Saturday 03 April 2004

My analogy for the day: Life is like a Slinky.

I've known for ages the cyclic forms life takes. People often talk of the "circle of life," but when the great Karmic wheel spins around to a familiar position one is not in the same place. One has the prior experience upon with to build, so rather than merely going around, he or she also travels up a level, like a screw. (Perhaps this adds new meaning to the phrase, "I got screwed!")

But rather than thinking of life like a screw, I think it's more like a Slinky. A screw has uniform heights between the levels, whereas a Slinky expands and compresses... some trips around the cycle take a shorter amount of time than others. A Slinky (life) is supposed to be fun. If you let someone else play with your Slinky, be sure he or she knows how to take care of it and share in the fun the same way you do. If your friend is not so thoughtful when playing with your Slinky, he or she may return it to you with a kink in it, bending it slightly out of shape. If this happens, it takes a long time and a lot of work to bend it back into the exact shape to continue to have fun... though most often, no matter how hard you try to bend the metal just right, portions of the kink may remain forever.

Yesterday was such a fun day for me at school. It was the day for our International Culture program, and our country of the month was Italy. Each teacher plans an activity for one class, and I took the third-graders... in math we took time during the month to discuss the life of one of my heroes, Galileo. For the program, Maddy explained to the entire school Galileo's experiments with falling objects, showing that things of different weights fall to the earth at the same rate. Benjamin told of Galileo's teaching of the Copernican model of the solar system (including a model of the planets and the sun) and of his subsequent trial by the Catholic church for writing that the earth might not be the center of the universe.

Blake talked of Galileo's improvements on the telescope and of discovering moons around Jupiter, proving that not everything revolved around Earth. For his visual aid, he and Ben held up a curtain about four feet high, and behind it I stood with a name tag reading, "Jupiter." When they lowered the curtain, the entire kindergarten class became visible, each holding tags of the different moons. Blake explained to the school that with his telescope, Galileo was able to see these little stars that he couldn't see before, then he and Ben raised the curtain again. As he told the school about Galileo looking through his telescope the next night, the kindergarteners orbited around me. When the curtain was dropped, the stars were in a different place, but still in a line close to Jupiter. One more curtain raising, one more orbiting, one more curtain drop, and the stars were again in different positions. Galileo tracked the movement of these little stars until he discovered their pattern of movement, realizing that the little stars were actually moons around Jupiter.

The younger kids in the audience giggled, the older kids and the teachers laughed... the kindergarten visual aid was just darling.