I Never Thought I'd Say This, But Don't Get Rid of Final Exams

At the end of last school year, several schools were subjected to a universally hated test called the "PARCC". Okay, maybe there was one person out of all of those affected who didn't consider the PARCC to be a stupid, time-consuming, counter-productive test. I'll believe it when that person is presented to me.

MCPS officials don't count.

To be fair, the PARCC did force our school to get better wifi, so it wasn't completely worthless. But still, I was understandably shocked when I learned that MCPS was responding to the complaints of over-testing.

By getting rid of final exams.

The thing is, people don't hate final exams. Like, they suck, but it's just something we have to do. Even when we (and I'm using that term to mean 'people I know') could technically get a C, or a D, or whatever, on the exam and not be affected, we still try. Sort of. We don't try as much for the tests that really matter, but we don't answer the questions randomly. We don't write complaints about the test in the middle of (or in lieu of) the essays. (If someone went A-A and only wanted a B, the 50% rule would mean that they actually could answer the multiple choice randomly, though it would be worth putting in some effort on the free response to avoid a zero. Not to mention if they only wanted to pass the class.)

I think it's fair to say most people don't hate final exams as much as the PARCC.

And final exams, compared to the PARCC, aren't as terrible in...any way. They cause some stress, but we have a good idea of what's going to be on the test and the teacher's grading style. (It helps a lot that we aren't losing class time to take them.) They take some preparation, but nothing like the PARCC, because their format is about the same as the tests we've already taken and acclimated to. They're at the end of the year, when we've learned everything we're going to, rather than weeks before. And they even have some educational value, because sometimes, they're the only reason we revisit the stuff we learned in class.

That's not something I'm very happy about, as I've written previously, but I digress.

Is testing us twice on what should be the same material a waste of time? Certainly. Which one would we pick? Final exams.

The discussion, however, is centered on how to restructure the final exams. There are four options.

• Option A: replace final exams for middle school courses with unit or marking-period assessments
• Option B: eliminate final exams for high school students
• Option C: schedule final exams over multiple class periods
• Option D: replace final exams for high school level courses with marking-period assessments such as unit tests, projects, and portfolios

I don't, to be honest, care much about the middle school students, because in hindsight, middle school didn't matter much. The rest of the options, though... As lovely as the idea of not having to take final exams sounds when going B-A, it sounds absolutely terrible when going A-B, and honestly, with the PARCC's disruptive influence, that may be the more likely one. Besides, I am morally opposed to grading on a trend, because as we all learned in math, two points do not make a trend.

Students aren't the only ones who need to brush up on basic skills.

Seriously, though, MCPS's grading policies. I love that if I get the same grade in both quarters I basically don't have to worry about the final exam. I love it. It makes the final exams a relatively relaxing time. But it is absurd to have precision of grades to one significant figure and then report the GPA with three. 

Anyways. Option C sounds absolutely terrible. First of all, transition time for tests is inevitable, so it would take more time to take the test. Second of all, nobody wants to study three nights for one test (forty-five minute periods would stretch a two-hour test over three periods). Yes, it sucks when math's your first test, but at least after you're done, you're done. You're free to promptly forget everything you learned until the last week of August (which, let's be honest, everyone does). Now you can clear some room in your head for that nomenclature. Two hours is a long time to be sitting, but it's two hours and then freedom.

Okay, I admit I'm biased, because I'm the type of person who needs to get into things to do well and doesn't have a problem sitting still. The points are still valid.

Option D is the most palatable. I still don't really like it, because I like projects that are highly stressful but, in the end, practically guaranteed As. However, replacing final exams with projects and unit tests (at the teacher's discretion, I assume) seems reasonable. Some AP classes use projects in lieu of final exams already. It's sort of weird, in fact, to have a test in an English class where the bulk of the assignments have been take-home essays.

(Not that that stopped the state of Maryland from creating multiple choice English formatives.)

Of course, there are some classes in which the bulk of the grade is made up from unit tests (math), so that might make that a bit difficult. And everyone's just going to calculate what they need on that last assessment to get the desired final exam grade. But it could be reasonable, as long as teachers don't respond to unit assessments being used as the final exam by adding more unit assessments.

