Solving a tech problem

A colleague of mine came to me with his iPad2. Apparently his kids had deleted Safari, the browser, and it’s inconvenient to have a computer that you can’t check the internet on, these days.

I plugged the iPad into his computer. But because he set it up and uses it wirelessly, I couldn’t simply back it up from his iTunes and hard drive.  So I plugged it into my computer.  Now my choices were, “make it a new iPad2″ or “back up from your own iPad.” Neither of these was an ideal option.

So I used Google. “How to restore Safari on an iPad 2″. Instantly I found a number of websites that offered help.  And the first option, a help website running off of blogspot.com, held the solution to the problem.  In the “settings” app, I went into ‘restrictions’ and unrestricted the use of Safari. Whereupon the app re-appeared on the iPad2′s desktop.

This was not a spectacularly difficult problem to solve… provided one had a computer and an internet connection.  Without a manual, and without access to Google, though, it would have been quite difficult.  What made it even more difficult, though, was the individual user’s lack of knowledge about his own device.  He knew how to use the software, but had no idea how to reconfigure his device.  Neither did I, to be fair, until I looked it up.

We live in a world in which it’s possible to look up quite a lot.  How do we, as teachers, go about training kids to ask questions that can’t be looked up, but require a number of complex look-up operations in a row? And how do we as teachers go about training kids to ask questions of Google that Google can answer… if you ask the right question.

Lost Student Papers

Just before February break, I was sick with the flu. As a result, I didn’t take home a great big stack of about thirty student papers, many of them 10-12 pages long (their stories about presidents, in fact).  They were sitting on my desk for a day or two until I was able to return to school, pick them up, and grade them at home…. and while at someone else’s house, and at someone else’s….

Today, as I went to hand them back, three of the papers were missing.  This disheartens me a great deal.  Somewhere in the last week, I put a student paper down in a place it wasn’t supposed to be — outside of the main stack, not in the “unread” pile or “graded” pile — and the result was that I’m now shame-faced about student work gone missing over a vacation.

As humans, we teachers are not perfect.  But it pays to develop systems to track and keep student work organized, and woe to us when those systems fail.

What’s your system?

My Emerald Tablet

I’d just re-read this essay by Alan Moore the comic book artist and occultist called Fossil Angel (in two parts), which argues among other things that maybe the purpose of magic right now should be to get back into art.  Rather than fight with magic’s rebellious children, Science (in the form of tow-headed tomboy Chemistry, longhaired wunderkind Physics, and exuberant, muddy-faced Biology), maybe we should recognize that one of the core purposes of magic is to make art that moves people, and makes them reconnect with their emotional and spiritual selves in a way that has nothing to do with official religious doctrine.  Any official religious doctrine.   Maybe we should collapse the whole edifice of 19th century ceremonial magic, with its lodges and its secret handshakes, and go for something a little more radical.  Make stuff.  Make a living, make a life.  DIY, as my friend Tony would have it.

It’s possible, even likely, that in paraphrasing Alan Moore, that I’m not representing his ideas very accurately, so I invite you to go read the original essay.  Again, even, if you haven’t done so recently.  This blog post isn’t nearly so good, anyway.  Although it does boast a little about finishing an art/magic project…

I’m very conscious, as the organizer of the design program at my school, of how little sense I have of where my students will be in 5 years, or what will be important to them, or what kinds of skills they will need (I did find one of the missing papers, though — which is good).  It seems important to me, then, to be an artist, and a designer, and not just a teacher.

Which is why I decided to finish this project.  I’d made the bamboo-book in the Chinese style a long time ago, inspired by the gift of the 36 Stratagems but I hadn’t finished it.  It had been sitting on a shelf in my studio: made but not inked.  The calligraphy is nothing special — a very basic italic with no fancy letters or thickened lines, because writing on popsicle sticks is a very basic thing to do.  But the text here, is the Emerald Tablet.

And this project is now complete.  Ish.

One of my big take-aways from learning to be a designer is that you’re never really “done” with a thing.  There’s always one or two more things to fiddle with, to fix, to solve in the next edition.  It’s very unlike homework, which has a deadline (“tomorrow”) and an expectation of quality (allegedly high, but in reality often quite low).  The point of design work is that it takes a lot of tries to move something towards excellence, and sometimes a project sits for a long time before it’s finished.   This one is done for now, but in six months or a year I might be called upon to embellish it further — maybe a little gold leaf, maybe some better calligraphy, something. For the moment, though, I’ve made art, and I’ve made magic, and I’ve seen a “bamboo-style-book” project through to completion.  What I do with it next, I’m not sure.

The underlying point, though, remains the same.  We’re living in an age when the people making the money and living the dream and inventing the world are artists — game designers, coders, graphics makers, fontographers, and all kinds of product developers.  Those are the people who were, in the last generation, bored in school in any classes that weren’t Art or Computer Science.  And now they’re running the world.

So one of my goals, as a teacher, has to include the idea of being creative, and a creator, and living a creative life in front of my students.  How do I do that?  How do you do that?  How do we recapture the spirit of playfulness and inventiveness in a way that makes it more likely that kids will be able to be the kind of creative being who will help run the world in the next go-round?

