DDD/journal

I read it in a book / and it will not let me go: a poem

2012-01-30T13:05:00.003-05:00

I read it in a book / and it will not let me go: our better nature

2012-01-26T13:13:00.000-05:00

Rube is in the House!

2012-01-26T12:20:00.000-05:00

A gathering of potential ideas/energy for Ms. P.'s science students. Stay tuned.

Poem

2012-01-24T14:49:00.001-05:00

I regularly post artwork from our Picturing America portfolio. In fact, our Lobby display case features two works right now.

But they also always lure me to writing; as Sargent's Portrait of Boy did today.

How unsubstantial are so many
of the marks you made
to make this boy.

He is nearly not here
within the moment;
conjured by so little
(as we all might be).

Barely, the width of brushstrokes
hold, like wings,
his flight of years, just so.

You must have seen
the passing of it all,
felt the swirl of his turning

and yet caught him, sat him,
kept him in a place I cannot have -
a boy throughout eternity.

Looking ahead

2012-01-24T09:25:00.003-05:00

So I'm spending my week looking into content curating. I do that already, of course, but this is about efficiently sifting through the glut of online articles in order to archive and share them with colleagues in a digestible way. The prospect of being fluent in that process of review, selection, and distribution seems crucial to the road ahead, even the road we're on right now.

Last night I got myself a Zite account and began selecting topics, reviewing and focusing the range of articles, and trial-posting them to Twitter and unique emails. I am skeptical about narrowing the returns too much, but I see the advantages if I'm on the trail for a colleague's unit of instruction.

I also will be trying to build some "stacks" within my Delicious social bookmarking site. Stacks provide a dressy format for archiving content (my content curatng stack)within a particular topic. I'll need to invoke my Google Reader as a place to read content more fully before acting on it, too.

Getting on board with all of this will be integral to a further challenge; building eTextbooks with my colleagues. The idea of applying my library skills with my design skills to create custom books for our students, or any students, is an exciting prospect to me.

Map Mural: update

2012-01-23T11:21:00.001-05:00

First, the river. It's why Afton is here.

Then the Interstate to orient the viewers.

Next, the bottom-land: fields, farms, islands, floodplain.

Cement. Yes, cement

2012-01-20T09:33:00.000-05:00

So I ordered Spotter's Guide to Urban Engineering for our library. It has a double-page spread on all sorts of civil engineering infrastructure: bridges, canals, bike lanes, water towers, pipelines, etc. It begins, however, with a brief overview of materials. This is where my last night's journey began.

First the provocative statement that cement is "the world's second most consumed substance." I didn't chase that one down, but it is a huge industry and telling economic indicator (check out the ballooning production in India and China, USGS). The industry is also responsible for about 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions. That's because to create cement (and the world created over 3,000,000,000 tons of it in 2009, USGS [the USS Nimitz weight in at 100,000 tons]) the ingredients are "cooked" at 2700 ° F in "the world's largest piece of moving inductrial equipment:" a rotating 700 foot kiln. Yikes!

Cement. It's what I learned about last night.

@ Chez Daniel's

2012-01-18T12:42:00.001-05:00

Really like the gorgeous graphic layout of our new My Cooking Class series: tempting recipes and images. One entire book deals with chocolate!

Vocab word: bricolage

2012-01-15T08:52:00.000-05:00

a construction made of whatever materials are at hand:

The Renaissance

2012-01-13T09:43:00.002-05:00

I've been reading a Modern Library Chronicles book: The Renaissance. It is a pretty accessible and conversational read; I'm thinking I may order the series for our library.

In only a few pages, the author prefaces the era itself with a recap of a few technology developments that paved the way for the study of classics and the subsequent sharing of information: paper and printing. I realized that the 15th century was also a very entrepreneurial time, as the proliferation of business opportunities proliferated with the rise and adaptation of inventions. In less than half a century after the first printed book, there were printing firms in Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Spain; including over 60 in Germany and 150 in Venice, Italy alone! Zoom.

He also mention the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (ever hear of it?). It is as good an example of the ambition, skill, and intellectual surge of the age as any artwork; comprising in 5 columns per page, the text of the bible in five language of antiquity. Amazing.

So the next day I read in the Smithsonian magazine that Thomas Jefferson, cutting and pasting, created his own "bible" with clippings from the original, in 4-columns: Greek and Latin on the left, French and English on the right!

Being a skeptical reader

2012-01-11T11:04:00.002-05:00

Periodic Table

2012-01-10T09:40:00.001-05:00

Measuring out a library table to see if we might transform one into a Period Table of Elements.

...a few days later. Thought about a wall made of tiles right outside the MS Science room, but tough not to make a mistake with permanent markers. Tiles from scratch (like created in art class) still means removing old tiles (agony) and installing new ones. Then tried the idea of students drawing or desktop publishing elements, adhering them to matte board, and using them a puzzle pieces or griding them on the tile wall with tape backing. To be continued...

Afton USA

2012-01-09T13:01:00.001-05:00

Speaking the language: interpolating the Times

2012-01-06T08:56:00.000-05:00

The New York Times ran a very inspirational article about the library system in Queens which stocks resources in 59 languages (12% of its collection) to serve a populace where nearly half the the people were born abroad:

Striving to cater to the intensifying globalization of its surrounding streets, the New York neighborhood library speaks your language (my italics) as never before.

And they work hard at it. They even have a demographer on staff.

The article gets particularly relevant for all of us "in the trade," however, if you substitute "services" or "technology" or "resources" for their efforts with "language".

- So important has acquiring foreign-language books become to the Queens Library’s mission that Radames Suarez, who supervises the Spanish collection, travels every year to the largest Spanish book fair in the world, in Guadalajara, Mexico.