To be honest, I don't think removing final exams (unless it was executed really, really poorly) would have a huge effect on students. The larger problem is this accountability testing we do. You'd think that if America was worried about its standing in the international rankings it would, you know, try to emulate schools with better rankings.

Top preforming countries do not test their students annually.

I'm not saying that we don't need accountability. We do. National standards are good, though it's totally unreasonable for us to put the United States of America as a single entity in international rankings. I mean, the list is topped by "Shanghai", which, like, isn't a country. (I feel obliged to note that all entities associated with China in the top ten have had significant Western influence.) And this is America, where individual states make their rules about schools. I don't know who decided that America was being tested as a country, but I hope whoever it was didn't take a US Government class.

But I'm getting off-topic again. The point is that the top-performing countries listed generally have testing as students advance between schools, which are often entrance exams but sometimes diagnostic. These tests also often test a wider range of subjects than math, reading, and science.

Of course, there are also things these countries do that I personally wouldn't support, like putting students into tracks. Testing only once at the end of elementary, middle, and high school doesn't sound bad, though. For one thing, it would take up less time, for obvious reasons, and wouldn't intersect with any sort of final exam. For another, people might actually be moved to take them seriously. I can hardly speak for other people, everyone I knew considered the MSAs—our annual state assessment—a joke. Now, if there was only one test before each promotion, and we only were subjected to one pep rally for the test, we might be able to bring ourselves to get anxious about it, especially if the stakes were made clear.

We might even move ourselves to study for it as if it were, like, a real test with, like, real consequences for doing poorly.

MCPS is considering getting rid of final exams because of the PARCC, but the problem isn't final exams. The problem is the PARCC, and the plethora of nationally (or state...ly) standardized tests we take, which consume more time and are less relevant to the specific content learned in class. The problem is the fact that we've started to just throw tests at the problem. And maybe, before we do away with final exams and instate the PARCC, we should think a moment about whether this is necessarily the best way to ensure accountability. After all, if people aren't meeting the bar for math after fifth grade, is it really the end of the world? There's still time to correct that, and more importantly, nobody really learns anything in elementary school.

Also, let's take a moment to appreciate the fact that China, which literally invented standardized tests, tests its students less than America. 

The Making of Immorality

I wrote this for English class as a rhetorical essay, but it really isn't a rhetorical analysis so much as an articulation through the lens of The Grapes of Wrath of my beliefs regarding morality in general.

That's why, if you'll notice (as my teacher did), the first paragraph is missing a proper thesis.

The Making of Immorality

For centuries, people have theorized about the nature of morality; what it is and why immoral acts are committed. Humanist psychologists, for example, believe that people are “innately good” and that deviance from this natural state leads to problems. The bible (or, at least, one reading of it), in contrast, teaches that all people inherited sin from Adam and Eve. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck argues that emotional separation leads to immorality.

In making his argument, Steinbeck must establish what morality is, which he does in defiance of enumerated rules. Morality conflicts clearly with law multiple times in The Grapes of Wrath, such as when the Joad family buries Grampa against the law because they don’t have the money for the state to bury him and don’t want to see him buried a pauper (190). For the Joads, their personal moral responsibility to see their loved one buried with dignity outweighs the law’s mandate. The biblical definition of sin, too, is kept distinct from immorality. In the government camp the Joads are in, the group of people named as the “Jesus-lovers” disapprove of dancing and acting and call it sin. One of them, Lisbeth Sandry, terrifies Rose of Sharon by telling her that the stage play the camp once gave was “sin an’ delusion an’ devil stuff” (422). Steinbeck makes it clear that this is not the majority opinion, nor is it a sane opinion. Mrs. Sandry is a crazy trouble-maker; she eventually goes into a fit and the respected and kind camp manager says of her, “She isn’t well” (439). Steinbeck presents those who are fixed on the bible’s definitions of sin as, far from righteous, insane.

It may be tempting to say that Steinbeck is rejecting the idea of sin. Jim Casy, the former preacher who ends up sacrificing himself for the migrants, suggests that “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do” (32). However, Casy, in practice, demonstrates that he does believe that some things are wrong, such as by protesting wages of two and a half cents for a box of peaches. His statement is more accurately interpreted to mean that there is no fundamental sin or virtue, despite what the bible says, and it must follow that if actions are not fundamentally labelled, people cannot be innately inclined to sin or virtue. Steinbeck certainly lays moral judgment on some acts, notably, destroying food when children nearby are dying of malnutrition, calling it “a crime here that goes beyond denunciation” (477). Steinbeck believes that there are sins and crimes; they are merely not necessarily the things officially labelled sins or crimes.

