Studying the U.S. Congress?

The New York Times posted this swell virtual panorama of the House chambers on the occasion of this year's State of the Union speech. Makes a nice "field trip" to the Capitol.

Along the Susquehanna

How lucky we are that our school and town are nested within the Susquehanna Watershed.

Yesterday, we walked along the river. After a week and a half of freezing temperatures, a shelf of ice reaching out fifty feet from shore scallops the long inside curve of the river. Ice floes and nervous squads of geese coast down the gray open corridor of water.

At 100-foot intervals along the the very brink of the shelf-ice we spied the fresh carcasses of three very large carp (like 10-12 pounds) recently caught and dined on by an eagle. The raptors were not present, only the inquisitive crows and the footprints of coyotes curious for a free meal.

Today we returned to the scene to find the carcasses gone, but three bald eagles roosting in the silver maples across the river; two mature ones with snow-white heads and tails, and one immature one (equally large) soaring fearlessly with mottled feathers and no white showing! They looked spectacular through the binoculars with a dusting of snow shaking down between us.

Somehow, I suspect today's Super Bowl is going to have a hard time impressing me with power, speed, drama, and a sense of spectacle.

Talk about a media-rich experience

This past week I watched a remarkable film, "Russian Ark." As I was watching it I was thinking, "what a wonder art film about history, I mean history film about art." The film, made in 2002, recounts 300 years of Russian history by means of a single, haunting, unparalleled, 96-minute Steadicam shot that guides us through the opulent Hermitage Museum; the former palace of the czars.

The fabulous splendor of Russian dynasties unfold slowly before us through the spectacular architecture, landmark paintings, and a cast of 2000 actors that appear in passing vignettes.
Whatever is lost in translation (it is a subtitled Russian production) comes across tenfold as we compare the spectacle of this lost time with what we know of it now.

It would be a good film to show in Global Studies after having studied the czars, the Russian Revolution, and Stalin.

Here's a peek:

Post Conference Day High

So I presented two pair of sessions at our recent professional development day: one on the reasons for maintaining a blog, and one on the reasons for using Google Earth and Google SketchUp in the classroom (I did some how-to demos also, but I believed the bigger hurdle was convincing them of the motivational opportunities they were missing by not exploiting these tools.).

Always a an unsettling feeling to present as a professional to one’s first-name-basis peers.

I covered a lot of extra ground; sprawling out to the advantages of accepting student work electronically through our shared drive, annotating it with comment notes, using Google Building Maker and Google Docs, and always: sharing and posting this student work to acknowledge student achievement.

So in the hours and days after my presentation, one colleague stops me to say a blog may be the perfect tool for the portfolio he needs to maintain for a graduate course, two of my colleagues have blogs up the following day(!), an elementary teacher asks to book our lab on “Fun Friday” so that her students can try out SketchUp, I emailed a Google Earth file of a topographic map draped over our town to a MS teacher as her students are working with the same maps at their desks, and another colleague stops me in the hall to tell me how important it is for our students to see the type of content that my blog contains...and that he is considering starting one to support his coaching efforts.

ACS Creates

Over the past ten weeks, eleven of my 7th graders have been working to craft an engaging script and learning how to tell that story on film...as a group. It has been a process of discovery, compromise, ingenuity, patience, adaptation, attention to detail, and skills development. The film that follows is like the diploma we pass out in June; meaningful in proportion to the growth and understanding that stands behind it.

Quiet on the set. Action!

Measuring tape

I used my poster of the Chrysler Building from Picturing America to create a masking tape comparison with new tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai. Dramatizing scale using a proportional model is a concept I keep returning to for students. One of the questions in my display is to ask students: "If we turned the length of ACS up on its end, where would it reach on this scale tape-model?" and "If I open a window on the 160th floor (!!!) will the temperature outside be warmer or cooler that at the 1st floor?"

Real-space libraries

Writing in the February 4th issue of New Republic, Lawrence Lessig writes about the crippling web of legal entanglement he foresees in digital media. (His analogy of the debilitating framework of copyright in regards to documentary films is a chilling tale.)

Anyway. I liked what he wrote about "real-space" libraries: something we don't want to ever take for granted:

In real libraries, in real space, access is not metered at the level of the page (or the image on the page). Access is metered at the level of books (or magazines, or CDs, or DVDs). You get to browse through the whole library, for free. You get to check out the books you want to read, for free. The real-space library is a den protected from the metering of the market...