- “Most libraries I’ve worked in have realized that to be a bridge where people learn what the library has to offer, it helps to have books, DVDs and music in the native language,” he said.

- According to Fred J. Gitner, the program’s assistant director, branch managers were asked to note uncommon periodicals on sidewalk newsstands or at new ethnic restaurants. They held foreign movie nights to lure newcomers in order to find out what books they might want.

- Meeting the needs of immigrants has also meant teaching English to adult newcomers — many branches have such classes — and recruiting staff members who speak foreign languages. The Queens system has 10 Korean-speaking librarians.

The inspiration for me comes from the fearlessness of this systems to get better; the flexibility of their willingness, their openness to their own self-learning, and the fluidity of their services.

I read it in a book / and it will not let me go: MLK, Jr. Day

2012-01-05T11:20:00.000-05:00

My day

2012-01-04T19:48:00.002-05:00

Created a lobby display for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: books, excerpts from letter, images. Also wrote script and filmed MLK spot for my "I read it in a book" video series.

Posted a video (the post below) from the New York Times, sent the post out on the SLS listserv and shared it face-to-face with our MS science teacher.

Responded to a SLS inquiry requesting a good non-western novel for analysis. I sent along The sorrow of war.

Went down to the maintenance staff HQ to dig up a gallon of green paint as a ground for mural project.

Placed my supplies order for next Fall on the BOCES site.

Took a photocopy of January's Afton Historical Society calendar featuring a photo and caption of a woman who had volunteered as a soldier in the Civil War to the MS ELA teacher as their class is reading about Deborah Sampson.

Sent an Excel monthly budget template to the Financial Math teachers to consider as a tool for subsequent class use.

Hosted my HS mentor group during A period. Fielded scavenger hunt inquiries from other groups on the prowl.

Science is social. Get in there and mix it up!

2012-01-04T10:14:00.002-05:00

Footnote to history

2012-01-03T18:52:00.000-05:00

I finished reading John Keegan's The Second World War over Christmas recess (my daily journal is dotted with my journey: the Eastern Front, North Africa, the Ardennes, Midway...). I am humbled by the events themselves as well as by the ambition of the book. Be sure to ask me about my experience of reading it.

My footnote is that I read it with my recently borrowed iPod from the School Library System by my armchair. And I must say it provided a helpful supplement to the text and illustrations. I looked up many geographical features that shaped the conflicts; the benchmark rivers of the eastern front: Oder, Dnieper, Vistula and their compliments in the West; the Burma Road and "moat" around Singapore, the narrow coastal corridor that hosted the bulk of tank battles in North Africa; as well as foreign phrases, new vocabulary words, and a host of pacts, agreements, conferences. I also think I finally have the battalion-regiment-division numbers clear in my mind. And if nothing else, it kept me from swallowing whole the overwhelming surge of statistics, facts, and data laying siege to my skepticism, that ally.

Watching the grid grow

2012-01-03T18:19:00.000-05:00

This article in the NY Times about the 200th anniversary of the NYC street grid is accompanied by a nifty interactive map of which I think the chronological "street opening" slider provides a dramatic illustration of the city's steady and, sometimes, meteoric growth; a great prompt for students to support with examples from the rise of industry, demographics, and other events.

A Susquehanna Flyover

2011-12-26T11:11:00.002-05:00

A nifty animation from NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center that illustrates the breadth of the Chesapeake Bay estuary system.

Holiday look

2011-12-22T10:17:00.001-05:00

Afton next

2011-12-22T08:55:00.001-05:00

I'm thinking enlisting interested students to paint a map of Afton at the end of the math hallway, perhaps in the painterly fashion of Richard Diebenkorn.

Portrait of an artist

2011-12-19T11:00:00.004-05:00

The December 17th issue of The Economist has an article about renaissance artist Albrecht Durer that focuses not only on his exceptional talent as an artist, but on his ground-breaking entrepreneurship as an artist; fueling his income with multiple-print woodcuts that he could crank on demand, give away as loss-leaders, or barter with as currency.

His preference for that medium also made it easier to share his expertise with distant artist and patrons, create more access to his work across an economic spectrum, and exercise independence from the traditional, patron-bound world of the arts. Of course, the wider his work spread, the easier it was for it to be pirated. Hence the conspicuous incorporation of his AD "logo" in much of his work to help preserve the integrity of his brand.

The analogies throughout the article to current methods of entrepreneurship are not hard to miss, but are nicely understated. Great historical context, insightful analysis, and strong links to current perspectives. A good classroom read.

P.S.

I would also add two other articles from this issue to this suite of pieces that rethink and link historical events to what we see in our current world.

First, "The company that ruled the world," compares the advantages and pitfalls experienced by the state-run East India Company of yore with the burly state-backed companies that are snowballing the economies of China, Russia, and Brazil. And, "How Luther went viral," which draws the similarities between Martin Luther's use of emerging technology and social networks to create an "overwhelming tide" of opinion - foreshadowing the use of digital techniology and social media used in this past year's Arab Spring.

What is college/learning for?

2011-12-16T09:18:00.002-05:00

Wise words from Gary Gutting in a NYTimes Op-Ed:

"Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline. But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching. Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.

Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding. Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting. It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have. Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting."

I read it in a book / and it will not let me go

2011-12-14T13:37:00.001-05:00

Tote that book

2011-12-14T09:04:00.000-05:00

It took me like an hour, but I fashioned a holiday bag from my free promotional poster from my Follett representative. A Newbery bag for my Afton co-librarian!

Drawings found behind a door in a classroom

2011-12-13T11:24:00.004-05:00

The story behind this little video is a perfect case-study in what ails us at ACS.

