Student Art:


One of my favorite things about my job is receiving student artwork. I encourage students to draw pictures on the back of their quizzes and tests when they're done with them and waiting for other students to finish. It helps relieve stress, allows me to see what their interested in and often helps lighten the mood when I have to sit down and grade their assignments. I've decided that this art is far too precious to keep to myself and I'm going to try to start sharing it. Here are a few pictures I received on the backs of some quizzes on facts about the 9 planets. My favorite is the last one.


Chimps in Space:

A fantasy piece depicting a future in which humans are no longer the only primates to have conquered the moon.




Pimp My Unidentified Flying Ride:

Initially a smiling, sunglassed sun in a staring contest with Saturn; the artist decided to go for a far more realistic piece showing an alien showing off his new set of wheels.




Dolphin-Penguin Mind-Meld:

?

This piece speaks for itself:

(highlighter reads: "I am a pig lover Mr. Myers!")

Here are some pictures I snapped at the Chinese New Year Parade. Though I enjoyed the parade, I'm not entirely sure that celebrating the beginning of the Year of the Pig was the only reason for the event. At first glance, it was pretty much what I expected to see. The streets were decorated with Chinese lanterns...

There were some absolutely gorgeous floats...





There were kids practicing martial arts...


And some kids just being cute....


The boy scouts made an appearance...


And of course there were Dragons...



After a little while, I began to notice the advertisements. At first they were fairly subtle. Ford was a sponsor and threw a couple of cars and trucks into the parade...


Soon the ads were less subtle , but consistent with the parade decor...



Some parts of the parade were just a stream of billboards...

It would be naive to think that this parade could be possible without help from sponsors. As the old adage goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. But you would think that after choking down so many ads, the sponsors could at least throw in some free dessert at the end. As it turns out, Fortune was not so kind...
I initially thought that all the advertisements cheapened the parade and that culture was being replaced by rampant commercialism. Having very limited foreign travel experience, I assumed that turning cultural events into advertisements was a uniquely American custom. After finding the following picture of downtown Shanghai I realized that commerce is a big part of all cultures and that my experience was probably very close to what it would be like to be at a New Year parade in a major city in China....Though there was definitely something about it that was uniquely San Franciscan.