Our trip to the American Museum of Natural History was a great excursion (despite my initial panic over forgetting all about it.) Sometimes a break of routine and getting away from the classroom is the healthiest thing for us.

(selfie)

While there I observed the Tiger in the Endangered Species display and an interactive video on Amphibians.

The tiger was a big hit among the crowd. 20 people actually stopped and looked, while more would quickly pause to look closer and then continue on their merry way. People seemed absolutely in awe of this tiger. I guess that they are larger than we would expect. There wasn’t a lot of reading going on. People were looking and then leaving. The information on the glass was for the most part ignored.

There was a very sweet interaction between a mother and a daughter where they roared at each other. A tour came through with only one elderly couple on it. As the tour guide said, “These are endangered,” I suspect the elderly couple thought to themselves, “We aren’t going to live that long anyway.” They did look in danger of dying at any second. But to contrast that, a woman showed her child in a stroller the tiger, as if to say, “This is what the future can hold, if we preserve it.”

The other exhibit I did was an interactive video based on amphibians. It had a little statue next to it. I’d say that 11 people were in the vicinity of the video but only 3 people actually looked at it. The most interested were a set of three girls, one of whom spent all her time touching the tongue of the statue, and the oldest of the three spending the longest time there- probably 3 minutes top.

Often enough children would stand right in front of the video, even touch the video, but not look at it. I felt like I was routing on the last place horse in the Kentucky Derby. At one point a man came over and truly seemed to be interested… until I realized he was just taking pictures of the wall behind it. There was so much stimulation and so much going on that the video was ignored.

Which brings me to my next point- I don’t think that the museum can be more engaging, more interactive, more conducive to educating the masses. Why is this? Because the masses aren’t trying to be educated; they’re trying to be entertained. The tiger exhibit drew eyes because tigers are cool, terrifying animals, not because tigers are going extinct. What people what to give their attention to is what will succeed. We live in a modern day where the real currency isn’t dollars, but instead attention. If people want to get educated the resources are out there and easily accessible. A trip to the museum is no longer solely about learning. It’s akin to amusement park attraction. And people aren’t going to pay good money to go and be bored.

Ps. I found this cool painting of a giraffe.