Great teachers..

What makes a teacher great?

Great teachers make you think. They are enthusiastic, they listen. Great teachers give you an idea you can work with and help you to understand concepts.

I had a great English teacher who once bought a pack of tarot cards into a lesson to explain there were other ideas about mythology than the normal or ordinary histories. I can’t remember much about the class but the artwork on the cards got my imagination working.

We had a great Geography teacher, who really explained clearly about all sorts of concepts, like isotherms, synclines and anticlines, geological fault lines. He made it really interesting.

And I’ve had several great Art teachers, in school and at college. The great ones gave me confidence with the work I was doing. One at school entered my art into a competition and I had a painting exhibited in our twin town in Germany. Another at college said my work had a bit of something about it.

The point is that Great teachers get us to go further and do more than we would otherwise do. Learning is dependent on you making an effort, and by having a great teacher you can be encouraged to try harder. I’m glad I had some.

Parallax

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The photo is an illustration and it doesn’t actually show parallax.

Do you know what parallax is?

Hold out your thumb in front of you and close one eye. Place it so that it covers something, perhaps a flower outside, or something in front of you. Maybe the moon.

Now without moving your hand open your eye and close the other one.

What do you see? The moon or the object appears to have moved! That is because your eyes are seperate. They are the base of a very long thin triangle and believe it or not you can measure distance that way.

Now stick a piece of wood in the soil on the equator, and a similar one a few miles north or south of it. At midday on the equator the sun will be directly overhead and there will be no, or hardly any shadow. But the one miles away will cast a shadow. The further away from the equator the longer the shadow. If you know the distance between the sticks, and the angle the shadow casts by the other stick. (measure the angle from the top of the stick and the end of the shadow) you can actually work out the distance to the Sun (which is casting the shadow). In this way the ancient Greeks did this and also worked out the size of the Earth approximately. You can use this idea if you look at a star at one end of the Earth’s orbit and six months later the other side of the orbit. That’s how they work out distances to stars. Amazing what you can work out by using your eyes, a couple of sticks and your thumb!

The things you find in old books.

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A train with pneumatic wheels that ran on the Paris underground? I didn’t know this existed, but it’s in the book my hubby is reading. It’s strange what you can find without looking at Google.

In the past you went to a library to find things out or research things, you took out the book and had your library card stamped, and a stamp put on the little form in the front of the book…..

Borrow for a week or two, then return so someone else could take it out. But beware, if you took it back late you could get fined! Books were sometimes sold off if they became out of date. Our bookshelves have some of these. The smell off a musty book, with slightly browning pages brings back memories of my school library, which for a comprehensive had a good big library, and our local, council library, with stern librarian keeping us all in order. Yellow or pale green walls and parquet flooring. Memories too of book covers with illustrations of dinosaurs or old fashioned atom symbols. I loved books on rocks and minerals and mystery stories. Craft books and origami. The library was the lace for ideas. Now many public libraries are gone, closed by politics not the Internet. Poorer people who can’t afford the Internet are kept away from knowledge. Sorry, getting political…..

Good memories…

Playing with ArtRage

I’m not used to my new ArtRage app on my tablet, neither am I used to my new tablet, everything is a bit mixed up. I’m mainly still doing things on my phone, but I’m slowly learning. I just found if I swipe the screen left I can find categories and tags, that’s useful..but when I tried again it wouldn’t do it?

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