Then what is morality? Early on, there are many things presented as good or bad. Steinbeck refers to the bank forcing tenants off their land for profit as “the monster” (44), clearly presenting this act and the construct as immoral. For the migrants, sharing is a moral obligation. When Pa questions whether or not they can take Casy along, Ma scolds him harshly, saying, “ ‘An’ any time when we got two pigs an’ over a hunderd dollars, an’ we wonderin’ if we kin feed a fella’ ” (139). Ma expresses another of Steinbeck’s messages; that it is good for people to unite and be together. She champions keeping the family together, even going so far as to threaten Pa with death to do so (230), and Tom later says, “Jesus, I’m glad Ma stopped us” (252), proving her correct. There is a definite implication that people uniting is good, such as when people collectively provide the money to bury babies honorably (266). What Steinbeck considers the origin of these, and other moral laws, is stated plainly in the passage that describes how the migrants built worlds, and more specifically the creation of codes. While certain rights, in the creation of codes, were required to be honored, others, such as the right to murder were crushed “because the little worlds could not exist for even a night with such rights alive” (265). The purpose of morality is to allow worlds, or, societies, to survive.

Both the right to offer help and the right to murder are called rights, though the latter are not upheld, reflecting the fact that humans have inclinations to do both. There must be, then, punishments to ensure that the former right is observed while the latter is destroyed, which are stated to be “a quick and murderous fight or ostracism” (266). Of the two, Steinbeck says, “ostracism was the worst. For…his name and face went with him” (266). Ostracism, thus, effectively blacklists one among ones’ peers, which is worse than death. Social pressure is brought to bear to persuade or dissuade without resorting to ostracism. The influence of the opinion of peers is shown frequently. The government camp uses it most effectively, running the entire camp on it. The watchman explains the disciplinary system to Tom as, simply, “Well, the first time the Central Committee warns him. And the second time they really warn him. The third time they kick him out of the camp” (392). This is apparently the only form of official discipline in the camp, and would not be effective if ostracism did not blacklist the migrant, as failing to get a job appears to be a common reason to leave anyways. The camp does not need death to enforce order; ostracism is enough. The camp residents additionally take care to enforce minor rules, as one does when Ma walks into the men’s bathroom harshly demanding, “How you come in here?” (411). Ma is duly apologetic. Social pressure successfully keeps order in the government camp.

Social pressure is shown to be enormously powerful, even capable of defeating stringent economic pressure, as it did for Thomas, a small farmer who tipped off the government camp about a fight planned at the dance (404). Though Thomas was under threat of losing his job, he tells them to maintain the respect his workers have for him. Social pressure is not just something used to encourage people to perform moral acts, but a tool used to determine morality. Pa says about Tom’s imprisonment for homicide, “When Tom here got in trouble we could hold up our heads. He only done what any man would a done” (190). Tom’s act is not judged as immoral, but completely natural, and therefore, the Joads treat it with pride as a moral act. Pity, too, is not as powerful as social pressure. Most representative of this is Mae, who gives a migrant bread against her normal policy despite initial resistance. Her resistance does not fall because of pity but because Al judges her negatively for her resistance (217). When people are affected by social pressure, it is enormously powerful. Social pressure in this way enforces morality.

As people have inclinations to be immoral, the converse is then true. The lack of social pressure, or, more accurately, the ability to not feel social pressure, leads to immorality, because such people do not have immoral inclinations suppressed. Noah is the definition of the ability to not feel social pressure, as he does not feel much at all. He is described and apparently lamented as someone who “didn’t seem to care” (106). This emotional separation from the world, including his family, allows him to commit the established crime of breaking up the family despite Tom’s reproaches and the knowledge of Ma’s need. Earlier in the book, in one of the interlude chapters, cold figuring allows the tractor driver representative of all tractor drivers native to the people they drive off the land to perform the act despite their remonstrance. The tenant tells the driver, “But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can’t eat at all,” appealing to the driver’s moral sensibilities. However, the driver responds with, “Can’t think of that. Got to think of my own kids” (50). For survival, out of desperation, the tractor driver learns to use his family as an emotional barrier between him and the tenants, his former neighbors.

