what I agree to attend to...

Listening to Krista Tippett's new podcast, Becoming Wise, and she's interviewing Maria Popova of BrainPickings. Maria quotes William James,

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

I'm reminded of the iAnthology post I wrote last night, from the Prompt, "What Are You Going To Stop Doing?"

• It came up just this afternoon, as an old computer I had restored for my wife stopped working, and all I had the energy to do was a few reboots, and that was it. She said to me, "You used to fix computers." It made me think about how all of that detail and "keeping up with it" that went with being everybody in my small circle's "go-to guy" for computer repair. I just wasn't interested--or rather there were other things I was so much more interested in, that I stopped doing that. If a few reboots won't fix it, it's not a device worth using. I'm too busy either teaching string games or figuring out how to teach string games better! And gardening, and a few other things...

Teaching--the experience of sharing the learning process with others--that's what I need most to attend to. For a while I thought I could lead a campaign to spread this curriculum I've developed, organize a study to demonstrate how well it works for all sorts of things that are measurable. Then those fantasies became much less interesting as I tried to break down what doing any of it would entail. And most of those steps are things I'm not great at, or that I don't really enjoy doing. It's the teaching that infuses me with joy, and that's what I need to focus on doing.

Finding Our Marbles

Planning a Workshop, working title

Finding Our Marbles

How playing string games

can help anyone at any age discover even-handedness,

work towards inner harmony,

and help create world peace

through understanding human cultural similarities

somewhere else instead

Many times a month I am reminded of the poem from "When We Were Very Young" called "Halfway Down the Stairs." It's something I've done all my life--sit on some stairs, not at the bottom, not at the top, and just rest, wonder, let the mind wander, reflect, observe, wait...



Many of the deepest and closest conversations I had with friends and family have taken place with one or both of us sitting on some stairs. Feeling at the moment in more than a bit of transition--my second long-term residency teaching string games ends tomorrow, and I'm not sure what exactly will follow--I have a waiting feeling. New moon and Chinese New Year in the coming week. Not sure what it means, but the year to come is a Monkey Year, and I'm a monkey...

Exquisite hypersensitivity

One of those epiphany kind of moments, when a phrase or even just a pair of words stop me and force me to sit down and write. Listening to the New Yorker podcast interview with a poet who began to write as part of her recovery from a catastrophic accident, which included traumatic brain damage as well as multiple other bodily injuries – and she uses the term "exquisite hypersensitivity" [@25:06 in the podcast] to describe the period in her recovery where any stimulus would set off some kind of symptom. I immediately thought of the hyperactive kids at school, and then of the image which pervades my childhood and to which I return as often as I can: my father's bookplate, engraved for him by his father, Herman Pumpian:

What those hyperactive children need is a lot of time with the same quality of peace within one's own thoughts which can be found in the quiet forest, reflecting on a passage from a book. We do that when we give them time to read, in the places and postures that please them, and the silence to enjoy their reading. 

The New Yorker's notes:

Episode 12: part two, a Resilient Poet 1/7/16  Robin Coste Lewis, who recently won a National Book Award, explains how a devastating injury damaged her brain, but aided her poetry.

Her book is 

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Ancient forests of the Klamath Siskiyou

Where I lived for 13 years, 

where both my children were born, where I want some of my ashes to go...  

 Info from the YouTube page:

Published on Feb 2, 2015

 The ancient forests of the Klamath-Siskiyou survive as a vivid, living window into the melding of biological and geological evolution on Earth. Mostly untouched by recent ice ages, the region's flora and fauna provide glimpses into a history barely imaginable by us today. This keystone of life's triumph is hidden in far northwest California and southwestern Oregon, between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade volcanoes.

 Filmed by Aaron Moffatt

Narrated by Jennie Greenberry 

Special Thanks to: Trinity Tippin KS Wild The Siskiyou Project

 Music: Jean Sibelius - Impromptu for String Orchestra Jean Sibelius, 6 Impromptus, Op. 5: Nos. 5 and 6 (arr. for string orchestra) Virtuosi di Kuhmo

Category Film & Animation

License: Standard YouTube License

Shapes hand game

Fascinated pursuing my mad dream to tie each month of the six coming to a string game, a shape, a star shape, a song, a movement exercise, a continent, a culture, a hand game, and a challenge. Somehow came up on this post of a class practicing hand games and singing  prior to a math lesson,m based around the idea of whole brain teaching. Will pursue that piece soon,m but for now, I'm thrilled with this song as a start, and the challenge to develop the corresponding hand movements collaboratively with my students:

Proud, silly, and profound

Three moments stand out over the past couple of months around my delight and amazement at having found my calling as a teacher of string games. I made a deliberate choice to transform myself from a technologist to a teaching artist, and I credit that intentionality with the greatest influence in making it happen. I've had a lot of good luck and warm support along the way. The first moment was largely negative--I was trying to help my wife order sunglasses online, using a tool in the web browser where one is supposed to see how any frame you select would look on by seeing them superimposed on the photo we had just uploaded. All we saw was grasshopper-like bug eye frames that appeared two to three times bigger than any normal sunglasses would be. I just gave up. It seemed clear to me that no amount of tweaking or redoing was going to make this tool work so as to give a very picky artist a satisfactory view of her glasses. This refusal to proceed on my part was frustrating to my wife, who really needs sunglasses to drive safely. But we were not saving anything of real value by spending our time and energy with this alpha-level software, and we were losing a lot of time. If the tech's not easy, I no longer feel any obligation to figure it out. All I ever do for trouble shooting is to re-start the device. If it fails the second time, I'm done.

The next moment was overhearing the school district's site technician for our site talking a staff member through how to fully shut down an application, instead of just closing its open windows. I remember how long it took me to understand that lesson, and thought about how many times I'd passed it on. I felt a bit of pride that there might never have been technicians who would take the time to give such instruction without the work I did pioneering technology training for teachers, not just for administrators. When I started using computers with students for them to connect with a global community of learners, it was revolutionary to think that these devices had uses outside of the financial and administrative realms, and to assert that teachers deserved support for using the computers that way did not fit in with the plans or budgets then being considered. It was a struggle, where for a few brief years we made some headway. By the time I abandoned technology in 2011 or so to focus on string figures, it was clear that all opportunity for students to use technology for creative and communicative purposes was gone, and the tech was now only for testing-related tasks.

The third, profound moment is not a single one, but many, spread out over the past months of launching this new career as a teacher of string games, a Teaching Artist, a movement and graphic and visual and performing arts teacher, and a singer, of all things! It's liberating beyond my wildest dreams to think that I can sing in public, with relative strangers able to hear me. I've never felt comfortable doing that before. It's still not exactly what I'd call comfortable, admittedly, but I'm doing it... And still shiver with amazement each time I get to share with someone that I went back to work full-time in order to be able to realize my dream of teaching string games in the public schools.

Singing louder than the guns

Thinking a lot about singing, launching a Utube channel of a capella folk songs, coming out as a pacifist activist and advocate, perhaps that's the second -ist word after artist that I'll allow a provisional re-entry to my vocabulary, as I try to give up on all other -ists besides artist...
The title line is from Phil Ochs' "When I'm gone..."

Oh Canada!

Welcome to Canada

“You are here and you are safe. You are here and you are loved. You are here and you can stay.”Canadians greet the first group of Syrian refugees who just arrived in Toronto.

Posted by AJ+ on Friday, December 11, 2015

A re-telling of the Thanksgiving Story

Well done, Franchesca "Chescaleigh" Ramsey. And kudos to MTV for airing it! 

Everything you know about Thanksgiving is wrong ft. Franchesca "Chescaleigh" Ramsey.

Posted by MTV on Wednesday, November 18, 2015

A few seconds here and there from seven weeks of teaching String Art as Performance

The "fun bio" as a way to introduce oneself to a group

A few weeks ago, I encountered this request on joining a group I stumbled upon through the Rhizomatic Learning Network:

Introduce yourself by creating a "fun bio," the opposite in tone and content to the one you would put on a job application or post to your professional website. I found the assignment fascinating, and came up with a basic draft in a matter of moments. I've editing a bit, and added a tagline that was not at all part of the original inspiration, and I'm quite pleased with the result:

• I grew up with Red Diaper Rash, the uncomfortable friction generated by rubbing Too Much Personal Freedom against 1950's Anti-Communist Hysteria. It took the Summer of Love to begin to soothe the itches, followed by a Decade of Communal Living, which rendered me Unsuitable for the Real World. After a Lost Decade as a Successful Traveling Salesman, a Decade of Re-Discovery becoming a Constructionist Classroom Teacher, and a Detour Decade as a Digital Storytelling Evangelist, I'm now coming into my Real Identity as a Teaching Artist, creating Collaborative String Game Stories as a Fun Path to Brain Balance and World Peace. May all  learn to be Even-Handed and Open-Hearted, with strings or without.

Loops and Knots, Ins and Outs

A worksheet for the first and second graders in my string classes this coming week:

Loops and Knots, Ins and Outs: What’s the difference between weaving 

and sewing?

Can people make clothes without weaving?

Two rules and three goals of string learning

After many years of using "Never Around the Neck" as a Rule, my #1, I've changed that to

• Always play safe with the string

so that the whole range of things not to do, of which around the neck and various horse associations strings always seem to bring up in kids are at the top of my list, becomes open-ended and complex.

