From another forum.
.....lunar eclipse which is of no real astronomical importance
My physics teacher (a keen amateur astronomer) said exactly that when there was a convenient lunar eclipse during after-school “science club”.
I would agree up to a point. However, the layman can easily notice two things, neither of them being mentioned in the recent media hype. The Earth’s shadow on the Moon shows that the Earth is round.
(to which someone said: "tell Trump that"). The shadow also illustrates the relative sizes of Earth and Moon (for practical purposes, it can be assumed that the sun is at an infinite distance with respect to the Earth/Moon system).
Jack