Today in working on extending our thinking about texts we revisited Anis Mojgani’s “Shake the Dust“. We started by reading and thinking about the text, then had a group discussion. I played the video at the end.
After we watched Mojgani, I asked the students to write down if, and how, his presentation changed what they thought about the issue they were most interested. Mojgani’s presentation is forceful, and it emphasizes different issues than you can gleam from a dry reading of the poem. Doing it this way, I think, allowed students to see that there are multiple ways of interpreting the same texts.
art … never simply transcribes what is “out there,” but selects certain details and arranges them into a harmony that transfigures them.
— Frank Wilson (2010) in “Still life and the alchemy of art“.
We might see arrangements like the stuff sitting on the counter every day, but the image/photography/painting becomes art when the collection is view from a specific perspective that transforms them and highlights details.
Aside from its obvious beauty, what really intrigues me about this picture is where it was taken: In the living room of the Menchers’ apartment, just a few feet from where I was standing. I would never have guessed.
When Eric told me that, I turned and looked, and could see where the vase and the other objects had been placed. But the setting was altogether different from the picture. The living room is a perfectly nice and neat space, and I had just been sitting there, but when I looked at it again there was absolutely nothing about it that would have brought to mind that photo.
Note: The image at the top of this post is computer generated Gilles Tran, using the free, open-source, 3D rendering program POV-Ray. I’ve played around with POV-Ray and it can be a bit tricky, but you can do interesting things.
EV from Somewhat in the Air has a great post on antithesis.
An antithesis … can be built by contrasting any of the different parts of a statement. But there is always a balance in the actual physical construction.
— EV (2011) inAntithesis – 15 minutes of writing
For example:
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is not vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” –Barry Goldwater (1964)
It makes for a nice little (15 minutes perhaps?) self-contained exercise.
Instruction on how to extract DNA from anything, (I’m going to use this as a lab and perhaps to make pea soup too) and specifically, from people (inside of your cheek).
We’ll be studying poetry soon, and Wikileaks is in the news. I therefore post the mind-expanding website, Haïkuleaks, which condenses diplomatic cables into seventeen syllables and three lines each.
The site uses Haiku Finder to scan through the cables for inadvertent Haikus.
‘People need to see
the results of decisions,’
the Sultan stated.
Haiku Finder is a quick and extremely dirty way of finding haiku’s in any texts.
You may not want to let your students find out about this site, or, alternatively, having them plug in their existing texts might make for an interesting way of introducing haikus.
I’m not particularly poetic (tell me something I don’t know), I have to go back through a month of posts to get my first Muddle haiku:
One of those things is
that rabbits eat their own poop.
Well not exactly.
Just in time for us to start reading The Chrysalids, David Schindler has a frightening gallery from the abandoned surroundings of Chernobyl, twenty-five years after the accident with the nuclear reactor.
The YouTube video below shows the same images as the gallery.
There’s a curious and clear gender difference when it comes to my student’s use of their blogs. All the girls have them and most are posting things right now, but the boys don’t.
This is in large part due to the way I rolled out the student blogs. I started with a couple students (girls) who were most interested, and since then I’ve been setting up blogs for students as they’ve been requested. The process has been slow because I’ve been trying the multi-user version of WordPress (WPMU), which is not nearly as easy to set up as a stand-alone WordPress installation (like the one used for the Muddle). I think, however, that I have the setup process worked out now, so I could accelerate the rollout if necessary.
Since the two students I started with were girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that it’s the other girls who were most interested in getting their own. That’s the way the social connections are arranged in our class.
Scattergram showing how girls' (red) brains mature differently than boys' (blue). Data from Lenroot, 2007.
Though there’s no real evidence for it, I do wonder, however, if there is a gender component to it too. Since girls tend to develop more quickly than boys at this age (see Sax, 2007 for a general description, and NIH, 2010 for a recent overview of adolescent brain development), so perhaps they’re more self-reflective. Girls also tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships more (e.g. Johnson, 2004), and are generally more communicative.
… females (1) develop more intimate friendships, (2) stress the importance of maintaining intimacy, and (3) expect more intimacy in their friendships than do males. — in Gender, grade, and relationship differences in emotional closeness within adolescent friendships byJohnson, (2004)
At any rate, I’m curious to see how this develops. I think I’m going to remind the whole class about the blogs though.
(Excel Spreadsheet used to create the brain volume scattergram: here.)