Rule #2 has also morphed as a result of my full-time experience with 250 kids a day:

• Strings are only for String Time, which you mostly only get in my class

One of the teachers asked me to have the students keep their string in my classroom, so they wouldn't have to deal with kids bringing the strings back into their classroom. I've compromised so that on their last day of the week with me they get to take their strings home with them. Their out-of-class practice time is so important, it's where they connect with friends and family and perhaps spark some deeper interest. At first I thought the request somewhat silly and annoying, but it's actually been very helpful. I have envelopes I use in class for the students to keep their strings until the end of the week, so I have them put their strings away early if we're going into activities, like singing, where I want their total attention to something quite different from string. 

When they need to have the string ready for a practice, but I need to make a correction or addition to the instructions, I use "No strings on fingers!" as a way to rein in a lot of very involved children. It's much easier when the students have desks, and I use the command to show me a triangle or a rectangle on top of their desks with the string as a way to get them to stop. 

My Ah-Ha of the evening, which came as I was watering the garden, was what I realized as I said them were the Three Goals of String Learning:

• Respect the String

• Inspect the Loom

• Thank the Source

The idea of respecting the string came to me as I imagined how the students will deal with the new classroom arrangement they'll have next week: instead of the circle of chairs which we've been in for the last three weeks, we'll have four large rectangular tables arranged in the center of the room as one big table, with all the chairs around the table, and art supplies and string and yarn of all kinds in the center. So if I'm going to put out my personal collection of mostly natural fibers of all kinds and types for the students to be able to inspect and use, I'll need to set up guidelines about how to treat these threads and strands with respect--literally, to look again at something you think you saw, and try to go to another level with the same thing.

Inspecting the loom is basically what we are doing all day--using our fingers as a kind of loom, and learning the basics of weaving--how the threads catch each other to form loops and twirls and arcs and knots. We practice a lot with finger games, and it's a marvel to see these first and second graders, many of whom have never imagined themselves as dextrous in any way at all approaching the level of skill they now show with less than three weeks of a few repetitions per week. I can feel the genuine interest in setting a personal challenge and asserting the need for help to achieve it – "I want to learn the Magic Carpet" – which many third graders have expressed now that they have strings long enough to attempt it. The drop spindle I brought it has attracted some interest, and next week I hope to have an example of some weaving in progress. By November I'm hoping that even the first graders will be able to grasp more of the meaning of fiber in their lives.

Which brings me to the third goal: Thank the Source. I hope to have students come away with the knowledge that the things we use for our games, clothes, and often our shelter, are woven materials that come ultimately from our earth, perhaps as petroleum, the source for the synthetic fiber the students mostly use for their string games, almost as much of it from plants, like cotton and flax and sisal, and a preciously small portion from animals, now that wools and furs are almost exclusively high end goods. In each source area, there are processes to acknowledge and appreciate, and workers whose skill and care deserve our thanks.

A Rainbow of Circles

Whoopee! Got approval from the principal to do one of my wild and crazy ideas: to give the kids an experience of how to make a circle, each one gets measured with a piece of string, then we go outside and take turns holding one end of the string in the center and having the child trace the circle her height makes with playground chalk. Eventually we'll get almost three hundred concentric circles...

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/Burgess_model1.svg/2000px-Burgess_model1.svg.png

Three Big Words, Four Little Words: My Seven Word Curriculum Plan

I am now more than half way through the second week of my two-month Residency in String Games, teaching 80 first graders, 80 second graders, and 100 third graders how to do string figures. I have each class (eleven classes!) for three 40 minute periods each week.

As part of a personal exercise in curriculum development, I chose not to write lesson plans for any of the classes. I've had so much experience teaching string games to all the primary grades that I knew I could wing these introductory weeks, and I knew what vocabulary and skills I needed to put into place to sow the seeds for later plans I hadn't really detailed out yet in my mind.

Ambidexterity is a big word that I introduce in all my string classes, and I've developed a clear way to communicate the idea of the brain development facilitated by bilateral activity: I explain to the kids that when I say, "Eyes on me," one of the calls I use when the class has been engaged in a practice session and I need their attention, what they need to do is look at my left eye--I point to it, and explain a bit about how I lost my right eye in an accident. Then I talk about how it's really not a big deal, because the eyes are wired differently from much of the rest of the body--each eye connects directly to the vision centers in the brain, and they can see by just putting a hand over one eye that the world doesn't really look much different with only one eye. I'll often talk a little about depth perception, and how I make mistakes several times a week about how big something is or how far away it is, but it's not that hard to figure out the mistakes--moving your head a little is almost the same as binocular vision.

But think about how different things would be if you had only one hand, or arm, or leg.

Most of the bilateral parts of the body are each wired to the opposite side of the brain, so bilateral activity, and especially manual ambidexterity, creates new pathways across the two hemispheres which can then be used for other connections between the ordered and the intuitive sides of our mental capacity.

