different places.

What is pictured here is a steam-powered calliope, in England. It has wooden pipes, that sound like loud flutes (because of the notch cut in them, and their sizes), and air passes through holes in a heavy card-stock board, fastened to the next and next. They are fed through, and refold themselves fan-style on the other side.

The history of science, the history of technology, and in this case art and music, too, can help fill in a lot of connections and timelines.

Today's link goes into the wilds: Some history of music boxes, with links
and info on Calliopes
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Three-phase appreciation

Sometimes sunlight seems to do a magic trick.

I suppose it always involves something between us and the sun, or the angle from where we're viewing it in a certain moment. It's more fun for me to think the sun is showing off, for fun.
Ta-daaa!

First I need to notice it, though.

Second, I try to pause to think gratefully of what I am seeing.

Third, maybe I can share it by pointing it out, photographing it, reporting it, painting it...

Maybe one form of sharing is to remind my own self to look more often.

SandraDodd.com/light
photo by Karen James
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Service as a gift

Schuyler Waynforth wrote:

It's amazing to see doing for others as a gift. It takes the whole angst about servitude away

There isn't any servitude in it when it's a gift.

—Schuyler Waynforth

SandraDodd.com/service
photo by Amber Ivey
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