Thursday morning random

* Now I'm wondering - based on Chris' comment - if those little wooden tugboats were a common classroom/Scouts/whatever craft, back in the day. I'd never seen another one, other than the one I made. (A quick check online shows some instructions, but they are slightly different from the tugboat I have).

I wonder if there are other things - I mentioned the yarn octopus as being fairly common and iconic - that kids of my generation (and a half-generation or so earlier) made in school or Scouts or Vacation Bible School.

I know one thing - not necessarily a sanctioned craft but something "everyone" (at least the girls) knew how to make - those little paper "fortune tellers" (also sometimes known as "cootie catchers")

I know now lots of the teachers of children's Sunday school or who do summer camp programs order stuff from Oriental Trading Company. I don't know that that existed back when I was a kid, it seemed that a lot of our crafts used stuff that the teacher prepped herself or that could be made from office supplies or popsickle sticks or that sort of thing.

* I decided to start doing Duolingo to re-teach myself a little German. It's fun, and it's a nice break during the day, but I don't know how much I'm actually going to LEARN. For one thing, I'm still struggling with remembering the genders of words. Part of my problem is being an Anglophone, I come from a background where non-living things are "it" (well, so are things like apples, that are living but that are not clearly male or female) and so I have a hard time with the concept of "gender" of a word because I am so used to, for example, thinking of "the female gender" as applying to cows and mares and female cats and that sort of thing. And I get that "gender" of a word is more than just "what reproductive parts the animal has" but it's hard to wrap my head around it.

Also, having learned French first and better, I find I get confused, because French and German are in opposition on certain words - "spoon," for example, has opposite genders in the two languages, as does "beer."

The other thing is that Duolingo, so far, isn't doing much with the different noun cases and I remember when I tried German before I had a hard time with that. (I am starting from the very beginning - where the Duolingo owl is just an egg - so maybe I'll get there eventually)

* It's very "gamified." I like that and I don't. I like that it's in bite-sized portions so I can do a little bit in a few minutes of time. But I'm not sure about all the badges and "lingots" and things like that, it seems a little goofy to me. But I guess this is what some people require to learn? Our BlackBoard system now has the ability to give "badges" that can be "shared on social media" when the students complete some kind of task and I admit I find that kind of patronizing, or I would if I were a student.

I'm also not totally in love with the daily e-mails. Not the fact that they're reminders to practice, I like that, but that they say something along the lines of "You'll make Duo [the owl mascot] sad if you don't" Yeah. I'm being made to feel guilty over an imaginary owl. I don't know if I'm more irritated with the website for phrasing it like that or with myself for actually feeling guilty. ("Duo, you're not the boss of me!")

And yeah. I do. I don't want to make an imaginary owl sad. How stupid is that?

(Does that, I wonder, have anything to do with the way I felt as a child when I read "Owl at Home" and read about him making tear-water tea? And anyway, tear-water tea would be GROSS.)