This freedom gave us something real. It gave us the freedom to research, regardless of our wealth; the freedom to read, widely and technically, beyond our means. It was a way to assure that all of our culture was available and reachable - not just that part that happens to be profitable to stock. It is a guarantee that we have the opportunity to learn about our past, even if we lack the will to do so. The architecture of access that we have in real space created an important and valuable balance between the part of culture that is effectively and meaningfully regulated by copyright and the part of culture that is not. The world of our real-space was a world in which copyright intruded only rarely, and when it did, its relationship to the objectives of copyright was relatively clear.

Blogs as ships' logs

"As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did."

from "Why I blog" by Andrew Sullivan

Saying it with a painting

Our visiting Costa Rican students jumped at the invitation to paint a mural outside our library. Working from a quickly brainstormed sketch, they quickly got under way. I played facilitator providing them with paints, brushes, document camera, and images that they requested. They provided the startling imagination, attention to detail, and teamwork to pull it off in under three days.

As their work progressed, I took a series of photographs and kept a projected slide show going in the library to update their work for all to see. In return, their gift photo of the Arenal Volcano will reside in our library!

My Day

Began with a full house Period A: Health class on 22 laptops, all seats taken in the LibLab and the Library proper. Humming.

Logged lab reservation for later this week from Tech classes and HS English.

Brokered the move of our mobile SMART board from its six-week residency in a MS classroom to a just-trying-it-out practice placement in the Elementary wing.

Touched base with the Interim Principal, Head Custodian, Spanish teacher, and Art teacher so that our visiting contingent of Costa Rican students could take me up on my invitation to paint a mural in the library hallway. Helped then grid their drawing, taped off the wall, fire-up the document camera for projections, and fetched paint and brushes. Took pictures all day of their progress; posting to the web page.

Created this month's Senior of the Month ballot and forwarded it to the Guidance Office for distribution.

Confirmed Friday meeting to share my Google Document slide show with in-service planning group.

Responded to the Reading teachers request for help centralizing PowerPoint files for class presentation. Created a shared folder for her and visited her to walk her through the procedure.

Talked to my counterpart at the Afton Public Library as we try to coordinate bringing a WWII exhibit from her library to mine.

Filmed the last three scenes our of 7th grade mystery movie. Began reviewing the "rushes" on our "wall" screen to determine and file the best "takes."

Received a reply from our state USGS office that they will be sending our library a copy of their publication detailing the 2006 flood, gratis.

Loaned a Flip camera to HS English student; quick-fixed a stall in it when they brought it back.

Loaned Bikiing magazine to a student who hopes to compete in a race featured in the magazine (ordered the magazine per his request last year).

Had a student in the library take my staff-photo for the Yearbook. Emailed it.

A Science Short Story

The New Yorker always publishes cutting-edge fiction. In recent years, the featured piece of fiction might be by a writer from India, Japan, Turkey, or Britain.

This week they have mined a new vein. The story is "Trailhead" and the writer is E.O. Wilson, the great sociobiologist and scientist of On Human Nature and The Ants fame. His piece of fiction, told without dialogue, is the carefully observed birth, life, and depth of a particular ant colony; complete with digestive, physiological, and behavioral data.

It was a fascinating read. Not quite sure if I encountered bathos, pathos, or character development, but the idea of imparting scientific notions to students through a story like this has merit. Perhaps if it doesn't conform to our idea of literature, it might serve to that even higher calling: teaching.

Poem

Discovery


I sight down the long lines of history.
They converge in the distance
at the birth of ideas.
From here, the accomplishments of antiquity
seem inspired, unique, the work of genius:
alphabets organizing tribes into nations,
geometry forging truths from the unseen,
perspective revealing the vision of the Renaissance.

I marvel at how such milestones
leverage civilizations, set nations apart,
and how these people with so many demands
on themselves just to survive, managed moments
of discovery. They must have been
special, chosen, few.

Not so.

Discovery, the excitement of knowing
something for the first time
belongs to each of us, always.
Meeting these moments of revelation ourselves
is no less profound than encountering them
on those landmark days. I saw it today:

Jim came home from class
with his paper still in his hand.
Miss Humphrey, in thirty minutes, had taught him
the principles of one-point perspective, that skeleton
of our perception on which we construct
and hang the natural appearance of the world.
That there existed a formula
for recreating depth on demand was a discovery.
It never existed for him until today.
This pivotal development in art and science
was discovered and practiced for the first time
on his earth today, in fifth grade, in Afton.
Will the world ever be the same?


