'Cause I'm a star, and I can make you a star

[austin_dern]

At the masquerade --- which included judging of fursuit construction, something bunny_hugger sat out of as she didn't build her own suit --- people in costume put on various performances, mostly moving jerkily about while some music played. I think the catch here is most fursuiters don't know how to dance, or haven't done much while in suit, so, they forget that there's three long minutes of music going on while they've shuffled back and forth and maybe clapped.

bunny_hugger did better than average, I think because she has studied dance and thought about what she'd do for her whole stretch of music, which was the fight song for Michigan State University. At least, she didn't seem to have any segments where she was stuck thinking what she might do next. I learned later she'd hoped someone in the audience --- since this was Columbus, home of Ohio State University --- would heckle her, so she could invite the heckler up and play against that. But the audience was politely quiet, possibly reflecting that while OSU really hates University of Michigan, they're only moderately sure they've heard of MSU in some context. (Also, logic implies that OSU and MSU ought to be frenemies, based on both being rivals to U of M.)

Nevertheless, while bunny_hugger didn't get an award for performance --- and there were many awards for performance, partly because fursuit awards are divided by skill levels here --- she did win a best-in-show certificate for best use of the con theme. You see, she was wearing a Michigan State shirt, and danced to the MSU fight song, which made hers the strongest use of the ``furries around the world'' theme.

After the masquerade (and before it, I should mention), we went to the dance, which was sadly small in attendance. This might reflect the Frozen Oasis folks --- who'd provide, besides the music, lots of frozen drinks --- being off on their own con this year (again), or that there really isn't any spot to hold the dance that isn't way off on the end of nowhere. But among the people at the dance were the two women we'd met at the hotel bar, who wandered in taking advantage, possibly, of the con's not-strict attitude about wearing badges or the dance's need for population. So everyone was having a great time, even if there could've been more people there.

Trivia: One of the earliest surviving orders from Dom Pérignon's cellars is a 14 November 1711 request for six hundred bottles to be sent to England via Calais, specifying that the bottles be of ``thick glass''. Source: The Essence Of Style: How The French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: Scholars, Students, and Parents: An Exploration of the Ideas behind the New Math and other Curriculum Reform, Stephen White. It all makes a good case for thoughtful education --- you know, where the course is designed to get students to think about why and how and to notice patterns of stuff --- but it doesn't make much of a case for this being the way to learn, and there's something terribly defensive in how it explains that you shouldn't worry about your child getting introduced to weird terminology and stuff like set theory because it won't do any harm. If your defense of the pedagocial method has to fall back on ``your child doesn't have anything to lose'' you've lost the case for education reform.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I recall my introduction to math in first grade being concerned primarily with sets, functions and the numberline, and how the membership of sets and the results of functions upon numbers, and upon sets of numbers, could be mapped onto the numberline. I think it was actually a pretty good foundation for math, as it gave you a way to visualize what was happening, and let you see that functions like multiplication were simply an extension of addition. They dropped that, IIRC, for second grade, and it wasn't until college that I started encountering a lot of this again. Based on my experiences, at least, I think it's a solid way to teach young children math.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I got pretty much that sort of introduction myself, and I certainly liked it. But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that, for instance, set theory doesn't actually teach you much that you can use before advanced mathematics: intersection and union, for example, just don't match to anything outside logic problems. The difference between ``the empty set'' and ``the set containing the empty set'' is a challenge to anyone's intuition. And while a seven-year-old can definitely understand fascinating things like the different sizes of infinity, I don't think any of them actually get taught it, possibly because it's really easy to get stuck in confusing technical points there.

It was a great approach for me, but I also know I'm very weird in pretty much every measure. And an argument that it's not going to do your child any harm is never going to convince a suspicious parent, and even ``it's neat and fun'' doesn't suffice to say why learn this instead of something else, or even why not drill on calculation some more. (That ``we have calculators now'' hasn't caught on.)