Civil War and Primary Sources and Google Maps

Last year, the historian-parent of one of my students assembled thirty portfolios of documents on thirty Civil War soldiers from Connecticut — photocopies of letters and diaries and newspaper articles, links to Google ebooks, links to PDFs and websites, addresses and phone numbers for archives and historical societies in Connecticut which had the original papers, and so on.  Quite the undertaking, and I’m incredibly grateful to her for the work she did.

Now this project is in its second year.  The kids this year have the materials assembled by this historian-parent, and they have the materials assembled by last year’s seventh graders.  And they’re already making discoveries quite different from the kids who worked through this material last year.

Working with one kid yesterday, and with the help of Google Maps, we located where one such Connecticut soldier was when he wrote his last letter to his wife before marching out toward an unknown destination.  By tracing the information in his letter, we were able to identify the location of his campsite (within about a mile) the previous night.  Using Wikipedia, we were able to find his commanding general, and using various historical atlases we were able to trace the route of his march.

The march that brought him to Antietam battlefield.

Based on the assigned positions of his commanding officers, we were able to get a rough idea of where he was standing during the morning of the battle, and where he was firing from.  We were able to guess from his letter after the battle, roughly where he was wounded.

And we were able to ascertain where his friends carried him, to lay him down among a pile of other wounded men.  Where, after being ignored for a day or two, he picked himself up from, and walked eight miles toward the nearest hospital.

Which we were able to roughly locate, using Google Maps and the man’s own letters, and the letters of his friends.

And where he died.

Officially not one of the wounded of Antietam, but nonetheless killed by it. A man who marched twenty-odd miles to be wounded in the neck by a passing bullet, and then marched another ten miles, many of them alone and leaking copious amounts of blood, to die in a hospital bed from lack of medical care and sepsis.

And from this I had a vision of what American education could be.  Not an endless round of tests and preparation for tests, but a chance for the discovery and the digitization of the historical lives of thousands or millions of people — pioneers and homesteaders and explorers and scientists and immigrants and all sorts of writers and painters and workers from all sorts of walks of life, where they were and what they were doing while great and terrible events unfolded around them.  And it’s extraordinary that I could go to Maryland and Virginia, and walk the roads that this man walked, or see those roads in satellite photographs, and actually live out the short, extraordinary military life of one man in the Civil War — Enlisted August 7, 1862, Died September 25, 1862 — and see where and how he lived and fought and died — in the space of an hour’s class.

Do we not live in extraordinary times?

Update on 30/30 Poetry project for April

I rashly swore that I’d produce 30 poems in April this year, after going years and years without.  And by my count, I’ve produced and published nineteen. . Here are links to the published ones; you can check if I made an error in tallying them…

1. April Greetings
2. On first reading Avicenna
3. Poem: For a Muse
4. For the Sun in Exaltation
5. For Greenleaf
6. For the Pleiades
7. For Venus
8. For the Moon
9. For Mars
10. For Mercury
11. For Jupiter
12. For The Sun
13. For Saturn
14. Quatrains on Geomancy
15. First of two experimental sonnets
16. Second of two experimental sonnets
17. a Sonnet about Cuba
18. A sonnet about my dad
19. Arrival over South America

There are two others that I’m not sure I like well enough to publish.  So… 24 days into April, and I’ve written 19 “published” poems.  I’m five poems behind, which is not as bad as I thought I was doing (and some of them are rather long, major pieces, like the Quatrains on Geomancy and the Seven Neo-Orphic Hymns).

How are you doing at writing thirty poems in April?

Follow-Up on Teaching Sonnets

I wrote both of these sonnets using the methods I advocated in this post, namely,

1. Choose the rhyming words first,
2. then count syllables to fit, and
3. wait for the iambic pentameter to emerge on future efforts.

My kids today wanted more practice, so they gave me these words:

Fly
So
Guy
Dough
Real
Cheek
Appeal
Weak
Ran
Bumpy
Can
Lumpy
Fat
Cat.