February 1994

Making a post

Here is the link to the screencast that I created with Jing!



And here it is embedded!

Reading

In between periods of frantic library-lab and library-laptop end-of-semester bookings, it was a pleasure to rearrange some furniture and lighting to host a reading for French students.

Scene 4, Take 2b: ACTION!

This is about being part of something. My group of 7th graders may or may not have had that experience before. I'm hoping it will bring out the best in them; or at least some characteristics, interests, or skills they may not have been aware of about themselves - as individuals and as a group.

We have scripted a mystery film. Maybe it will get finished. More importantly, especially during this shooting phase, there is much to do, much depending on cooperation and stepping-up, much to do with having ones head in the game. And it's fun.

Within the orchestrated mayhem grips are moving furniture and taping-off marks for actors, continuity people are photographing scenes so that we can reconstruct them the next time we meet, a steady stream of camera-persons take their turn framing scenes and following direction, and always our talk-alouds to share how we are thinking about the scene, the story, the flexibilty of the medium.

It's a good thing to be part of.

Booktalk

Rebecca Stead knows how to tell a story. She has a fearless imagination and a jugglers daring; balancing a coming-of-age tale with her flare for out-of-the-box circumstances. We care for her characters, empathize with their predicaments, and keep our fingers crossed for their dreams.

When You Reach Me takes place in NYC in 1978. Twelve year-old Miranda lives with her single Mom who has just got her chance to appear on a game show. The "usual" cast of friends, enemies, weirdos, and adults is not tiresome in this tale. But it is the cryptic arrival of anonymous notes that beg Miranda's help while creeping her out that turns the pages quicker and quicker.

It was a fine satisfying read.

Flexing the network

You know that moment when you finish the perimeter of a jigsaw puzzle and there is that rapid placement of the last 2 or 3 pieces when you know you've got it? You're not done, but you are definitely on the road to getting there.

This week, with our new cart of laptops online and our LibLab now a bookable lab, faculty members have been hovering around the ol' librarian likes hounds around a pork-chop. I've had a real opportunity to plant some dormant ideas on how faculty can use our network to collect files of student work, annotate it using the "Comment" notes under the "Review" menu of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, then slide it into a folder where students have the rights to open it again and continue the draft process.

The prospect of this process should be a welcome one. It will allow us to focus on the process as much as we do on the product, it will make redistribution of student work easier for classroom presentations and community recognition, and it will provide the foundation for archiving student work for portfolios.

Booktalk

It ought to be a pretty easy task to identify "the good guys and the bad guys" when talking about the American Revolutionary War, but Laurie Halse Anderson reminds us in Chains just how illusionary the moral high-ground can be; especially from the perspective of a slave.

This is a story about a young slave negotiating a harrowing life in a Tory household of New York City at the onset of the Revolutionary War. The city is a place of suspect alliances, an untried colonial army, quartered British soldiers, and always the cruel realities of slavery for whom the "revolution" did not promise freedom. The texture and sounds and smells of that world are alive on the page.

It is the thread of a life that Anderson entwines through that world, however, that bring both to life. With a smattering of "betwixt" and "rememories" to salt the language to the times, Anderson yet depends on her clear and urgent prose to bring the devastating brutalities of slaves (and patriot-prisoners!) to life in the person of young Isabel.

Chains is a powerful confluence of storytelling and history. It portrays the reality of the times as well as the resiliency and the depravity of the human spirit. That it poses as many provocative questions for its readers as it does revelations is what made it memorable to me.

Sharing prideful work

Readability

Do this.

Go to the one-page Readability site. Click three radio buttons. Drag an icon to your browser toolbar.

Now, next time you want to read an article buried among banners, sidebars, and headers... just click your Readability icon and the article ONLY will fill your screen in the width, font size, and format that you selected.

Neat, clean, easy.

(Thanks to David Pogue and Chuck O.)

Winter reads

I have enjoyed the books that I brought home to read over Winter Break and the ones that I received as gifts:

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

The blatant, subtle, and insidious evils of slavery infect every resident in the teeming world of Edward P. Jones' Manchester County, Virginia. Blacks who are themselves slave-owners anchor the plot of this wonderfully woven tale of desire, despair, and complexity. A masterful hand is at work in the storytelling; blithely dropping future histories of the characters at all points in their development which never undermines but only enrich the story. I also enjoy "large" stories like this that take the time to flesh-out, however incidentally, passing characters who remain two-dimensional devices in shorter works.