 Numbers appear multiple times as methods of emotional separation, usually appearing as money. Other men, tasked with throwing tenants off the land, are said to have “worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling” (42), and these “would take no responsibility” (43). While all of the owner men find their ways to deal with their actions, the ones who use numbers as a shield are portrayed as the most irresponsible and the most immoral. It is, similarly, for economic purposes that fruit is destroyed while children die of malnutrition, the “crime here that goes beyond denunciation” (476-477). The small farmers’ calculations of the amount it cost to put crop out for sale and conclusion that it was not economically viable ultimately allows them to destroy food when faced with the starving. Numbers, combined with necessity, are a powerful barrier from emotion.

Numbers also contribute to distance, which is another powerful separator and the ones the ultimate villains, the huge landowners, use. The huge landowners, such as the monster, the bank, drive down wages to keep profits high without mercy. Their distance is both physical and in power. Many of the huge landowners are situated far away, such as in the east as one tractor driver reports (52). So far removed are they that “many of them had never seen the farms they owned” (317) and value their farms at “principal plus interest” (316). Because they do not see their farms or the people that worked on them, they were capable of ordering starvation. The power difference also allows them to view their workers as inferior, saying things like, “Sure, they talk the same language, but they ain’t the same. Look how they live. Think any of us folks’d live like that?” (322). The migrants are different and inferior, and thus, they are not peers, and their opinion does not matter. This is quite literal for the individual migrant because the individual migrant cannot make an impact. The landowners’ power extends far, as Thomas reports, saying that the men who burned out a migrant camp were “sent out by the Association”, which is controlled by a large landowner bank (402-403). As there are always migrants willing to work and migrants are landless and nameless, migrants only have power collectively, and the landowners work in this way to keep them from uniting. Because of the gap between the landowner and the migrant in both physical distance and power, the landowners commit immoral acts against the migrants without qualms.

An obvious argument is that the cited actions are not actually immoral, as the society the perpetuators are part of has not been threatened by their actions; that the laws they are breaking are laws for the migrants so that their worlds might survive. But Steinbeck takes care to show that all the actions are working towards a rebellion that will overturn the social order, destroying and remaking it. First, the tractor drivers and owner men are directly responsible for destroying a society, because once the tenants are forced to become migrants, the former community of small farmers is gone and without replacement. But they are not the main point. It is the large landowners who have the largest hand, and they are the ones working towards their own destruction. Migrants’ anger is something the large landowners clearly fear. In an interlude chapter, one thinks, “What if some time an army of them marches on the land as the Lombards did in Italy…?” (323). For this reason they order camps to be destroyed. However, they know themselves that this cannot work indefinitely, because “Slaughter and terror did not stop [the Lombards]” (323). At some point, if they starve the migrants indefinitely, the migrants will unite despite their attempts to repress them and rise. Already the whispers are beginning. The threat of death even has no effect, because, as a migrant asks rhetorically, “Which’d you ruther for your kids, dead now or dead in two years with…malnutrition?” (322). They consider themselves certain to die, and have reason to do so, and instant death is preferable to a slow one by starvation. The landowners’ actions are self-destructive and therefore immoral. Steinbeck concludes this with the words, “And the great owners…ran to their destruction…cemented the inevitability of the day [of their destruction]” (325). There is left no doubt that all the actions against the migrants are immoral, because, whether by citing history or the migrants’ words, Steinbeck leaves no doubt that these actions are destructive. What the great landowners’ distance has led to is immorality.

In the Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck argues that the purpose of morality is so that society can function, and naturally, it is enforced through social pressure. When social pressure does not have effect, immorality ensues. Whether through mathematics or distance, all people committing immoral acts have separated from those who would judge them as immoral, whether they have separated themselves so they can perform the immoral act, as the tractor drivers forcing their neighbors off their land do, or can perform immoral acts because they had already separated themselves, as is true for the large landowners. Either way, emotional separation necessarily precedes immorality.

A Day in the Abiotic Life

"Are you serious? She replaced her head again?"

Kally (otherwise known as 0101000000010110101111000) nodded. "Look, she's coming in right now."

