Music Hall Painting from Postcard

Saw this at the Krohn Conservatory. Notice part of buildings on the right, where Washington Park School recently stood.

One thing I really like about the Krohn is that it is open 365 days a year. It does get a bit crowded on days when everything else is closed, like New Year's Day:

 

Compare to some recent photos:

 

 

From the Washington Park School Site:

 

Good Teachers are Like Gold

For Christmas, one of my son's teachers gave each of his students a note with a bit of candy. This particular teacher is male and is quite strict, and is probably my son's least favorite teacher. My son feels he is terrible at the subject and resists going to that class. What I immediately noticed about the note he sent home with my son though is that it was written in cursive, which most second graders cannot read. My son didn't even know what the note was about.

Now take another teacher. My son loves this woman teacher. Yesterday she sent home a note thanking him for the cookies he brought her for Christmas. The note was very simple words and written very clearly, obviously meant for the boy to read. It said in large writing "you're the best". This meant so much to my son, that he held the card all evening.

He woke up this morning wanting to go to school because of this teacher. To this teacher, I say: You are the best...

Lego Goes Urban - Market Street Set

Sorry for the lengthy hiatus in posts. I always seem to get behind at work during deer season. And many thanks to Mike for posting Lego Cafe Corner in my absence.

The Market Street set is another home-run from the folks at Lego. Models in this series are being produced at roughly similar scales to permit assembly into an urban neighborhoods. Now Lego afficianados have the option to build solo or join forces with others and start to build bigger developments.

A Good City Stimulates Your Brain

There is a Boston Globe article making the internet rounds with the headline "How the City Hurts Your Brain". I had to make a few comments.

Basically they are saying that there is too much negative stimulus in the city, and that your brain can only do so many things, and thus people who stroll in a garden can think more clearly than people navigating a street full of cars.

Take this quote for example:

In a study ... Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.

The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory...In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature.

"We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it's like to be there," says Berman. "And that's when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer."

The problem with this set up is that the city photograph was probably of a poorly designed, car-dominated street. Is the choice really between living in a city and living in a park? Of course not. The real choice is between living in a city and living in the suburbs. So then the question is, which is more damaging to your brain, walking through Washington Park to work, or navigating the Norwood Lateral?

But the ending of the article is better. It emphasizes that parks and street trees are very important, and must be properly designed. What the article doesn't say is that there are many cities (Paris, Barcelona etc) that are already well designed like this. They end with a statement about the stimulating life of dense cities that I completely agree with:

..When a park is properly designed, it can improve the function of the brain within minutes. ...Why do cities continue to grow? And why, even in the electronic age, do they endure as wellsprings of intellectual life?

...the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, ...