More about school, crafts and fairs

One time my grand­son was very fond of origa­mi. He and his class friends made and exchanged some com­plex geo­met­ric three-dimen­sion­al fig­ures with each oth­er. They com­pet­ed with each oth­er who could do it bet­ter and more com­plexed. He even got me involved in this event. We saw on YouTube how mag­nif­i­cent swans are made, but we did not dare to do such painstak­ing work. Then he cooled down a lit­tle to origa­mi. He start­ed tak­ing and edit­ing video on the iPad. Now he has a new hob­by. Recent­ly, he took a book from the library on how to make video games and sat down to fig­ure it out on his own. The book told how to use ready-made blocks in the Scratch pro­gram to com­pose var­i­ous light pro­grams and games. Mark fig­ured out on his own how to build these blocks to make his video game. The space­ship is mov­ing, and mete­orites are fly­ing at it, and it shoots them. Yes, so excit­ing that even I played with him. He has lim­it­ed atten­tion for any­thing, but he can sit at a com­put­er for hours.

Once at school, they were asked to con­duct an inter­view about their par­ents pro­fes­sion and write /​draw an essay about it in the form of comics. So he inter­viewed his dad, and now he wants to be a design­er. It is clear that views can still change a hun­dred times, but I won­der how the trend has changed. Before, boys at this age want­ed to be police­men, fire­fight­ers, at best, pilots and astro­nauts.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, boys at this age want­ed to be police­men, fire­fight­ers, at best, pilots and astronauts.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, the grand­son loved to draw, sculpt, but now you can’t make him. True, at school in the Art class they study artists (more and more impres­sion­ists, abstract artists), and then draw some famous pic­tures of the stud­ied artist. At the end of the year they can take these draw­ings home. So inter­est­ed. Of course, this is not Van Gogh, not Picas­so and not Mon­et, but you can guess the artist’s style right away. And you can even imme­di­ate­ly feel what kind of pic­ture it is. We guessed Van Gogh’s “Wheat­field with Crows”, “Star­ry Night”, imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nized Mon­et’s “Pond with Water Lilies”. There are many paint­ings by Picas­so, and I even want­ed to hang an abstrac­tion in the style of Kandin­sky on the wall in his room.

And I can also tell that fairs were held at their school, and the sale of some hand­mades, all kinds of cook­ies were orga­nized. The mon­ey went to the school fund and oth­er var­i­ous funds. This was done with the direct par­tic­i­pa­tion of par­ents. And par­ents who could­n’t come because of a work, gave dona­tions. The school also arranges such an event: par­ents must buy some goods in a cer­tain store for a cer­tain amount, and for this the store will pro­vide the school with, for exam­ple, office paper. It does­n’t occur to me why the school needs such a com­pli­cat­ed scheme. We would have col­lect­ed mon­ey at school and bought paper. Well, it’s clear for the store: they will come for sta­tionery, and will buy some­thing else.

In gen­er­al, here (in my opin­ion) they are try­ing to help the ser­vice sec­tor to make mon­ey and come up with events and hol­i­days to revive trade. For exam­ple, they have a “crazy hair­style” or “crazy socks” day and many go to buy wigs, hair acces­sories and fun­ny new socks. The school also offers par­ents with chil­dren to vis­it a restau­rant, and the restau­rant, depend­ing on the num­ber of vis­i­tors, gives a cer­tain per­cent­age of mon­ey back to school. The school has anoth­er way of earn­ing mon­ey. A test is announced, and par­ents must write how much they will trans­fer to the school for each cor­rect answer of their child. Grand­par­ents can sub­scribe, or you can sub­scribe for a total amount, regard­less of the cor­rect answers. Usu­al­ly these tests are very easy so that there are more cor­rect answers. 🙂

Adults also some­times orga­nize a joint lunch at a restau­rant or a trip to play golf at lunchtime at work, then they return to work togeth­er and refine it. They call it “strength­en the cor­po­rate spir­it”. Some­times after work they orga­nize a trip to some base­ball game or Amer­i­can foot­ball. Also, for a team build­ing exer­cise, every­one should hap­pi­ly go to a game :), even if you can’t stand Amer­i­can foot­ball and don’t under­stand any­thing about base­ball. Amer­i­can foot­ball is when two teams run after an oblong ball, like in rug­by. And foot­ball, which is played by the whole of Europe, and to which the whole world is accus­tomed, they call it “soc­cer”.