And here’s the resulting 15-minute sonnet:

I had a dream once where I was a Fly
with six small legs and wings angled just So
and in this dream I landed on a Guy.
he worked in kitchens all covered in Dough
He hit me. I survived. Was this dream Real
I bit him when I landed on his Cheek
I tast of his flesh had such sweet Appeal
but the blow from his hand made me feel Weak
I buzzed around his head and off he Ran
This dream I had was crazy and Bumpy
He tried to catch me in a small tin Can
the old man’s cheek was hairy and Lumpy
I bit him again and then I got Fat
Suddenly I was eaten by a Cat.

And if you read this poem out loud, it will become immediately obvious which lines are definitely NOT in iambic pentameter.  It’s also clear that there’s a story that sort of emerges, but that story is compromised (I think) by the fact that the words were chosen first, before the subject of the poem was chosen.

Here’s the second set of rhyming words I was given:  doors, walls, floors, calls, pencil, two, smencil (a kind of scented pencil, apparently), blue, horses, monk, forces, funk, cheese, please.

And here’s the 15-minute poem that resulted:

I dreamed that I could walk through maple doors,
dark portals piercing through sweating stone walls.
My feet do not echo on pale pine floors.
But off in the distance I hear the calls
of laughing students writing in pencil,
counting syllables out loud, two by tow.
Strawberry scent — someone has a smencil,
and new colors also, yellow and blue.
From through a window, grass-smell and horses;
from up the stairs, the chanting of a monk,
and all these symbols represent forces
of my mind alone. Students in a funk
expect great sonnets; but first write the cheese—
for the form must be learned, ere it can please.

And this is one of the core concepts of the form, really — one must start with the rules of the form, and work backwards to a completed poem a few times, even if the poem doesn’t make ANY SENSE AT ALL , before the capacities of one’s brain readjusts to writing poetry that makes sense.  It takes time.  It did for me, and it did for anyone else that’s ever learned to write a sonnet — the first few are terrible, and then suddenly the brain adjusts.  It says, “Oh, is this what you were trying to do?”  And then it does it.

It’s magic.

How to Teach Writing Sonnets

Today was Shakespeare’s Birthday. It’s possible that you did something fun with your classes to celebrate. I taught mine to write sonnets. Everyone is under the impression that sonnets are hard. But if they’re so hard, then why was everyone in Elizabethan England absolutely mad for writing them? The trick is to learn the form first. Accordingly, go get a sheet of paper and a pen. Write sonnets in pen. Be ambitious! Along the right side of the page, write this on successive lines: A B A B C D C D E F E F G G Ok. Now go back through the list, and choose rhyming words. Lines with an A on them, rhyme with each other, lines with B on them rhyme with each other, and so on. But D lines only rhyme with D, not with E or F.

Keep your rhyming words simple. Don’t get fancy. One kid suggested ”mahagony” for a D-rhyme, and what rhymes with that?? Now… Count syllables.

Sonnets basically follow three rules:

1. each Shakespearean sonnet has 14 lines;
2. they rhyme according to the scheme shown above;
3. each line has ten syllables in it;
4. each line follows this complex “iambic pentamer” rule.

I’ve been doing this a long time. Rule 4 does not come instantly, but it does  come with practice. And kids will learn to HEAR it on their own,
but first they need to learn the three core rules, i.e., 14 lines, weird rhyming pattern, ten syllables in a line. So count syllables, like Shakespeare. You have ten fingertips. Your rhyme word is probably one syllable, so… find the nine syllables at lead up to that word. Is it a two-syllable word like “pencil”?So, then find the eight syllables leading up to it. Don’t change the words that you chose for your rhyme pattern. You’re not trying to write a perfect sonnet on the first go-round — you’re teaching your mind to learn a formal poetic style. And you won’t do that if you concentrate on content, that
is, the poem’s meaning. Insist that your brain conform to the form alone.

