Category: Art

Endurance

The Endurance frozen in the ice.

Shackelton’s Antarctic expedition remains one of the most ridiculously epic adventures I have ever encoutered. Through excellent leadership, and remarkable feats of navigation, every member of the expedition survived the destruction of their ship, The Endurance, and made their way across the harshest landscapes and oceans to find safety.

Sir Ernest Shackleton scouting the way across the Antarctic ice.

How to be a Retronaut has posted the color pictures taken by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer.

According to the State Library of New South Wales, after their ship had become irretrievably stuck in the ice:

Hurley managed to salvage the photographic plates by diving into mushy ice-water inside the sinking ship in October 1915.

– State Library of New South Wales via How to be a Retronaut.

This is kind of emblematic of the dedication of the explorers on this expedition. There’s so much for middle-schoolers to learn about dealing with hardship and immense adversity. I strongly recommend the book, but little anecdotes like this one continue to impress.

Frank Hurley with Cinematograph.

Keynes and Hayek

I used my notes and the Keynes versus Hayek music video as part of our reading this week. As usual, half the class tried skipping directly to the video, but it became pretty clear, as I suspected it would, that they didn’t understand what was going on if they had not read the notes.

We’ll be discussing the video tomorrow when we try to wrap up the week’s work, but, as one student mentioned, it can be a little hard to figure out the words in the rap. Fortunately, the Econ Stories website has been updated to include the lyrics.

Even without the lyrics, however, I really like that you can get a good idea about the competing economic theories solely from the video itself, since it’s just a very detailed extended metaphor. It’s so chock full of symbols that it could probably be used to supplement the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in our language lessons on finding symbols in texts.

Propaganda Posters from WWIII

Poster by Brian Moore (2009) (click image for his Flickr page).

Next year we’ll be looking at (and creating) propaganda posters when we study 20th century conflicts. Brian Moore has a wonderful set of adaptations of WWII posters for WWIII.

Inspired by the 2009 Iran election protest and activism and censorship therein, the WWIII Propaganda Posters were conceived as a mostly playful statement on wartime, citizen journalism, censorship, and how they all play with the advent of the Internet.

— Brian Moore: WWIII Posters

Because I’m such a fan of open-content, collaborative efforts like Wikipedia, my favorite poster is below.

Image adapted from Brian Moore (2009) (click image to go to his Flickr page).

I particularly like the eclectic selection of titles.

(found via How to be a Retronaut).

Haiku by an economist

Economist Stephen T. Ziliak’s reflections on poetry are quite appropriate for the moment, since we’re doing both poetry and economics this cycle.

Invisible hand;
Mother of inflated hope,
Mistress of despair!
–Stephen T. Ziliak: Haiku Economics

Zilak says that, “Poetry can fill the gap between reason and emotion, adding feelings to economics.”

He particularly loves the haiku, because it is such a wonderful metaphor for economics: “less is more, and more is better.”

Each poem is the length of about one human breath. This constraint, though severe, is more than offset by a boundless freedom to feel.
–Stephen T. Ziliak: Haiku Economics

Creativity is said to lie at the intersection on disciplines. This is an excellent example of it.

Counting syllables

If you need a little help finding how many syllables are in a word so you can use it in your haiku, there’s the How Many Syl.la.bles website.

Screen capture from the How Many Syl.la.bles website (Grade Level Technology, 2009).

It also suggests related words if you need a differently-syllabic synonym.

Where disciplines meet
creativity emerges
from the shaking chrysalis

How to memorize a poem

My students are working on poetry this cycle and I’m having them each memorize and present each of the different types of poems we’re covering.

Jim Holt suggests memorizing poems slowly over time:

… the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits.
— Holt (2009): Got Poetry?

But I very much like John Hollander’s advice to use the rhythm of the poem to help with memory:

It is partly like memorizing a song whose tune is that of the words themselves.
–Hollander (1995): Committed to Memory

Another approach, which worked for Michael Weiss, was to type out pairs of lines in a word processing program.

It may take about ten repetitions before a couplet is committed to memory, but as you gain experience, they’ll come faster than that.
–Weiss (2009): How to memorize a poem

All of the essays cited above also make persuasive arguments for why anyone should memorize poems. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that poems in memory are readily available for reflection. You get a feel for the rhythm and musicality, and you get to look at the words in different ways as you turn them around in your mind, playing with their meanings.

Finally, my students have become pretty good at presenting poetry, partly because they’ve seen Shake the Dust, but mainly because of our doing poetry every morning. Good presentations in the past have ratcheted up the quality of the presentations we’ve been seeing.

We’ve already started on haikus, but next week my students will be presenting sonnets. So far, things look promising.

Photos from Egypt

TotallyCoolPix has several series of totally cool pictures spanning all the events of the Egyptian revolution. The images are all from the major newswires, and, with their excellent framing and composition, as well as the dramatic subject, are superb examples of the photographic arts.

January 26th, 2011. In the first days, the protesters squared off against the riot police. The marches start off peacefully. (From TotallyCoolPix:The Egypt Protests).
Violence erupts as police try to disperse protesters using rubber bullets, water cannons and (U.S. made) tear gas. (Image via TotallyCoolPix:The Egypt Protests)
January 30th, 2010. The Army came out, and the protesters saw them as protectors. (From TotallyCoolPix:The Egypt Protests Part 2)
Feburary 4th, 2011. Pro-government loyalists attack anti-government protesters, 'exchanging' Molotov cocktails. The battle (which includes a horse and camel charge) goes on through the night, but in the morning the protesters held their ground. (Image from TotallyCoolPix:Egypt Protests: Anti-Mubarak vs Pro-Mubarak Riots)
February 10th, 2011. Protesters wave shoes as Hosni Mubarak refuses to resign in a televised speach. (Image via TotallyCoolPix:The Egypt Protests: The Shoes Come Out)
February 11th, 2011. Gridlock in the cities as Egyptians take to the streets to celebrate Mubarak's resignation. (Image via TotallyCoolPix:The Egypt Protests: Mubarak Resignation Celebrations)

Graphing discussion threads

Graphic representation of the Wikipedia discussions about deleting articles. The image links to an interactive version of the graphic at http://notabilia.net .

Swings to the right are arguments for keeping the article, swings to the left are arguments to delete them. Moritz Stefaner and others’ website have created this wonderful graphic of Wikipedia’s discussion threads. They have lots more details and discussions on their website.