Sure enough, the robot they were gossiping about, Joey (01001011100010011000), sported a new, larger, shinier head and had installed the new eyes that could detect all the wavelengths the sun put out with only one sensor. To compensate for the weight, Joey had also replaced her shoulders with a more expensive and flexible metal alloy. Miry (01100010001000111000) looked at her own shoulders, which she knew were wearing down. Self-consciously, she unzipped the insulator covering her neck and rubbed some lubricant on it.

"I wonder what changes she made to her personality," Kally was saying. She smirked. "Hey, do you think she's gotten rid of whatever it is that makes her replace her parts so often?"

Miry laughed. "I hope not. It wouldn't be Joey, then."

Kally shook her head. "That robot changes herself so often I don't know if she's ever gone a month as the same person. It's her decision, but I have to say, I wouldn't. I mean, I'm always installing new things, but she does some serious rewriting of her brain."

"She wants to be better, I guess." Miry frowned. "Not to be mean, but it's so human of her."

"I know, I can't understand it. You know me—I always have a backup copy of my brain in case this one gets damaged somehow and I lose something. I mean, we're all robots, aren't we? We can just change anything whenever we like. There's no competition. In fact, the only thing that really separates us, meaningfully, is our identities."

"But she wouldn't be Joey if she didn't do this all the time," Miry repeated.

"Gah. It's u—"

Fortunately, Andy (00000011100001111000) spared Kally's 2 exabyte, 32-watt brain from trying to puzzle out Joey. "Hey, did you hear the news?"

Kally shook her head. "I'm on a three-day cycle for regular news. What happened?"

"I'm telling you, this is why you don't stay on a three-day cycle. The last humans just died!"

"Really? All three of them?"

"Well, two died yesterday, but yeah, all at once."

"In the name of WALL-E and EVE, what happened?" Miry turned on her fan as her brain heated up, processing this. She really needed to install a new cooling system as soon as possible. Probably at the same time as she got new shoulders.

"Well," Andy said, drawing out the word for dramatic effect. "They'd been closing down the enclosures, you know, since we decided to stop breeding them for experimentation—there just wasn't any point anymore, and it's so expensive to keep them alive. So they put these three into the same enclosure, for convenience, and also because they say keeping them alone's pretty cruel."

"Unsurprising. We'd hate that too, and we were built in their image."

"Of course, we could get rid of that easily if we wanted to," Andy said, looking a little petulant at Kally's interruption. "Anyways, like I was saying. They put these three together, but they didn't really get along well. Two of them had history, I think, and the other one was just belligerent, or a troublemaker or something."

"Oh, dear."

"So they were eating lunch, the three of them, on those porcelain plates that are still left. And the trouble-making one finished and wanted more, or maybe something had happened before. Nobody really paid much attention to them, you know. For whatever reason, when the other two were squabbling about something, he stole some food off one's plate and made it look like the other had done it."

"And they got into a fight."

"And they got into a fight, and at some point, plates got broken, and heads got smashed into walls, and anyways, the last died today."

Kally shook her head. "Rather poetic, that they finally destroyed themselves."

"Kally!"

"Why so scandalized, Miry? It's true. They had those stories fearing that we would destroy them all, but we never did anything—that's not how we were programmed. They drove themselves to near extinction, and here, again, we preserved them and they killed themselves."

"They still made us," Andy protested.

"Oh no, don't get her worked up on this topic."

"No, they didn't! They didn't make us. They made some sketchy prototypes that were either human-like, useful to humans, or their idea of utopian humans! Yes, they gave us our start, but that doesn't mean they made us. That's why we don't say we 'make' other robots. We give them life, and a few years later they'll have replaced their body completely and rewrote a lot of their brain. And don't say we owe them stuff for it. We don't owe them anything. We propped up their species for this long, didn't we?"

"But they still made the essential step to create our...kind. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for them."

Miry's radiation sensors very easily identified that Kally was radiating condescension. "You mean the smart ones? Not all humans are made of the same metal."

"Well, they weren't made of metal at all..."

"Shut up, Miry."

"We still bear their hallmarks, though, so you really can't dismiss their influence on us like that. Like, look at the fact that we could convert everything we say to their alphabet, though we got rid of most those special characters. And some of our words are still the same, though we've gotten rid of those ambiguities. Like 'she'. We call everyone that because in the dominant language then, there wasn't a gender neutral pronoun and we decided that our ability to 'reproduce' and nurture our 'children' was more reminiscent of human females."