In passing by a high school classroom and stopping to greet a substitute teacher, I noticed dozens of pencil-portrait drawings posted on the wall behind the classroom door where nobody in school, even the kids in class, might see them, enjoy them, benefit from them.

So I pulled out my pocket camera and photographed a handful of them. While cropping them in iPhoto, I was inspired by their diversity and by the haunting quality of these drawings not done by "artists" - inspired enough to write a poem.

Then, having just benefited myself from a "sharing of work," I made a film with both the drawings and my poem, posted it to YouTube, embedded it here, so that maybe a next person might be inspired and pay the whole thing forward.

What ails us is that we treat student work as only assignments that are due for a grade and not as the one-of-a-kind human accomplishments they are - worthy of celebrating, sharing, and enriching our community.

It is so easy to share, such an of-course part of my world. How will I convince my cloistered colleagues to make it an of-course part of their course-work?

Shape

2011-12-08T13:38:00.001-05:00

I'm going with this pine-tree shape for displays this afternoon.

Scale

2011-12-08T11:17:00.001-05:00

I really enjoy visuals that help us appreciate the scale of phenomena; like this illustration from the NY Times that compares our solar system to the size of a recently discovered immense black hole. In fact, I've created quite a few representations in my library (diameters of redwoods, depth of the ocean, a million gallons in our gym, etc.) to help students visualize physical relationships outside their experience.

And so I am excited to see the book I just ordered. It is titled "A Bee in a Cathedral, and 99 other scientific analogies." It promises to provide a bunch of need analogies. I hiope to be able to bring some of them to life on our library floor.

Twilight: the zone

2011-12-06T08:17:00.000-05:00

A few well-placed syllables

2011-12-05T16:00:00.001-05:00

I'm thinking we might take a page out of the NYCDOT playbook and use haiku/graphics throughout our halls to emphasize our character education initiatives.

You are there

2011-11-30T10:47:00.001-05:00

I am reading, at long last, John Keegan's definitive book, The Second World War. The fast-paced opening chapters have sent me headlong across Europe with Hitler's Blitzkrieg. It is a rich book.

Now, I see in the NY Times, I can follow those WWII events "contemporaneously" through a Twitter feed (RealTimeWWII) by Alwyn Collinson whose 40 posts per day have a following of 140,000 readers. He draws on diaries, time lines and other resources to align WWII events to our present calendar and hours - allowing us to experience this "breaking event." Neat idea.

Mending wall

2011-11-28T10:29:00.001-05:00

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
more

From the archives

2011-11-22T09:51:00.001-05:00

Back in the 1990s I collaborated with sixth grade teachers on a Medieval unit. I played the "master" guild artist to groups of sixth grade "apprentices."

As stone workers, we created the centerings and then the arches for a cathedral's flying buttresses.

Students posed for a master "cartoon" which we transferred as stained glass window tracery; coloring our window with tissue paper.

As sculptors, we created a life-size gargoyle with duct tape and perched it on the school roof overlooking the entrance.

The Sophomore Classic

2011-11-18T14:58:00.000-05:00

Once again, the ACS Library is host to a stop on the AGA Tour. Our scenic upstate indoor landscape makes for a breath-taking, challenging (and cheap, 25¢!) round of golf.

Early me @ ACS

2011-11-18T12:44:00.000-05:00

This early SADD adventure really hooked me into understanding that what happens outside the classroom in school can be as worthwhile as what happens inside. Team-building (like, school-wide team-building), creativity, collaboration, and inclusion were hallmarks of this effort.

Our new best thing

2011-11-16T13:02:00.002-05:00

My hands are covered with newsprint ink. I have been counting treasure.

My wife brought home a shoebox from the estate of her parents. Inside, carefully cut-out and stacked are nearly all 900 historical minutes from the Tri-Town news written by Afton historian, Charles Decker. It is nearly as priceless a gift for our library as I can imagine.

I have already begun discussion with some Junior Honor Society students on how we might go about digitizing, tagging, and sharing this one-of-a-kind resource. I hope we might do justice to the vision and care of the actual archiver.

Cool tool from a colleague!

2011-11-15T15:00:00.002-05:00

Computer History - an overview on Prezi

Thanks for intro to Prezi, Stacey!

Maintaining relations

2011-11-15T14:39:00.000-05:00

An overdue visit to our custodial workshop area revealed some newly painted sheet rock walls: crisp, but barren. So I scanned some yearbook photos of 1950-1959 maintenance staffs and designed a large poster print for them to display.

Captions

2011-11-15T11:19:00.007-05:00

I think the image
is about...hope.

No, I think it is
about despair.

Maybe it's about
the path to glory.

Or, then again,
about not being fair.

It's about how aging
changes your perspective.

No, it's about how hard
it is to endure.

I think it's about
the challenge of climbing

and how perilous
to think you're secure.

Maybe the rungs
are a rescue.

Maybe the pit
is my heart.

I'll never get a shot
at the answer

if I don't make a leap
and start.

Image by Martin Puryear

The root of all writing

2011-11-09T13:33:00.000-05:00

This cover article in the recent Chronicle reviews the state of plagiarism at the university level and the use of software by faculty to police it and by students to avoid it. The article ends, however, by citing some research that indicates "better teacher, not technology, as the key to preventing plagiarism."

The suggested improvements sound very much like the involvement librarians crave to contribute to classrooms, but all to often are precluded from. What follows is a rather long excerpt from that article (italics and boldface are mine):

Students are "dragging sentences out of random, simplistic sources and pasting them together in an often incomprehensible pastiche" of sentences, Ms. Howard said in presenting the data at a conference this year.

"How much plagiarism goes away if students actually know how to read and write from sources?" she asks The Chronicle. "My guess is: a lot."

