In Rod We Trust

We had a great day out in Glasgow with Rory & Jane in chilly Spring sunshine. I've lived in Scotland over two years but today was my proper visit to Weegieland; the other trips were just stumbling in the dark to concerts. A highlight was the Scotland Street School Museum, a beautiful building designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There's old classrooms and inkwells and pinafores and chalkboards textbooks and best of all a biscuit tin full of Cuisenaire rods! I plunged my hand right into the pile, the lovely wooden clinky clink noise they made reminded me of how much I hated stinking maths.

There's also some hopscotch thingies in the corridors. We hopped around for ages trying to remember the rules. It was much more of a cardio workout than I recalled.

April 23, 2005 | Permalink | Posted in Living In Scotland | Comments (7)

Comments

1 · pol x said:

hee hee Shauny you went to the big Weej.

My home town so i do hope you liked the old girl.

Don't know exactly why you visisting it makes me so pleased, it just does.

April 24, 2005 12:06 AM

2 · pol x said:

oh and have a good ANZAC day tomorrow.

April 24, 2005 12:36 AM

3 · lee said:

hmm .. offtopic .. how do you rephrase a penile dysfunction drug?

ontopic .. i loved school .. though i still hold the all-time record of cut classes in my school .. but my grades were fine so they did not expel me . . never did get my head around hopscotch .. and now you say there are rules? .. damn .. i feel like a chunk of my cultural background is just .. missing ..

well .. off to the park to do some research .. fingers crossed i don't get mistaken for a pedofile ...

April 24, 2005 12:27 PM

4 · Kate said:

I think you throw a stone, and it lands on a box, and then you have to do the one-step/two-step jump, depending on if the boxes are single or double, and NOT jump in the box with the stone in it, but pause and pick up the stone without falling over. If I recall correctly.

April 24, 2005 2:39 PM

5 · fifi said:

Cuisenaire rods...

It was only recently, as an adult that I worked out that cuisenaire rods were responsible for my colourful calculations...
black times brown is 42, 16 is hot pink squared, lime green lots of yellow is fifteen...etc.
Every number has a lovely colour theory.
Didn't help me with algebra, or equations tho.
no wonder I did art not maths.
I wanna go to the museum of rods! Where is it?

April 25, 2005 6:42 AM

6 · Kirsten said:

We had them too, but I didn't know they had a name. What's that all about? Cuisenaire sounds like a name for upmarket saucepans!

They were such pretty colours that I played with them rather than doing my maths. But it doesn't seem to have led to lifelong number synaesthesia - I don't remember which colour went with which.

I remember we had big flat squares for 100 later (same size as 10 "10" rods side by side) and even a solid cube for 1000, which was quite heavy and probably had considerable potential as a blunt instrument.

April 25, 2005 9:34 AM

7 · Gordon said:

My Gran went to school there ya know.

And yeah I didn't realise those rods had a name, I was expecting some Home Economics thingy there!

Glad you spent some time in a real city though, not a fau tourist trap like Edinburgh ;-)

April 25, 2005 9:02 PM

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