In Salt Lake City, the debut of “On Point,” a fifteen-foot pencil sculpture made from an old utility pole.
See also these pencil sculptures, twelve and sixteen feet.
Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)
[Yes, the eraser is way too big.]
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
“On Point”
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comments: 6
I see you linked to the new pencil sculpture in Minneapolis--I just saw it the other day as I was biking around the lake--immediately thought of you, but didn't have my camera.
Looked it up and like what the patron says:
"The No. 2 is a classic. As students we took the math tests, we had to fill in the ovals, we wrote letters – maybe a love letter, a poem, but the color of a pencil, the feel of a pencil, the sound when you sharpen it, the smell of the cedar, there’s so much special about a pencil that we can all relate to."
[But who is this "we" he refers to, the we who "can all relate to" a pencil? I bet lots of people under 30 don't.]
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/kare11-sunrise/lake-of-the-isles-giant-pencil-sculpture/89-c1aafd56-11ce-4a6e-aa6e-2d0b138e7dc7
I’m still optimistic about pencils. Supply lists for schools still ask for a dozen. “Ticonderogas are best,” says a local school. They care!
That's great. The specificity!
But, from the Guardian in 2018:
"Children struggle to hold pencils due to too much tech, doctors say".
Sally Payne, head paediatric occupational therapist: 'Children coming into school are being given a pencil but are increasingly not be able to hold it because they don’t have the fundamental movement skills.
'To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers,. Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills.'”
I just wonder if pencils will hold children they way they held us.
Yes, the difficulties with pencils are real. It’s smart to have kids coloring and drawing and writing early on.
Once in a while I found that a student couldn’t read my written comments — not because of sloppiness but because I was writing in cursive. So I ended up printing. And at least once a student showed me handwritten comments from a younger faculty member that were (literally) unreadable.
A few miles up the road from us in Keswick (Cumbria, England) is the Pencil Museum - https://www.derwentart.com/en-gb/c/about/company/derwent-pencil-museum which among its other delights claims to be "the home of the first pencil" and to have on show "one of the largest colour pencils in the world measuring almost 8 metres".
Pencils are, I confess, not really my thing, but I am reliably told that the museum shop is wonderful for art supplies, including, naturally, lots of pencils...
A venerable name — I have their pencils and a beautiful modern extender.
Someone recently left a link in a comment to a great item from the museum store: WW2 Secret Map Souvenir Pencil. Wow!
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