School visit

I did a rare bit of volunteering this morning in the second grade classroom, for an art project. The project seemed to me very ambitious: each child was to make a clay Tree of Life on a base with a candle holder. They had about an hour all together. But the kids-- all 29 of them!-- were incredibly quiet and focused and all had made very impressive progress on their projects by the time I left at their recess break. The art teacher used an overhead projector to demonstrate the steps and five or six parents moved around helping things along. She showed a basic design with a trunk and "branches" coming off as tiered loops. The kids all reproduced this with various levels of delicacy, except Anselm, who instantly revised the design to make his branches as roots that went down into the ground like a ficus.