Month: March 2013

Conclusion: I Like NPR More Than NPR Likes Me

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My biannual losing submission to NPR’s Three Minute Fiction follows. English teachers should write, so I do.

“Timestamp”

Timestamp:::

Hello? Hello. There’s, I don’t know. I’m going to try you again later.

Timestamp:::

I couldn’t – I think I tried you earlier. I’ve just lost track of time. I keep getting this machine. I just wish this was a conversation. It’s – I guess the machine tells you when this is.

Timestamp:::

I’m sorry.

I/

Timestamp:::

Listen: Maybe a story will help put this into perspective. Years ago, I think, we were in Gstaad and the wind came up suddenly. This was winter. Anyway, the wind came up suddenly and although it hadn’t snowed in what seemed like several days, the limbs of trees around our chalet stirred and flooded the air with crystalline glitter. I said the wind came up, but it came down, suddenly, with a rushing sound like a train passing through a local station, but then up again, maybe as cold pressed over warm air and rebounded. When the wind came down, then up, lifting the snow off every light surface, it stalled. Neither of us breathed for I don’t know how long and the air was solid. We were frozen in that moment in cut glass hanging in a windowsill framed in southern light. I don’t know, do you/

Timestamp:::

Look, that wasn’t Gstaad at all, but I think Les Gets or Vevey. Where are you? It’s funny. Not funny, but strange to dictate to you like this. Mediated. What time is it there? Jetlag. Jetlag is like a fat floppy bunny incubating my brain. I guess bunnies don’t incubate anything.

Maybe that actually makes more sense as a description for jetlag with the error about bunnies, but/

Timestamp:::

Your answering machine is demanding. How long is the time window for leaving a/

Timestamp:::

There was another time, maybe you remember, in the Alps, near one of those funny huts with beautiful shutters and boozy coffees in warm wooden rooms, above tree line. So much of the Alps is above tree line. Not like the Rockies, which are much higher, but which line their flanks with lodgepole and spruce. Anyway, the hut. I can’t remember when it was, exactly, but we were climbing on skis near a ridgeline when the snow came. Did I leave this story already? Did I tell you this? Perhaps you remember. Maybe I’d better/

Timestamp:::

I was remembering the alpine hut and snow falling over snow above tree line. The story doesn’t matter. It’s the dislocation of losing all definition. I could see you, clearly, above me. How far? Impossible to know, but I could see you. I couldn’t reach you, but we spoke, wondering – up? Down? Which way was which? We’d pick a few turns down and fall over slowly, simply lost within our inner ears, balance collapsing into itself without external cues. We had only the memory of the ascent to guide us back down, not even very far – 600 meters? But we doubted, slipped and slid, sure of the encroaching moment of weightlessness, when our skis would slip off into whiteness with nothing beneath/

Timestamp:::

I wonder with what voice your machine crows back the time of this call? Female, male, brash, muted? What time is it there? It doesn’t matter. I don’t even know what time it is here.

Timestamp:::

I was recently in the desert. It feels recent. Nighttime shocked with its cold, but the stars pierced the darkness and the Milky Way stretched overhead, at least from here to there, wherever you are, whatever the clock reads in that place.

This is no way to have a conversation.

Constructivism & Learning – Reflection from Session 3 of “Learning Creative Learning”

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* What ideas in the readings interested or resonated with you?

Seymour Papert’s seventh chapter of The Children’s Machine, “Instructionism vs. Constronstructionism” was incredible. Particularly, his argument that school overvalues abstract reasoning or thinking while undervaluing concrete thinking resonated deeply with me. As a teacher of text from literature to media, new and old, I often find myself talking about abstract reasoning based on abstract data sets like “Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” by e e cummings with reverence. At the same time, I brew a variety of British, American, and Belgian beers as a hobby. I meditate, and I snowboard, and I cycle. I enjoy working on engines. I’ve learned that precision and speed on a snowboard mirror my experience in yoga meditation. I like writing and brewing beer for similar reasons – both allow me to create something new, based on an existing form, and engage in a reflective cycle of improvement. I learn from all of these activities, and each involves some level of concrete and abstract thinking. I find each valuable. Linking to the Maker pieces, I greatly enjoyed them and believe in making as a way of being creative. In my secondary school experience, I found great solace in the photography darkroom, making photographs from my negatives tangibly in a way that Photoshop and a printer has not been able to replicate. This space in my day was essential. Schools should have maker spaces, absolutely, for kids to hang out, mess around, and geek out on low tech and high tech making.

* How could you apply these ideas to help others learn in your own work, family, or community?

This is a big question – how do I turn an externally moderated course like AP or IB Literature into a tangible maker experience, where the concrete meets the abstract? I don’t know. My AP Lit Badges have yielded one student-created dress based on a Tennyson poem, which was awesome. I have also created a choice menu for assessment outcomes for a choice novel or drama unit to end AP Lit. Still, my students are either in full embrace of the primacy of “the formal stage” from Piaget as the top of the hierarchy. Few make. Some create, certainly, but nobody is building beautiful cabinets, and my school has zero facilities for making anything other than music, art, and digital anything. We teach to AP/IB outcomes, and there’s no making. This is not a dig; this is reality. Certainly, my Digital Journalism course asks students to explore digital media through making digital media, which is a kind of making, but nothing so tangible as the Soulcraft laid out in this book that began to change the way I see my teaching practice. After reading “Big Ideas Need Love, Too,” a nagging question about, if not the value of making media, the lack of tangible making in my teaching became totally realized. I don’t want to be an agent of superficiality, driving kids to ever more banal forms of expression, turning them into little Alex Joneses. However, I believe in bringing kids to language and inquiry into their world through digital journalism. How else can I make this concrete, real, making? I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it.