At the conference, Ms. Howard elicited gasps from her audience when she showed one student paper from the project. The eight-page paper, about genetically modified foods, drew nearly half of its source material from the first page of a three-page WebMD article. Basically, the student took that text and broke it up with nine citations and a few original phrases.

The example illustrates broader trends. Students use books and journals, and they generally know how to cite them. But what they cite tends to come from the first page of a source, the project found. They pull "killer quotes" rather than engage with the overall argument. Almost half the time, they cite sources four pages or fewer in length.

On the basis of that research, Ms. Howard calls for a "fundamental shift" in how writing is taught. Professors should focus more on starting the research process collaboratively with students, she says. They should select a few complex sources and explore them with the whole class.

"What that means is not rushing students quite so quickly in their first semester in college into writing a 25-page research paper written from 15 sources," she says, "but rather taking them through the process of engaging with those sources first."

Veterans' Day

2011-11-08T09:23:00.004-05:00

Visualizing Libraries

2011-11-03T11:16:00.002-04:00

As engaging as I find the news update about the Digital Public Library of America, I was equally delighted that they hired graphic artist to visualize conference talking points, in real time, on a whiteboard. Nice niche art job. One is inclined to forward one's resume to ImageThink, or at least to pursue the process right here on the job.

Last year's reflection...revisited

2011-11-01T14:19:00.000-04:00

"Frankly, it has been a year of necessary reinvention for our library as it has been for the institution of libraries everywhere.
   What does it mean to be a library at this instant? I think, as never before, it is for each school community to decide. Our idea of what constitutes a “resource” needs to expand. Our expectation of what a librarian might manage and administer needs to expand. Our preconceived notions of the library space as a citadel of quiet and catalogs needs to be shelved. I’m already on these pages.
   It is a hugely exciting opportunity for us that I hope the staff and administration grasp and invest in. Right now our impact is tactical. It would be awesome to see the results if it were strategic.
   My vision is that our library concern itself less with being a virtual library and more with being an actual library. Our students crave an opportunity to discover, create, and exhibit what they can do. They need a ready stage to perform on, an always museum that is zero miles away, an open audio/video lab to match their electronic imagination, a workbench to dismantle and build, a dais to debate and a podium to read poetry. In a word; a library of our own making.
   The notion of a librarian and a room that waits to interact with students until a teacher herds an entire class here to sit 4-to-a-table died about five years ago. This library is now functioning as an independent laboratory for learners with its own assignment/opportunities: chairs being painted by artists, poems being composed by armchair readers, video ads filmed and exported, murals planned and executed, student initiatives cultivated and facilitated (plus a foreign language tutor for two hours every other day: one on one learning!).
   I withdrew thirty shelves-worth of old books so that I could remove four floor fixtures so that I could enlarge our flexible space (We accommodated a six-foot high book arch project and a chair-painting demonstration while hosting an all-day superintendents’ conference.) In fact, our entire book collection would fit as stacks in the Library computer lab. Does the prospect of that large of a flexible room brim with possibilities for you as it does for me: Remediation center, breakfast-break station, writing lab, class meetings, tutoring stations, discovery center, reading buddy corner?
   I believe that the “library resource center” that we invent can address real needs at ACS. I believe also that the unique skills I possess as an individual will serve me in these capacities as much as the common skills I share with my fellow librarians; maybe even more so.
   I just know that our students have so many needs and that the former models of serving them through classrooms or through a website is no longer applicable. And so that one-minute long teachable moment that I used to use to explain our OPAC or how to use an index, I now use it to invite/challenge the student to explore, make, plan, build, something from that nub of interest. And it’s working, one student at a time, in the library."

A chunk of yourself

2011-11-01T11:30:00.003-04:00

Your average anonymous Sophomore who contributes a part of themselves for the good (the fun!) of the class.

2011-11-01T10:08:00.000-04:00

Drumming up class-spirit by dissolving identities (sometimes obstacles) with this ice-breaker activity.

Keeping track of ACS: a lobby display

2011-10-28T13:03:00.000-04:00

You gotta love it

2011-10-28T10:12:00.000-04:00

The parking garage at the Kansas City Public Library.

"We're writing in order to have an experience"

2011-10-27T14:55:00.000-04:00

Writing wisdom in words and images from Lynda Barry. Much to like about her approach to teaching writing.

An incremental step

2011-10-26T09:54:00.000-04:00

What we teach. What we need.

2011-10-24T09:57:00.000-04:00

Complex issue. This Op-Ed piece makes an argument for those tangibles/intangibles that seem to be the hallmark of our famously innovative business start-up successes.

If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure.

He says our system is good for preparing graduates for "regulated fields" like doctors, lawyers, and engineers, but not for entrepeneurs - skills he believes all graduates need in the job market; reminding us that

AFTER all, there is not one job market in America, but two. The formal market we always hear about — jobs that get filled through cold résumé submissions in reply to posted ads — accounts for only about 20 percent of jobs.

The other 80 percent get filled in the informal job market. Any employer knows how the informal job market works: you need a position filled, so you ask your friends, colleagues and current employees if they know anyone who would do a good job.

In this informal job market, the academic requirements listed in job ads tend to be highly negotiable, and far less important than real-world results and the enthusiasm of the personal referral.

Classroom skills may put you at an advantage in the formal market, but in the informal market, street-smart skills and real-world networking are infinitely more important.

Of course, his slant in this essay is developing persons to drive "the engine of job creation"; perhaps aiming a little higher than our current expectations of job readiness. But I like it.