(The SLJ had a small article about The Digital Library of American Slavery. Here is a link to "petitions" of free black slave owners.)

Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson

Henrietta Leavitt was a "computer" in the early 1900's, a modestly paid women who compared photographic plates of the night sky to catalog any number of variables. A largely unknown footnote to the history of astronomy, Leavitt's grassroots observations and perseverance recognized that cyclical changes in the size of Cepheids, giant variable stars, could be correlated with their luminosity. This relationship provided the "missing link" that allowed scientists to extrapolate the distance to stars and the size of the universe. Indeed, Johnson spends most of his time (and it is time well spent) relating the incremental story of
just how fluid those computations have been; even up to the last decade.

Chasing Lincoln's Killer by James L. Swanson

This is a direct compelling telling of Lincoln's assassination and the subsequent chase and capture of Booth and his conspirators. It is a very accessible book for students. The book also strikes an effective balance between design and content; overcoming the often distracting use of graphics with some well-executed visual support.

Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

If I don't buy multiple copies of this book and share it as a weekly booktalk with a dozen colleagues, I should be horse-whipped. Lehrer makes a case for several artists of varying sensory expertise (Whitman, Cezanne, Woolf, Escoffier, Stravinsky) anticipating scientific neurological discoveries in their artistic work. Lehrer's writing is clear, compelling and graceful. His even-handed applause for the overlapping insights of both the artist and the scientist is no accident as he is a proponent of the "third culture" where art and science are complementary rather than adversarial.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

This is a coming-of-age story with all of the cruel bumps and hilarious eccentricities that accompany the lonely passage through adolescence. There is little relief in the bullying, the dissolving family, and the day-by-day feinting and manipulation to survive it all. The well-drawn characters, the infectious British slang, and the islands of compassion make the hard reality just bearable for the reader. It is not an easy book; either emotionally or contextually, but it is a passage that consoles us for what we ourselves know of the journey.

What is literacy?

This NY Times Magazine article deals with the impact of digital technology on the literacy of blind learners. It describes the debate in the blind community between Braille readers and "listeners" who use text-to-speech technology, as well as research that investigates how the brain responds or adapts to these forms of learning, and whether listening without recognizing the underlying structure of language and writing constitutes literacy.

The implications of listening "readers" to sighted students intrigued me also. The author quoted one source who analyzed stories by non-Braille-using blind students who composed and editted their work by keyboarding and listening to the words played back:

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them — transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.”

As I read drafts of compositions by our own students, some of these observations seem applicable; and I wonder how the sensory world of cell phones, YouTube, and iPods - as well as our own accommodations of Kindles and audio books influence a student's path to becoming literate, as we understand the word.

The difference: expectation?

The Oneonta Star recently ran this cover story about a seventeen year old student who has produced a documentary about her hometown of Cooperstown. It's on sale at Amazon.com.

The student was quoted as saying, "I started when I was in seventh grade, when I made a video for New York History Day,'' she said. "I discovered that I really like to make documentaries, and I've been making them longer and more complete.''

Talk about planting and cultivating a seed.

If we are looking to ever participate in History Day, we need to marry it to a renewed sense of expectation for our students - our expectations might be the only variable keeping more of our students from exploring their potential.

Basketball clinic

My "one shot" gym-class library visit went well. As the students entered the library, I had a classic basketball video going that I had created some years ago of a great Afton player. I talked about his many skills: shooting, passing, defense, and ball-handling - and how they would frame our activities today.



Using 4 available cameras, plus a range of players and camera-operators, we filmed still and moving images of proper basketball techniques. These images have been files in our shared Photo folder so that students can create tutorials from them.





We finished up the class with everyone using regulation "4-sheet New York Times masking tape baskeballs" to shoot ten foul shots from the free throw lines. Seven out of ten was the winning percentage!

Cross curriculum evidence

I always look forward to the NY Times Magazine annual Year of Ideas issue. This year they placed little icons next to each entry to designate the domain of the idea: arts, culture, technology, etc.

Not surprisingly, almost all of them feature a couple of icons; cross discipline ideas, either by inception or application.

