How Do I Love Thee? CEP 818 Modeling Ansel Adams once said, ‘There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept’. I think what he meant was that we may look at things without actually seeing them properly. And that’s where the core of modeling lies in my content area – The ability to interpret what one sees. In spatial description, students are often faced with the uncontested difficulty of figuring out how to make sense of what they see, for they can see alright, but they need to turn that space into a meaningful entity to the reader. It’s pretty much like being inside a building. Can you tell what it looks like on the outside? You may describe every inch of the building to the reader and yet not manage to put two descriptive items together that would help form an overall clear picture of that building.
Room to describe
With that said, modeling presents a crucial part of spatial description. Students work on a scaled down model of the room to describe and figure out how best to describe it. There isn’t a single way to describe a room, and therefore each student may go about describing the room in a way that makes sense to them. After all, this is a very personal task, but with a model of the room, students are able to imagine it in many different ways and then describe it in a way that makes sense to the reader. Seeing an overall picture of the room is definitely better than looking at it from the inside. The entire furniture is laid in one spot rather than around the student. As such, students can ‘wrap their heads’ around the layout of the room and come up with a more appropriate description than when being asked to describe the room from within. Students can see the different sections of the room all at once (sitting area, work area, window, …) in one spot and relate them to each other. Instead of describing each section of the room separately, they make a comparative description of the room based on how the different parts Prepared by: Jean-Claude Aura
Date: November 2010
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How Do I Love Thee? CEP 818 relate to each other (i.e. the distance between the sitting area and dining area, the size of the work area compared to the sitting area, the convenience of the location of the window as to the light it casts, and so on).
Close up on work sitting and work areas
Close up on work area
Close up on entertainment area
Prepared by: Jean-Claude Aura
Date: November 2010
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How Do I Love Thee? CEP 818
Model 1: Side view of the room
Model 2: Top view of the room
The 2 models above provide students with a basic version of the room to describe. They exclude all the details deemed distracting and show students the necessary elements in the room to focus on while figuring out an appropriate description.
Prepared by: Jean-Claude Aura
Date: November 2010
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