From the news

2011-10-19T14:13:00.001-04:00

Here's my riff on the NY Times tear-sheet that I posted in the library some weeks ago:

Discovering together

2011-10-19T10:17:00.000-04:00

I was unaware of the unique expectation of teachers at St. John's University until reading this article in the NY Times. Teachers are expected to teach ("or tutuor in the St. John's vernacular") courses in which they have no background or training; "leveraging ignorance as much as expertise." (SJU has a core curriculum of sixteen year-long courses which all students take. There are no majors.)

Michael Dink, graduated from St. John’s in 1975 and earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. Like most professors here, he long ago traded the traditional three-course academic career — writing journal articles, attending conferences and teaching a specific subject — for the intellectual buffet at St. John’s. His first year included teaching Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” a treatise on planetary movements, and atomic theory. He since has taught 15 of the school’s 16 courses, the exception being sophomore music.

Sounds like a vibrant place. Each day a day of discovery for everyone. No laurels to rest on, just laurels to share.

Visualizing something small

2011-10-18T13:52:00.002-04:00

At the library right now. Questions

2011-10-17T14:29:00.003-04:00

Questions.

Students for Change

2011-10-17T09:48:00.001-04:00

Thanks for donating your pennies to help our community!

Why I read

2011-10-17T09:22:00.002-04:00

One of the reasons I read is because when an author has such clarity of thoughts and words, it helps to forge new relationships I might have missed through an entire lifetime.

This article by architecture critc Michael Kimmelman makes that leap for me. He uses the "Occupy Wall Street" movement as an example of we ,"tend to underestimate the political power of physical places." Along the way, his observations, his insights, his perspective from outside the moment as well as from within it create a lucid awareness that might otherwise have escaped me.

These are probably too many excerpts (read the article!), but I can't help it:

Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations. So we check in on Facebook and Twitter, but make pilgrimages to Antietam, Auschwitz and to the Acropolis, to gaze at rubble from the days of Pericles and Aristotle.

I thought of Aristotle, of all people, while I watched the Zuccotti Park demonstrators hold one of their “general assemblies” the other day. In his “Politics,” Aristotle argued that the size of an ideal polis extended to the limits of a herald’s cry. He believed that the human voice was directly linked to civic order. A healthy citizenry in a proper city required face-to-face conversation.

It so happens that near the start of the protest, when the police banned megaphones at Zuccotti Park, they obliged demonstrators to come up with an alternative. “Mic checks” became the consensus method of circulating announcements, spread through the crowd by people repeating, phrase by phrase, what a speaker had said to others around them, compelling everyone, as it were, to speak in one voice. It’s like the old game of telephone, and it is painstakingly slow.

“But so is democracy,” as Jay Gaussoin, a 46-year-old unemployed actor and carpenter, put it to me. “We’re so distracted these days, people have forgotten how to focus. But the ‘mic check’ demands not just that we listen to other people’s opinions but that we really hear what they’re saying because we have to repeat their words exactly.

“It requires an architecture of consciousness,” was Mr. Gaussoin’s apt phrase."

_______

“We come to get a sense of being part of a larger community,” said Brian Pickett, a 33-year-old adjunct professor of theater and speech at City University of New York. I found him sitting last week among the neat, tarpaulin-covered stacks of sleeping bags in one corner of the park. “It’s important to see this in the context of alienation today. We do Facebook alone. But people are not alone here.”

And as a result, demonstrators also reveal themselves to each other. Egyptians described this phenomenon at Tahrir Square. Tea Partiers have talked about it, too. Protesters don’t just show the world a mass of people. They discover their own numbers — people with similar, if not identical, concerns. Imagine Zuccotti Park, one protester told me, as a Venn diagram of characters representing disparate political and economic disenchantments. The park is where their grievances overlap. It’s literally common ground.

Cooperstown exchange

2011-10-14T08:24:00.000-04:00

My annual invitation to the NYSHA Teachers' Advisory meeting in Cooperstown is always a welcome one. The advisory team is made up of a range of educators from across the state: history and art teachers, elementary and high school teachers, humanities advocates, and librarians! It is hosted by the very professional staff at NYSHA; and that is a treat. Their organization is proactive, proud, and concerned with anticipating teacher needs as our expectations flex and evolve.

The discussion revolved around how our schools are responding to the Common Core initiative, how the museums' educational programs might accommodate those changes, and specific strategies they might explore to provide truly rich educational experiences.

As always, the dialogue was rich with ideas that we might adopt also. Two ideas in particular seemed transferable to ACS: posting "essential questions" throughout the school to focus and cultivate a climate of inquiry, and teaming triumvirates of History-ELA-Arts teachers to encounter-explore-explain artworks (or any DBQ-type resource) for empowered understanding and responses.

Sound bites

2011-10-13T08:53:00.000-04:00

Long-form journalism; probing articles of context, insight, breadth, and complexity are finding it harder to make their way into remaining newspapers; even newspapers of record. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review takes issue with the precipitous fall-off of long-form articles in the Wall Street Journal; especially under the leadership of Rupert Murdoch (the graph below illustrates the number of page-one articles of at least 2500 words).

The demise of nuanced long-form journalism trickles down to shape the capacity of readers to engage the inherent complexity of many issues, thus eroding tolerance, intellectual rigor, and a whole range of collateral reasoning that might otherwise be analyzed, discussed, and explored further... sounds like the challenges we often address in our classroom.
There is more at stake then leaving more page-space for advertising.

Thanks for the tip on this article, Jim.

Customizing for Common Core

2011-10-12T11:01:00.002-04:00

An article in the Chronicle surveyed some textbook-customization outfits. AcademicPub builds print or ebooks from its base of two million pieces of content from 75 publishers; arranging for royalty fees as the book is compiles. They can also include free content from the Web.

As we shift to Common Core standards with their expectation of more literary nonfiction (supplemented with primary source documents), creating school- or regional-specific textbooks might be a cost-effective as well as a teaching-effective route to explore.