I’ve seen kids write (terrible) sonnets in twelve minutes using this method. You have to convince them that the quality of the poem doesn’t matter. (and it must NOT matter.. Extra super bonus points for really crappy sonnets that follow the form exactly, but get really weird around line 5 because the rhymes are odd. [save the meaningful poetry for the ninth or tenth run-through of the sonnet form].

The next five or six sonnets you write, choose the rhyme scheme first, then fill the fourteen lines with the correct number of syllables to match. In other words, build the poem in reverse — choose the ending words of the lines first, and then write the stanzas to obey the rhyme scheme. Around Sonnet 8 or 9, the process will reverse — your brain will find the line first, and then begin constructing the rhyme scheme. Around Sonnet 15 or 25, your brain and ear will start rejecting lines that aren’t iambic pentameter, or at least rejecting the ones which are obviously NOT iambic or pentameter.

And around the time that you write your fiftieth sonnet, some of them will be good enough to memorize. And you will no longer be the sort of person who can say, “oh, I could never write a sonnet.” And neither will your students.

But from a time management perspective, let’s break that down just a bit more. I’m guessing that it takes the time needed to write 50 sonnets for the form to become truly ingrained as a recognizable brain pattern. But let’s say you’re from Lake Woebegone, and you’re a bit above average (I assume all my blog readers are). In that case, you only need to write thirty sonnets. One a day for the next month. At fifteen minutes a pop, you’re talking seven and a half hours of writing effort to learn the base writing style of William Shakespeare.

The Bard of Avon. Happy Birthday, Billy.

Poem: On First Reading Avicenna

Last night, I delved into a book called The Traditional Healer’s Handbook, by Hakim G.M. Chishti, which is a partial modern re-imagining of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, which was THE medical textbook from the Ganges to the Straits of Gibraltar, from Oslo to Kerala, for about a thousand years.  Avicenna is only the most famous of the proponents of the “four humours” theory of the body, in which disease is the result of interactions with the environment becoming imbalances of the four humours.  These imbalances are cured first with diets and particular exercises, second with rest, third with medicine, and fourth with philosophy.   This book, which unfortunately is not Avicenna, is nonetheless based on his work.

Oft have I wandered between woe and weal,
refusing medicine though ached and pained,
for mostly I thought the body would heal
any portion that felt broken or strained.
Yet no foundations did I feel beneath
my bland decree that no drugs would I take;
til Avicenna, crowned with laurel leaf,
caused feckless mind from sluggish dreams to wake!
For in these writings of an ancient sage
I saw the elephant I had touched blind,
how heated digestion cools as we age;
and in the pulse of blood can healers find
the signs of all our ills. At once I saw clear
how crowds seek in vain for something quite near.

This of course, is 2/30 for April…  I did much better today than I did yesterday.  And curiously enough, it had to do with learning some new things, namely about the four humors and the pulse-diagnosis system.  It doesn’t come across in this poem, of course, which is only a taste of Avicenna — and only based on reading one of his modern-day disciples, rather than the Prince of Physicians himself —  but the notion that doctors should have an idea of what healthiness is, and what it looks like, and know how to diagnose imbalances away from that healthy image using only three core tools, a very particular range of cooking spices, and a small range of simple medicinal plants… wow.  I was impressed.

It also gave me a sense of what alchemy is for.  I’ve made some spagyrics, which are tinctures of various herbs with the ashes/salts added back in, according to ancient alchemical formularies. Some haven’t gone so well, but they’re interesting objects and tools for understanding something of ancient chemistry and medicine.  However, I’ve never had a sense of why one should bother, except as manifest thought experiments. However, once one compares Avicenna with the methodologies of Paracelsus and Avicenna, though, one discovers that there’s an underlying theory of health and disease, and an underlying theory of diet and the uses of medicine, which is part and parcel of a view of the universe quite different to modern scientific materialism — that produced effective-enough results for a thousand years.  Hakim Chishti doesn’t say “don’t go to Western/allopathic doctors” or any such nonsense.  Rather, he says, “for many of your basic health issues, there’s a range of remedies in your grocery store that work to maintain heath so that you don’t have to go to the Western doctors quite as often.”

