If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’re not going to be creative. But when do we give kids the chance to be wrong. Ken Robinson’s argument in this TED talk, is that schools are designed to produce workers good at automatic tasks and bad at creative, heuristic ones. This may have worked well during the industrial revolution, but is painfully deficient in the modern world. It’s the same argument made by Daniel Pink in Drive.
Robinson is a most entertaining speaker, so the presentation is a joy to watch. It’s a great reminder that we need to foster some risk-taking, and students need to know that sometimes the ultimate consequence of failure is learning.
Utterly amazing. Keith Loutit’s Small Worlds Project, uses time-lapse photographs, carefully adjusted focus, and color highlighting to create videos that look like a lot like claymation animations.
Last Wednesday’s lunar eclipse was nicely captured in the stop-motion video below. What a wonderful way to celebrate getting past the longest night of the year. And, because the question does come up, we’re seeing the shadow of the Earth cross over the moon.
Over the last two days, I’ve been trying to focus a little on how different texts can be connected by their shared themes. Poetry is one of the options for students’ presentations during the community meeting every morning, and, to speed things up a little, I’ve been insisting that students have their presentations ready and approved by the facilitator, be it a poem or leading a discussion of one of George Washington’s Rules of Civility, before the meeting starts. Otherwise, I get to choose the poem they present.
When we do a poem or a rule of civility, the presenter leads a short discussion of the work. For poems this means identifying interesting aspects of the language, but mostly I’ve had them focusing on extracting themes. They’re getting better and better at that with practice, so today I explicitly asked, “What themes do today’s and yesterday’s poems share?”
It took us a while to unpack the two pieces, they had to hear them again, and finally I ended up giving them my opinion.
We need to work on these intertextual comparisons a bit more, but, hopefully, they’ll improve with practice.
I’m considering having them read the lyrics of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful (the “clean” version) tomorrow, because it fits nicely with the other two poems and a contemporary work might offer them an additional connection to the work. We’ll see.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
One of my students is working on a personal project on ice dogs and how they aid polar exploration today and in the past. Amazingly, dogs are still used in expeditions that spend the winter on the ice, as shown in the video from the Tara expedition of 2006 (hat tip to Ryan):
The poignancy and romance of exploration are distilled in Stan Rogers’ ballard “Northwest Passage“.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
–Stan Rogers (1981) from Northwest Passage.
The Bounding Main website has the lyrics, including footnotes about Franklin and the others mentioned in the song, as well as major geographic features like the Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.
History and art collide. The music sticks in the brain then seeps down to catch the throat. I think this is a great way to get into (spark the imagination about) Artic exploration.
The next step is, of course, Shackleton and The Endurance.
This wonderful animation shows the exploration of the North American Coastline from 1500 to 1876, updating the map as the different explorers push further along the coastline. Most of the action occurs to the north, as expedition after expedition sough the Northwest Passage.
What’s nice, is that the names of the explorers, like Cabot and Franklin, should be familiar to students after this cycle’s research.