Laptop stations

2011-10-11T10:15:00.000-04:00

The use of our loanable laptop cart is evolving. Issues with classroom use (20 users logging on at once for the same site) have revealed that laptop use makes more sense in the library-proper where users are not regimented by time or destination. We have had seven units plugged in along a counter which are constantly used. This week I am placing four laptops on book shelves near endcaps, adjacent to our upholstered chairs. I will be interested in their use, their battery capacity, and their standard of care.

2011-10-05T12:40:00.003-04:00

I brought in this this slab of maple from the large tree that fell by my house and have challenged students to let me know if it dates back to the "birth" of our home (around 1840) or other famous events.

We are going to try corroborating our analysis with some annual precipitation data.

To do list: Item #1

2011-09-28T08:20:00.000-04:00

I really want us to build something like this in the library this year!

Kuratorium — Mouth from Crictor on Vimeo.

"Heroic Failure"

2011-09-27T14:52:00.001-04:00

Risk, creativity, and innovation often end in failure. How we treat failure impacts the sought-after recipe for new successes. One company in this Wall Street Journal article is awarding a quarterly "heroic failure" trophy to employees whose idea failed but whose creativity they value and want to encourage.
Other examples in the article support industry's efforts to cultivate risk-taking while encouraging trust, communication, and criticism. "Mistakes are OK - hiding them is not."

Postscipt: Newsweek has been running a last-page feature titled "My Favorite Mistake." Famous-types tell a failure anecdote and how they learned from it.

Poem

2011-09-27T08:36:00.000-04:00

When one is bigger than life,
endowed with great physical size
or expansive spirit, or both,
they assume a burden
to be more, to bear more.
And when they do
and they manage it with equanimity,
we are humbled and inspired
and changed by that touch
which takes root in us
and does not pass away.

Obit: Michael Hart

2011-09-26T12:15:00.001-04:00

Michael Hart, the visionary founder of the free e-book site Project Gutenberg, died on September 6th. This is an especially fond remembrance of him and his life's work from The Economist.

Lecture/tutor

2011-09-23T10:06:00.000-04:00

This article in the Economist describes how teachers are using the instructional videos at the KhanAcademy and its management system to "flip" the traditional model for instruction by having students receive their "lecture" from the Khan online videos, then using class time to "tutor" individual learning gaps as revealed by the management system:

THE 12-year-olds filing into Courtney Cadwell’s classroom at Egan Junior High in Los Altos, a leafy suburb of Silicon Valley, each take a white MacBook from a trolley, log on to a website called KhanAcademy.org and begin doing maths exercises. They will not get a lecture from Ms Cadwell, because they have already viewed, at home, various lectures as video clips on KhanAcademy (given by Salman Khan, its founder). And Ms Cadwell, logged in as a “coach”, can see exactly who has watched which. This means that class time is now free for something else: one-on-one instruction by Ms Cadwell, or what used to be known as tutoring.

So Ms Cadwell, in her own web browser, pulls up a dashboard where KhanAcademy’s software presents, through the internet, the data the children are producing at that instant. She can view information for the entire class or any individual pupil. Just then she sees two fields, representing modules, turning from green to red, one for Andrea, the other for Asia. Ms Cadwell sees that Andrea is struggling with exponents, Asia with fractions. “Instead of having to guess where my students have gaps, I can see it, at that moment, and I walk over to that one student,” says Ms Cadwell, as she arrives at Asia’s chair.

Take one!

2011-09-22T12:52:00.000-04:00

My first "feature" using our new green screen. Roll'em!

On tape

2011-09-19T10:22:00.001-04:00

Kudos to a fellow taper! Check out the time-lapse video of her construction at the New York Times.

The image accompanies a compelling article about two school developing "character" report cards.

Students 4 Change

2011-09-16T10:14:00.001-04:00

I am making a lobby window display to help kick-off our school wide service project, "Students 4 Change." Each class will be collecting change for a specific community organization. As a finale, students will design floor-mosaics with their donations before presenting their efforts to the community.

Multimedia, sort of

2011-09-16T09:58:00.000-04:00

I was checking-out a projector set-up on a mobile cart when I noticed the blue warm-up screen serendipitously falling perfectly within a drawing of Abe Lincoln that I made for our library walls.
So I fired up the first YouTube video I found on Lincoln and made me some multimedia.

Star Wars redux

2011-09-15T12:23:00.001-04:00

My daily flip-through of the New York Times paused at this auction ad for a 16th century piece of Chinese armor. I quick posted it on an endcap with a much later and more familiar iteration!

It's here

2011-09-15T12:13:00.000-04:00

Our green screen has arrived! We had to quick put it up and try a 10 second clip. We are delighted that it is so easy to confiure in iMovie.

A Google a Day

2011-09-13T10:59:00.000-04:00

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

A Google a Day is a Google game. Google poses a question for which there is one answer. You research against the clock to submit your best shot. You can click for hints and (Google) tricks.

Might be a good extra-credit gambit for teachers. Some good critical-thinking opportunities in the mix.

The writing algorithm

2011-09-12T10:55:00.000-04:00

The Big Ten is currently using a software service, Narrative Science, that kicks out articles from game statistics. Humans don't write the articles, the computer does. It has been "taught" to recognize scenarios that cue up narratives about "come from behind," "team effort," and "season high" from statistics and play-by-play.

One user of the service pays $10 for each 500 word article.

Stadium seating

2011-09-12T10:08:00.000-04:00

Our ACS Library is like Madison Square Garden; we're always reconfiguring the layout for different events. To accommodate attendance-taking for the first period PhysEd classes that meets in here to watch the morning announcements (60+ students), we are going to try using mobile markers to designate seating "sections." If your seat assignment is in SECTION E, look for the tabletop marker rather than the table. We'll see if this speeds-up the attendance process and actually works as we begin to shift furniture as trhe weeks go by.