Because if we can’t teach them to be that way, then we’re looking at a pretty dismal world ahead.

Seeing the Ecliptic

Seeing the Ecliptic

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Our world is filled with imaginary yet real things. The ecliptic — the imaginary line along which the planets skate across the sky — is one such imaginary thing that nonetheless has a good deal to tell us about the world. This line is semi-visible in this photo: by tracking the three objects across the night sky, you can sense how the Sun traveled this same line earlier in the day, and now it’s the chance for the planets to show up the Sun along the same line. Few things ever helped me see the beauty in the existing universe so much as being able to pick out this line in the night, and know that the world had an order and a beauty to it that I could only dream of.

Via Flickr:
It’s rare for me to get good pictures of the night sky. My camera just isn’t good enough. But on February 23, I got this picture of the Moon (bottom), Jupiter (upper left), and Venus (middle) just a little after sundown. It’s such a beautiful way of seeing the ecliptic — the line imagined across the sky, along which the planets travel — that I couldn’t resist snapping the photo.

Topataco and the Future

Topataco
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Two weeks ago, I went to Easthampton, MA to meet my friends T and E. They were going to the t-shirt sale and book signing at Topataco. Topataco publishes graphic novels and makes t-shirts for a lot of different webcomics, and some of their authors, including J. Jacques of Questionable Content were in attendance (Questionable Content, despite its name, is not really questionable; it’s the story of some post-college kids living in the Northampton, MA area, in an alternate reality from ours where artificial intelligence has been invented).

The visit was very much ongoing proof to me that people are not really doing the kinds of things now that they were doing 20 years ago; and that this trend is going to continue. A former student of mine is living at home, attending concerts and trying to make work for himself. Two others are involved in video-game coding. Some are in the army. Few of them are going on to law school or medical school out of college. Everyone is hustling. So are the folks at Topataco — designing t-shirts, publishing books of formerly web-published material, and generally inventing lives for themselves against the backdrop of economic apocalypse.

The folks hanging out at Topataco were odd ducks. Alternative folks, mostly younger than T and E and I. Folks who looked like they didn’t belong to the mainstream, and didn’t care that they didn’t belong to the mainstream. Artists, nerds, geeks, fashionistas, artists. Artists.

What’s the world we’re moving into? What’s the mission for teaching kids for the future? What’s the future look like? What will people be doing? The factories are closed or closing. There’s only so many fast food joints that can open anywhere. We can’t all work in posh high-level all-local all-organic eateries, because we can’t all afford to eat in them. How will we train kids to see opportunities for themselves — niches like webcomics, and t-shirt creation, that clearly support some people, and give them a kind of life that they want to lead? It’s obvious that Washington DC is not going to solve this, nor is Wall Street, nor their proxies.

How will we, the teachers, restructure what we do, so that our children have a chance to fly once the rubble of what was, has stopped bouncing?

Zentangle mandala

Zentangle mandala
Originally uploaded by anselm23

A while back, I was in a Michael’s art supply store, and found a pamphlet (considerably less than a book, but more than a worksheet) about the idea of Zentangle. I didn’t think the book was worth my money, but I leafed through the book, enough to get the idea. And then, at breakfast with extended family on Saturday at one of our favorite breakfast places, I showed one of the artful-minded but hesitant family members just how easy it is to produce art. I used one of the paper napkins from the dispenser by the coffee urns, and used a Pigma Micron #05 pen in blue. It ripped through the paper in several places (as one uncle said, “napkins are a hard medium because they’re a soft medium…” you try to decipher that one), but it turned out OK. Is it exactly Zentangle? Maybe, maybe not.

What’s the takeaway for me as an educator? I don’t know. I said in one of my recent posts, American High-Tech, that we don’t really know what our students are going to be doing in 10-15 years. I talked with my Dad tonight, and I was reminded that my parents made sure that I tried my hand at as many things as possible — hiking and canoeing, bicycling and blacksmithing, pottery and writing and fencing. I had a pretty divergent experience as a kid, and I got to try out so many different things. Even as an adult, I do that.

Yet as an educator, I’m amazed at how much I keep falling back on the same basic two principles of homework: “read this and write that.” Just two days ago in a restaurant, I demonstrated my skills as an artist to my lady’s family, and it had nothing to do with homework or being an academic. It had everything to do with being a human being.

And which do we really care about, for when our children grow up?

American High-Tech

it’s not much to look at, but the industrial revolution in America was born in buildings not much different than this one in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. (Truth be told, this was a gristmill — not a political newschannel, but for making flour) Next to a fast-flowing river to provide power, this building harnessed water to generate momentum, and used momentum to do work: weave cloth, spin thread, hammer metal, and sew clothes. Despite the windows, it was likely dark and cold inside, and the workers made little in the way of money. Benefits? Leaving in three years with some wages saved and most of your fingers. Imperial? Of course. Instead of child laborers in Indonesia, black slaves toiled in Missouri to grow cotton to feed the machines here.

Now of course this building is filled with old farm equipment nobody wants any more, rather than the 19th-century latest in textile technology. It’s a reminder of how far to the periphery modern America has pushed its manufacturing, and agriculture, that we wouldn’t really recognize much of the old equipment that once inhabited this building, or the exhibits that it holds now.

