Orientation Day, Sept. 2006

Orientation Day, Sept. 2006

I noticed a bunch of words neatly printed on a yellow Post-It note, stuck next to the speedometer. From the back seat I read:

Careful Ageless
Useful Tireless
Hopeful Tasteless
Peaceful Changeless
Wasteful Shapeless
Graceful Scoreless
Wow.

I sat there utterly stunned by these poignant, powerful words. I thought my supervisor, Norm, is quite an interesting guy. He has meditation words to focus on while driving. Those words were so simple.

We were driving to the beach for lunch, a small beach just inside the Bay that looked at the Marin Headlands and some steep brown islands. We also came to pick up some seaweed for the sea slugs that were held on the exhibit floor in a large tank.

Norm was already my mentor. He showed me how to set up and maintain all the biology exhibits, including the necessary tricks for the Limping Grasshopper Exhibit that was only supposed to be up for a few months but had lasted for twenty years. And he encouraged me “to lose some time” in other parts of the museum. Since I started working at the Exploratorium, I felt I was getting closer with Norm than with my other co-workers. Especially after our calm lunch watching tankers and sailboats in the Bay and then the flora walk rummaging through the different kinds of seaweed, Norm was starting to be my friend and mentor.

At the end of this day, we were packing up our stuff in the office. I decided to ask.

“Norm? You know those words on your dashboard? What are they for?” I couldn’t help my reaching out emotion from cracking my brow or voice.

“Oh, those. Those are this week’s spelling words for my oldest son, Willy. We put them there so we could test him.” “Oh, that’s a good idea.”

——
This vignette is my favorite and applicable to our orientation day in August. Well, let me begin by asking what does “placeful” mean? By my accounts, it’s not a real word, but one of my favorites. Was that teacher a visionary or did I misspell the word? I define “placeful” as a deliberate choice to fulfill the aesthetic. Moving with purpose. There was a point, during our orientation day when people were filing out of 201 N for a break when I came up with another definition for “placeful.”

Here we have an accumulation of great potential; there will be great teachers here. Simply, we represent an amazing set
of choices.

by James Erard