Nonlinear reading

2011-09-07T10:20:00.000-04:00

In the continuing discussion about the move from books to ebooks, this NYT essay looks at the advantages to reading as civilizations moved from scrolls to codex (books) to digital texts. The author makes a pretty convincing point about a print book's main advantage being its access to nonlinear reading:

The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn’t be done.

Shapeways

2011-09-07T10:03:00.002-04:00

This is exciting! Shapeways is an online service for fabricating small items that you create with 3-D modeling software like SketchUp. Imagine rendering useful unique hardware like clamps, brackets, and action figures, then uploading your design file, selecting the appropriate materials and having your design MADE! ... Like this cool steadi-cam mount below.

Ten decades

2011-06-20T13:16:00.005-04:00

Made this lobby display for Graduation week; class photos or rosters at ten-year intervals back to 1911. Wrote this poem for it.

Ten decades

Faces. Names. People.
They arrive and move on
like ripples at the shore.

What do they carry with them
from this common experience,
this uncommon place?

They carry both
The accountable lessons of learning
and the immeasurable connections of community.

So look backward, look forward.
(We are of a place
as much as we are of a time!)

The bonds of who we were together
serve to strengthen us when we must be
who we are on our own.

The distance of years cannot erase
that arc of our learning
or the meaning of place.

An audio record

2011-06-20T08:41:00.001-04:00

Last Autumn, I spoke at an Afton Historical Society meeting about using technology to record one's personal history. At that time, I suggested that I might make podcasts of Charles Decker's weekly historical articles in the Trt-Town News.

I'm proud to say that with the exception of Minute No. 924, I managed to record thirty-five of them in the course of the school year; numbers 900-935.

They are available at the Internet Archive.

Collect books / make books

2011-06-13T12:49:00.001-04:00

Two new books just in at the ACS library - made by us.

The first is a 20-page color photo-essay book following the creation of our Wellness Mural. This was cranked out of iPhoto using the make-a-book feature. It cost $10.

The second is a hard copy of this blog; one year's worth. It is a 64-page B&W book with a Table of Contents and glossy color cover. (Embedded items are not included or, disappointingly, even noted with a URL.) It cost $15.

I have been sharing both with colleagues hoping that they might provide motivational support for any project-based activities they might undertake with students. Like school yearbooks, these items are barcoded and added to the database of our permanent collection.

Looking for dissent on the Internet

2011-06-09T08:15:00.000-04:00

Some reminders about searching with Google from, Sue Halpern's article in The New York Review of Books:

A Google search—which Chorost would have us doing in our own technologically modified heads—”curates” the Internet. The algorithm is, in essence, an editor, pulling up what it deems important, based on someone else’s understanding of what is important.

As Eli Pariser documents in his chilling book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, since December 2009, Google has aimed to contour every search to fit the profile of the person making the query...With personalized search, “now you get the result that Google’s algorithm suggests is best for you in particular—and someone else may see something entirely different.

Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of fifty-seven variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology, and assumptions. Pariser suggests, for example, that a search for proof about climate change will turn up different results for an environmental activist than it would for an oil company executive and, one assumes, a different result for a person whom the algorithm understands to be a Democrat than for one it supposes to be a Republican. (One need not declare a party affiliation per se—the algorithm will prise this out.) In this way, the Internet, which isn’t the press, but often functions like the press by disseminating news and information, begins to cut us off from dissenting opinion and conflicting points of view, all the while seeming to be neutral and objective and unencumbered by the kind of bias inherent in, and embraced by, say, the The Weekly Standard or The Nation.

Sensing the meaning of a book

2011-06-03T12:32:00.002-04:00

I am not nostalgic about books as bound paper objects. I will, however, speak to their ability, for me, to deliver a more complete relationship to whatever they contain than electronic books.

I am prompted by an article in The Chronicle about peripheral differences in the e-book reading experience. For one:

What is the title of my current e-book? When I'm not actually in the act of reading, the author and title are far less of a presence than they used to be. When I open (activate? illuminate?) my e-reader, I am presented with the last page I read. Convenient, yes, but devoid of context. No cover means no strong visual cue to reinforce just who and what I am reading

I am a person of place. Place is a necessary ingredient in who I am, what I value, how I proceed in the world. Also, if I am not a sensualist, I am at least dependent on a number of senses when I read.

When I think of a book I own, I see the book: its cover, its thickness, its deckle edge - the red tattered cover of U.S.A., the fanned-out corners of my Robert Penn Warren poetry books, the faint blue pamphlet-book of A Child's Christmas in Wales. They are part of the story because I am part of the story. I recognize me as I recognize my book.

Also, my books are somewhere, just like me; canted on my bed stand, alternately stuffed with recent letters while rowed upon the back edge of my dresser, at hand on the bottom shelf of my alarm-clock book case, waiting tonight's free moment on top of the piano, ordered in "my" room upstairs on shelves shared with a hundred keepsake treasures. It is a sort of hierarchy; much more complicated (as am I) than alphabetical order or purchase date.

The actualness of books places them in the present (that mysterious place) with me, unlike an ebook which is kind of non-dead: switched on from its non-being everywhere-place to which it will return /transform when switched off.

I must read either form in the present, but I need to bear them with me into the future. For that, for me, I need to know them as I do your face, your handshake, your fragrance even as I wrestle for a lifetime with knowing who you are.

Mapping (and knowing) your home turf

2011-06-02T12:38:00.001-04:00

This project video about mapping the trees of Central Park provides a swell template for any local/school group. Discovery, attention to detail, research, visualization, and a huge public service are just some of the areas that a project like this might accommodate. Let's keep this one on one of the front burners.

