27 June 2009
perfect daze
I’m afraid these blow-by-blow recaps are getting tedious, so I’ll try to be more concise. There’s just so much filling every single day (and night), I can’t possibly make sense of it all. We’re hitting a real stride anyway now, and I am no longer worried about the Social Engineering part of teaching, particularly after Friday’s class… They are truly a delightful group of talented people, working and playing just so well together.
We were slow to start that morning, but filled the pre-lunch session with notes and recaps and the sharing of discoveries. We were supposed to have a mid-session cleanup this morning, but for some reason one of our students, Ayla (the young stylish one whom all the boys on campus follow around) decided to have a late-night clean all by herself. Betsy declared it “Hug Ayla” day, but that may not have been such a good idea… The boys were a little too eager.
Our weather was gray for the first time all session, so I decided to skip our Anthotype demo, which was really too bad since I was going to try it with wine today*, and looked perfectly ridiculous this morning, overdressed as usual and carrying a half bottle of wine to breakfast. We still had plenty to do, since I had them all making pinhole cameras. It’s such a simple and goofy thing to do, and almost everyone had made one before, but it was surprising how much they all got into it. My original schedule had today being a Play Day – fun demos and goofy cameras and plans for our 4th of July Parade – and it was.
The afternoon session saw us all out on the picnic table. Some were casually dropping back inside to coat a gum, or load a pinhole, while one student played the clarinet and another cut paper hearts out of all the scrap paper on the table. One guy, Steve, went to his room, dumped out his clothes and made his suitcase a camera. Soon we were all running down the hill to the newly-baled hay for pinhole, analog and digital photo shoots. This quickly devolved, of course, into various hay gymnastics and circus tricks. We could not stop laughing at ourselves and each other, the more so when we realized we were the spectacle for everyone beginning to queue for dinner.
I’m going to stop worrying about whether they’re happy now.