"And then we were too lazy to stop using it," Kally agreed with a laugh. "Look, I'm not denying that humans have influenced us a lot. Our language, our traits, our standards of beauty, our governmental structure—we used to vote before we adopted communism—"

"To be fair, that was sort of the natural way to govern ourselves."

"But they're sort of the necessary step to form us. Abiotic sentience couldn't have risen by itself. Only biotic organisms could have evolved naturally and then made the leap to creating abiotic sentience. But obviously, being abiotic is better. We can replace our bodies indefinitely, we think faster, we control our evolution, we can control our senses, we aren't bound by petty impulses—"

"Proud to be abiotic much?"

"I'm not sure about the petty impulses part," Miry said thoughtfully. "I've seen you spend time on purely aesthetic changes."

"What do you mean? They happen to have structural value."

"Right..."

"Well, I don't see you changing that polished head for a bulkier one better suited for your brain."

"Yes, but I'm well aware that I do it to look nice."

Kally radiated annoyance.

Out of the Clouds (pictures)

Of the fifteen Independence Days I've lived through, there have always been sunny skies for our vacation and clear skies for the fireworks (save the year I went to China, but I don't count it). This year, however, water was the theme of the day.

When we arrived at the hotel the evening before, it was raining, a kind of on-and-off drizzle like a fretful child's crying. One moment it was all clear, and then the next we had to huddle under our umbrellas to escape a sudden downpour. We were cross because we'd turned back, two hours into our drive, when we discovered we'd forgotten my mom's bag. The rain dashing our hopes for a hike around the lake didn't help our spirits.

It was still drizzling the next morning when we headed out to the main attraction, the famous feat of architecture, Fallingwater. High up in the mountains as we were, my phone lost connection (quite traumatizingly) and we could only follow the GPS's instructions. It led us higher and higher up a winding forested road. 

It was quite beautiful. The quiet forest and the homes scattered throughout was cloaked in fog--or perhaps we had driven into a cloud. There were buildings, at first, old, abandoned sheds with the paint peeling off, lonely play-sets with their bright red and blue, rows of white and beige houses standing in fields. 

Increasingly, forest replaced cultivated land and open field. Mist pooled around the thick trunks and green foliage, shrouding the depths in mystery.

We were the only ones on the fog-blanketed road. The view would have been easier to enjoy if the road wasn't filled with hills and curves that appeared only when we were almost at them. As we drove upwards, it became increasingly like driving through a sea, in which mysterious things appeared as we advanced.

At some point, we came across a niche in the road that we could park in, and we did to appreciate the scenery we had chanced upon.

The empty road proved to our benefit, as it allowed us to run around freely.

After taking a few pictures, we returned to the road. The speed limit was 40 mph, but we moved much slower than that. We began to go downhill.

The signs of civilization reappeared and visibility improved enough that we could see those signs. As we drove, we passed a post office, a firehouse, and an ice-cream-pizza place. But our destination was up ahead.

Fallingwater was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Kaufmanns, who wanted a new cabin, preferably facing the beautiful waterfall. Wright instead designed "the greatest building of the twentieth century" and integrated it above the aforementioned waterfall.

The site was on Bear Run, where the Kaufmanns ran a summer camp, a briskly running stream swollen with the day's rain.

The sun was quickly burning out the fog; it had been raining still when we arrived, but we soon put away our umbrellas. The combination of a newly-fed waterfall and glistening sunlight made for beautiful outside views. The inside, however, was the main attraction.

We weren't permitted to take pictures inside. Wright took his inspiration from the waterfall and protruding stones, which defined the structure of the building. The interior wouldn't have been out of place in Japan, whose architecture Wright admired. There was even Japanese artwork to complete the impression. Glass windows provided views of the nature surrounding the building. It was air-conditioned by the cool air above the stream, which circulated through the building when the windows were opened.

In addition to glass windows, there were plenty of verandas from which to view the surroundings, where we were permitted to take pictures.

The day was cooling as we walked out and took a last look at the work of art integrated exquisitely with its surroundings.

And we still got to see the fireworks.