That's the first big word I teach the kids. The other two are "Repertoire" and "Portfolio." I start almost immediately talking about how they each need to keep a mental checklist of their personal string repertoire, because they're all going to be helper teachers, and we as a class need to know what they can each teach us. And as we go on learning more and more, I'm going to be asking them to create a Portfolio that shows what they know. I had first thought of manila folders or envelopes for each student, and then I remembered how we used to take large pieces of construction paper and fold them to make student folders.

Our four little words for the two months are:

1. Circle
2. Sequence
3. Cycle
4. Spiral

I'll write more about what the plans are around those words soon...

Here's a worksheet I developed for seventh graders--there will be quite a different format for the primaries!

Two Month Residency as a Full-Time String Game Teacher!

A friend I visited yesterday, bringing back her table to set up for her birthday party, remarked on how good I looked. Really these days I am glowing like the King's Favorite Jester. A local elementary school where I've substitute-taught many times, and know the staff and administration, called a week ago Friday to ask if I would do a two-month long-term substitute job for them, replacing their music teacher, who had to take a leave of absence. I said I couldn't teach music, but would be happy to teach string games. They said, "Whatever you want to do is fine."

I've just completed my first full week as a an official Teaching Artist, teaching string figures as my art. I am humbled and amazed at how the universe answered me, so clearly and directly: I remember saying to Dan in one of the Connected Learning Drop-In sessions a year or so ago, "What I really want is for someone to pay me to teach string games full-time!"

Since one student did say "I miss doing music," I am pondering how to have each grade level (First, Second, Third) learn a different song, which they will share in our culminating performance. Here are my notes so far:

• 1st: Make new Friends

We Are All Kin=Family=where we get the word “kind”

• 2nd: A song about the seasons--any suggestions?

Things change, and then they cycle around again

• 3rd: This Land Is Your Land

You and me Makes a We: How do we talk to and listen to (and talk about) people who are different from each other?

Artifacts vs. art, product vs. process

Artifacts vs. art, product vs. process

Assessment is not a spreadsheet -- it's a conversation.

         

 – Joe Bower, for the love of learning

One of the many benefits to teaching string games is the obvious way we can see and experience the difference between process and product in learning. We can assess directly the outcome of our teaching, “Has the student mastered the figure?” through their demonstration of the process of successfully producing a particular string figure. There is no product, per se, there’s only the shared experience of the student demonstrating and the teacher witnessing. The figure was observable, momentarily, and then it was gone.

Absent a video or photographic record,

or some crude (or elegant) “pin-down”

 of the figure onto a piece of paper, there is no artifact to the learning. Requiring that there be such, in the real world, is of use only to a third party. Between the teacher and the student, the experience of demonstrating a learned process and having it witnessed is all that each needs to be confident they can go to the next step in this student’s learning journey.



This is the essence of a student-centered approach to learning, and an essential realization if we are to acknowledge and rectify the imbalance in so many schools today, where almost all attention is on pedagogy--on what teachers do and say and present--and little meaningful attention is given to mathetics, the study of how children learn, what they are actually doing as they process their own skill and knowledge expansion, what meanings they give to those acquisitions, what use they can give now to their new skills and knowledge, how they can work together with their class- and school-mates as they relate their growth to the real world in which they live.

Not a ranger, a gardener of love

The "Ranger Me" Challenge never grabbed me, and I couldn't quite figure out why. I could have just moved on and payed attention to something else, but something made me want to figure out what was bothering me. Then I realized, it's putting myself in a uniform.

I knew from about 11 or 12 years old that I was subject to the draft, and that I was not going to register or serve in the military. I am a lifelong pacifist, out of political conviction, not religious, although Khalil Gibran was a kind of mystical inspiration. I began assembling my dossier to establish that I was a Conscientious Objector to War by the time I was 13.

So putting myself in a ranger uniform just didn't work. It's also uncomfortable in that many Park Rangers are armed and sworn police, with the capacity to use deadly force. I cannot imagine being in a position to use deadly force. I have never struck another human being, or held a weapon since pre-teen archery practice.

I decided to try to research a bit the historical rangers, and the mythical rangers, Aragorn/Strider from Tolkien, but still pretty militaristic. There was a Norwegian archer who was a conceivable model, but she's pretty fierce, too.

So really my alter ego as a Steward of the Earth, a Protector of Parks and Wildlands, is the Gardener of Love I was back in the 70's:

That's the communal outhouse on the hillside behind me, and hillside above that outhouse is the one that we terraced for a vineyard, which I wrote about in "Markings on Her Face."

Mike Rose's #celebrateteachers post

Wonderful post from Mike Rose, apropos of the #celebrateteachers tag:

http://www.mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/2015/07/reading-difficult-book.html