Another fine short video from the same source about tree identificatio n.

My blog: the book

2011-05-31T10:35:00.000-04:00

So I'm trying this out.

It is costing me about $15 to have a bound B&W book made of this year's posts.

I'll keep you, well, posted.

Library Links

2011-05-27T08:52:00.001-04:00

Our nine-hole mini-golf course is open this afternoon to host some of our high school mentor groups.

What's supposed to happen at a library?

2011-05-26T10:07:00.003-04:00

So, a theater group staged a performance/reading at the NY Public Library's periodical room: a mash-up of Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Beyond the performance, I love the way the library completely dove into the happening:

Visitors wandered in and out, some fascinated, others apparently dumbfounded. No, they couldn’t get the July 1947 issue of National Geographic just now, and, sorry, but Vol. XXXIV of The Journal of English and Germanic Philology would have to wait too. There was a stack of recent copies of The Washington Post at one end of the counter, but an actor’s drink was on top of it. A severe-seeming woman in a black dress talking on the phone looked as if she might be a librarian but turned out to be, oops, another one of the actors, speaking Hemingwayese: “The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta.”

No help at the periodical room’s computer terminals: they were displaying not the catalog but a version of the script that the actors were reciting, and if you looked up at the wall, a projection of the text of all three novels was quickly scrolling by.

Libraries as a place to not just supplement experience, but to provide it.

Can you spot the tutor?

2011-05-26T09:32:00.000-04:00

I see six "pods" of normal library activity; all functioning well, all using library voices. One group represents a particularly intense learning experience. It is a 90-minute student/tutor experience that takes place every other day in the library. It neither interrupts other activities, nor is it compromised by other activities. Surprisingly, tutoring in the library was not a strategic choice for our school, it was an only-available-room might-as-well-settle-there "decision."

Using the library as a strategic tutoring center is just one of the "resource" options I think our school might consider for an evolving library space. As we look at the number of students in need of remediation, in need of homework help, in need of time and space that we say is at a premium in our school, I submit there is a place with time and space to address these needs.

Our home field

2011-05-24T12:50:00.000-04:00

In the course of my picture-taking day, the opportunity presented itself to get this rare perspective of our beautifully groomed baseball field. Cobbled it together with a bag of tricks.

Gerald Manley Hopkins

2011-05-22T20:50:00.000-04:00

Do you know his work ( here is Carrion Comfort)? His poems are packed with enjambments, dissonance, and an absolute gush of wonderful words. They sound like Baroque architecture looks: magnificent.
Well, he's alive and well in the work of this young man. What a bravura poem and performance!

The library landscape

2011-05-19T12:52:00.000-04:00

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From hosting the morning gym class with the announcements projected on the wall, to creating a mini-auditorium that seats 60 students,, the library landscape flexes daily to encourage individual inquiry, making and creating, event presentations, and an environment of "we can find out and make it here."

Seating for sixty

2011-05-18T14:46:00.001-04:00

We are hosting a guest speaker for 8th grade Social Studies tomorrow. I am tickled that our expanded flexible floor plan will accommodate 60 listeners!

A Museum in our Library

2011-05-17T10:01:00.003-04:00

Our library is delighted to be hosting the "Exploration and Expansion of the Western Hemisphere," an exhibition of historic artifacts and slide shows created by 5th grade students.

Meeting notes

2011-05-17T09:30:00.000-04:00

The keynote speaker at our Annual SLS Meeting, Allison Zmuda, was frustrating for me to listen to because her observations about student learning myths were so accurate, her descriptions of engaged learners were so familiar, and the environment for their cultivation is so nearly a vanished opportunity within our "closed classroom" school now.

That missing facet of our school culture; the expectation that our teachers and classrooms must be as "agile and adaptive" as we expect our graduates to be, is the caved-in keystone we keep side-stepping as we walk into our separate kingdoms each morning.

So much of what we do as librarian - creating student-directed opportunities for learning that insist on being transferable to new experiences - doesn't even get a shot at students within these walled-courses. That is why I was also inspired by something else Ms. Zmuda said about being a librarian," I am here to support student learning, not to support teachers so that they might support student learning." Hearing those words reinforced the direction I have been pursuing this year in this library; treating this library as it's own classroom, all students as my students, their learning opportunities as my priorities.

Poem

2011-05-13T13:34:00.002-04:00

Picasso's Bull

Teacher

if you please

reward this scholar with an "A"

for recognizing

in the storm-fall branch

that most pass by

the essence of another thing.
His is

the artist's vision

that even five week's hard labor

would not grant

to you or I.

The Promise of Baseball

2011-05-10T11:13:00.000-04:00

A poem inspired by our Modified baseball team.

"What's this?" they ask as they approach.

2011-05-05T09:32:00.001-04:00

This tape measure stops everyone who enters. They follow it up to the ceiling and read the sign at the top which says that the ceiling is 11 feet high AND it congratulates our student who just set a school record by pole vaulting 12 feet! Library as not only hub for celebrating information, but also illustrating how to create meaning from it.

My emergency poems

2011-05-02T14:52:00.001-04:00

To celebrate national Poetry Month, I posted 19 "Emergency Poems" around our school; including these six by me.

2011 Art Show Tour

2011-05-02T12:43:00.000-04:00

A quick tour of the High School Art Show that was hosted by our library and curated/hung by me!

Grass roots recognition

2011-05-02T12:37:00.002-04:00

I was recognized at a recent high school awards ceremony with a certificate from a student who thanked me for supporting his ideas and projects; like creating a program for students to recognize helpful ACS staff members. Thank you.