When we get our students into small groups for problem-solving, and we frame the discussion to invite the interplay of what they're learning in "other classes," we prepare them for the world of collaboration: which is our future.

Some of my favorite Ideas from 2009:

The Rainfall Theory of Development
Massively Collaborative Mathematics
The Google Algorithm as Extinction Model
Literary Alzheimer's

Virtual sculpture projects

We picked-up on a lead from School Library Journal and tested a download of Blender, open source software (OSS) for 3-D design and animation.

It looks like a pretty steep learning curve, but I turned it over my freshmen SketchUp guru (below) and he had a volume up and was sculpting in 45 minutes!

Once we get the basic routine down, I think we will introduce it to our HS art teacher; looks like a dandy way to address new skills while incorporating traditional ones.

Virtual Us

This tutorial at Rutgers RIOT does what it does very well. It is an interactive animation that breaks down research into a series of modules that students can work-through on their own. I will definitely be forwarding it to my teachers and colleagues.

That said, I think I am much more interactive than "Kate."

Of Reason and Rhetoric

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was reading Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages, A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. I hope to share parts of it with you as the months advance.

Perhaps it is just that I have fallen for Gopnik as a writer, observer, and thinker in the same way he has for Darwin and Lincoln.

For us, teachers and students, the particular value of the following passages from the book is both the craft of Gopnik's writing and the pivotal role that he argues writing played in the greatness of these two men.

I share these passages from the introduction of his book:

"We must be realistic about what they were like; not saints nor heroes nor gods but people. Darwin and Lincoln are admirable ans, in there way, even lovable men. But Lincoln, we have always to remember, was a war commander, who had men shot and boy-deserters hanged after sitting on their coffins in the sun. We would, I think, be taken aback at a meeting. Lincoln summed up in one word was shrewd, a backwoods lawyer with a keen sense of human weakness and knack for clever argument, colder than we would think, and more of a pol and even more ofa wise guy than we would like him to be. Winning is the probity of politics, and a good pol is more concerned with winning - elections, cases, and arguments - than with looking noble. Lincoln was smart, shrewd, and ambitious before he was, as he became, wise, farseeing, and self-sacrificing. If we had been around to watch him walk across a room, instead of stride through history, what we would have seen were the normal feet that left the noble prints."

...

"The real common stuff, and the really significant subject, though, lies at a deeper level - in the kinds of words both men used, and in a new kind of liberal language that they helped to invent. They matter most because they wrote so well."

...

"Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason. Good writing is mostly good seeing and good thinking, too. It involves a whole view<>Good writers have always argued from the facts, but few before ad taken such narrow paths of reason toward the broad road of truth. They shared logic as a form of eloquence, argument as style of virtue, close reasoning as a form of uplift."

Faux friendship; the evolution of our social space

Faux friendship is the title of an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It is a thoughtful and eloquent overview of how "the sudden and forceful distortion of social space" by social networking has changed the meaning and and scope of "friendship."

It's relevance to the connectedness and context of our students' lives (and our own) make it more than diversionary educational white noise. Here are a few of the paragraphs that I read over two or three times:

Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When they've shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content? If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.
...
Now we can see why friendship has become the characteristically modern relationship. Modernity believes in equality, and friendships, unlike traditional relationships, are egalitarian. Modernity believes in individualism. Friendships serve no public purpose and exist independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice. Friendships, unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of friendship coincided with the shift away from arranged marriage. Modernity believes in self-expression. Friends, because we choose them, give us back an image of ourselves. Modernity believes in freedom. Even modern marriage entails contractual obligations, but friendship involves no fixed commitments. The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want.
...
Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls. The same path was long ago trodden by community. As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. Now we speak of the Jewish "community" and the medical "community" and the "community" of readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have, instead of community, is, if we're lucky, a "sense" of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have "friends," just as we belong to "communities." Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a "sense" of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.

Facebook's very premise—and promise—is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.

Global studies/Area studies

Although this Chronicle of Higher Education article is speaking to college level curriculum, its argument for the advantages of providing context for broad international policies by incorporating "area studies" within Global Studies are compelling ; even for a high school course.

"... global-studies programs would be stronger if they insisted that their students gain an intimate familiarity with at least one region of the world. It is important that these students have a place in which they can envision how abstract policies and concepts play out. I would further argue that those with a grounded understanding of particular places often are better equipped to study transnational linkages."