Classified Tableu

This weekend, was a fine one. Saturday, Lynn-nore and I took the kids (thanks to library passes) to the Museum of Science. Kara was an electron, spinning crazy from exhibit to exhibit. Caleb was a telescope, wide-eyed and taking it all in. Lynn-nore was a field-guide, stopping to dig a midden with Kara, twisting the map 180° to locate our position, raiding our supplies when necessary. I was a hypothesis. I wanted to know “how to identify sand x from these other four types using a microsope and your skills of CLASSIFICATION.” I wanted to stand there with the over-sized “identifying butterflies” chart trying to figure out the name of this or that chromatic creature. (My favorite was the Banded Orange Heliconian of Northern Mexico.)

One of the best stories to come out of the trip occurred in the CLASSIFICATION section.

A particular spinning-ginny display had been set up on a low table. Two seats faced each other, the spinning wheel between them, and, to the side, a heterogeneous cornucopia of nickle-weight shells. The task: CLASSIFY. One person classifies a bunch of shells simultaneously opposite another person and, when they are done, they spin the ginny and try and guess what methodology their partner employed. Lynn-nore and Kara decided to give it a go.

Now the first time they performed the CLASSIFICATION exercise, the methods both used were pretty straightforward: clam shells go with clam shells, tube shells with tube shells (this is very scientific.) The second time, Lynn-nore decided that she was going to, I won’t say impress, but let’s just say outplay our daughter by sorting shells in the most unusual way she could think of. This time she turned them over, so that what were similar clam shells became purple and yellow clam shells. She had discovered a greater point of CLASSIFICATION. Feeling congratulatory, and Kara being so quickly done, the ginny was spun only to reveal that Kara, rather than her Mom, was the real master of CLASSIFICATION-al ingenuity. Whereas Lynn-nore had turned them over and found some new feature of the shells, Kara assembled them into groups resembling table-settings: plates with plates, silverware with silverware! We all had a big laugh out of that one.