Unit 4 · Term 1 · Weeks 10–12
Making
“The sculptor acts on the bronze, and the statue is the bronze given a form, not a new thing. The camera is the same: light acts on the sensor, and the maker gives the picture its form.”
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In a child’s words. When you make something, you give a shape to stuff that was already there. You do not make the stuff.
The Institute habit
The Whisperer: a machine Mr. Curtain modelled on his own mind, which offered comfort and belonging, the things only persons give, and soothed a fear instead of answering it. Against it, Kate’s red bucket: tools that serve the person who carries them.
The book
Mr. Curtain’s plan, the white knight, and the end, where Reynie resists the Whisperer by facing the fear it wanted to soothe.
Week 1 · the kind of answer
Pack a bucket of your own and give a reason for every item. Monday puzzle: a control panel drawn with clues to find the one true OFF switch.
Week 2 · into the gap
Make a shoebox camera obscura and a figure in clay. The light acts and the maker frames; the clay is given a form and is still clay. Making is a gap on the map, so the child writes into it, in Mr. Benedict’s voice: what I made, and what I did not.
Week 3 · the case
Peter Lombard allowed that God might give a minister the power to create; St Thomas Aquinas denied it. Try the rule on every person you know, the sculptor first, and it fails each time: no creature gives another its being. The sculptor makes; he does not give being. Then ask what the Whisperer could do to a mind (rearrange it, hide its memories) and what it could never do (give one).
The workshop · suggested
For a child taking the workshop strand, Project 2, the adders. Every chip is NAND gates given a shape: the child makes something real and adds nothing to the gates, which is the unit’s rule in silicon. Then ask what the Whisperer’s maker could give it, and what he could not.
The end first
Four causes are four kinds of line into one thing. Draw them on the camera obscura: the box and the glass, the shape that lets light through one hole, the child who made it, and seeing the yard. Then soap: begin with what it is for, to clean, and divide it by its causes, not its parts. Only the line from the end points from the future. These are the first gold lines on the wall map.
Fridays
The end-of-term trial: see Mr. Benedict’s tests on the page for parents.
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