I think one of the reasons why education is floundering in so many ways these days is that we don’t really know what our students will do once they leave school. Are they going to be graphic designers building websites? Probably not. The World Wide Web is dying, though the internet is stronger than ever. Are they going to be farmers and agriculturalists? Maybe. But Maybe Not. Are they going to be quantum mechanical geeks? Likely not, given that we don’t know how to teach this stuff in schools yet. We can’t even prevent adults from going all woo-woo about it now.

The high-tech changes of the last thirty years have created an environment in which the mind-set and world-view of the past — the world on which we adults are expected to teach the children — doesn’t really exist any more. Maybe my next business should be converting the Williamsburg Historical Society building into a server farm that runs on water power, and any business in town that wants a website gets storage space for free. It’s telling that here in a rural New England town, not 20 miles from the high-powered campus of the University of Massachusetts, the most powerful and important industries are a lumber mill, a brewery, and a blacksmith. How do we know what our students will be doing in 15 years when they graduate from their schooling and move into the workforce?

It’s simple.

We don’t.

Essays vs. Stories

Tim reminded me in a comment on my last entry that I should really be doing more writing about being a teacher, and I’ve had it in mind to do an entry about this assignment I gave my students in American history after the start of the new semester at the end of January.  The assignment was simple enough:

Write a story about a President, written in such a way that it would be understandable by a third grader, and appeal to them.

How deceptively simple this assignment appeared at first glance, and how much of a shibboleth it appears to be now!  I’ve spent a good deal of time reading these essays over the last week of vacation; I’ve been trying to read one or two of them a day, sometimes more.  I still have a good many to go through, and that’s dismaying.

What’s really dismaying, though, is how many of them are simply not stories.  It’s not that these writings are bad stories, or that they’re stories in need of a little (or a lot of) editing.  It’s that these writings are essays — short pieces of writing often based on the author’s personal point of view.  They’re full of the analytical detail and factual evidence that makes a good essay, of course.  But they’re short on the liveliness and personal detail that makes a good story.

Wikipedia explains to me that the definition of an essay is a little vague, probably for good reason.  It comes from the French verb essayer, meaning ‘to try’, and these bits of student writing are certainly trying to be stories.   The fact that they’re not stories is all the more frustrating.

Students certainly need to write essays. They’re going to be writing essays for most of their school careers.  But outside of journalism (magazines such as The Atlantic and Harper’s publish essays, and the Op-Ed pages of newspapers are full of essays), and academia, who else writes them?

I discussed this with a friend and colleague of mine who teaches at the college level, and she agreed. “The best historians write stories that happen to be factually true,” she said.  ”They don’t write a lot of essays… really more like non-fiction novels.” That suggests that as a history teacher, I should do a better job of teaching history students to write non-fiction short stories.

It’s clear that such instruction would be counter-intuitive, and go against the grain of the vast majority of American practice.  Would it put my students at an advantage or a disadvantage in their academic careers to learn how to write a different way?  How would I have to vary my instruction? Should I go 50-50% on essay vs. story instruction?  How would I change my reading assignments so they were better prepared to write stories rather than essays?

I’m not sure.  I am conscious that I have way more of these essays-for-third-graders to read, assess and grade before going out to dinner tonight, so it’s time to stop blogging for now, and do my duty as a teacher.

A journey

I’m on my way home from Maine today by lady and I and her daughter have been visiting her mother in the Mid-Coast region. I’ve just about finished the reorganization on my blog. I have about 1500 entries in the “general/early”category. Now there are slightly fewer than 400. It’s been good. I’ll admit, as I re-filed, I have gone through many of my old entries. It’s amazing how much junk there is: old memes from diaryland, LiveJournal, and other web hosting services I’ve used. But it’s also interesting to find how unhappy I was, and how sick. A good many entries now filed under “personal “deal with my regular illnesses, and my regular sinus trouble. I found reminders of my 100 days of tai chi. I found poetry, now filed under “poetry”, and under “Magic and Druidry”, that show that I was thinking about poetry as one of my magical tools at least six years ago —maybe more like ten years. 10 years ago I wouldn’t have called myself a magician now I can only say, “well, maybe I am.” It’s been quite an evolution.

Reorganizing

I’m taking some time over my vacation to reorganize this blog.  Accordingly, you’ll find the links along the right-hand side to be re-organized into “poets”, “magicians”, “teachers”, “webcomics” and other categories.  I’m also trying to rearrange the posts into a smaller number of categories, and a larger number of relevant tags.  With almost 3000 entries, though, this will be a much longer-term project.  In the meantime, enjoy the re-arranged links, which now more closely reflect the kind of reading I try to do on the Internet on a regular basis.

Update, 2/23/12: I’ve re-categorized about 600 entries so that they’re now something other than “General/Early“, and it’s a real improvement.  For one thing, about 150 entries were “poetry” and “magic and druidry” stuff, and now you can FIND them. Where possible, I’ve also been tagging entries, so now one can find the full moon and new moon sonnets and the odes for the various pagan days.