There’s a lesson in here somewhere, actually, for schools, too.  Maybe it belongs in the history curriculum for a World History class, or maybe in a science class.  But I can’t help thinking that I’d love to teach a World History class that teaches Geomancy from West Africa, a guide to basic health and diet from Islam, Geometry and Architecture from a western European point of view (ad quadratum geometry), astronomy/degrees from a Sumerian/Babylonian perspective, and so on.  Teaching some (im)practical arts from past cultures might be much more effective at helping to fix ancient and medieval cultures in the minds of our students.

3D Printing: Sketch to SketchUp, 30 minutes

This evening, I bumped into a guy I know, who talked to me about a project he’s working on. Turns out that he could use a template for this project. Basically, he needs a jig.  A jig is a three-dimensional object that serves as a template:  Slide the unaltered main part into the jig, use the guides on the jig to attach the relevant bits in exactly the right place, slide the newly altered part out of the jig, and boom! Done!

But describing the jig — a template for a part that requires repeated steps to assemble in exactly the same way every time — this bit of tape here, that cut there, and so on.  It’s a very difficult task.  He was trying to describe it in words, and not doing very well.

So, I whipped out my iPad, and started up Paper by fiftythree.com, and in a few minutes we’d worked up a passable sketch.  I left him, and walked home, and used the remaining thirty-five minutes of battery power to design the jig for his project.  A short while later, I’ve gotten an e-mail back from him, and he’s seen the .JPGs of his rough idea, rendered in SketchUp, and approved the design.

I’ll try doing a rough printout for him tomorrow on our cupcake printer, Moira.  And he’ll be able to try out his design, and talk to his project partners, on Friday or Monday.

Think about the power of that for the future of manufacturing:  A rough design of a part, from sketch to SketchUp or other 3D Modeling software, in 35 minutes. Another hour or two to print the design — twenty minutes of that time spent calibrating the Frankenstein’s Monster of a cupcake printer (Love you, “Moira!”) and warming her up to 220° C for printing, instead of waiting six to twenty days for the part to be designed, mis-manufactured, shipped, corrected, shipped back, re-manufactured, and then be useful.  Wow.

And now, add in the potential that your kid in third grade is doing that work.

A kid in third grade doesn’t even know what the X-Y-Z axis means, let alone how to measure precisely along those axes.  He doesn’t know what a cam or a jig or a template or a gauge is, or how to put calibration markers into his design, so he can compare the first print with the model, and determine how much of a margin of error is created between the digital model and the final product.

But he could.  And he will, with enough practice.

In the meantime, there are going to be two prints of this object — one for my friend, and one to show the new teachers who are coming to my school to attend a class on how to teach Design Thinking.

Because, as Scott says, “A picture is worth a thousand words. But a part is worth a thousand pictures.”  And so it proved.  I took my friend’s words, about a thousand of them, and I structured them into a rough sketch, and then into a SketchUp model.  And tomorrow, I’m going to take two hours of time I could be writing, to dedicate my computer to the task of printing two copies of this model, to make a part.

A hundred thousand words — a hundred thousand x-y-z axis calibrations and a semi-precise amount of melted plastic later — and my friend will have his part.

It’s hard to believe I’ve done the equivalent amount of thinking, as if I’d just written a third of a Stephen King novel, but I have.  We should do a better job of teaching kids that drawing is thinking.  We should do better than that, really: We teachers should believe it ourselves.

Tai chi Y2D15

Yesterday’s decision to focus on improving one thing in each posture appears to be working. I was able to do one sequence from grasping the swallow’s tail to the next grasping the swallow’s tail with a fairly high level of intensity… Muscles tightened, strong breath work, good long pause on each movement, correction of posture. I feel much better for doing it, and it gave me a short but intense workout in the middle of an otherwise easy set of movements.

I also managed to get to bed by 9:30, which is unheard of… And yet needs to happen more often.

Review: The Arte of Glamour

Deborah
Castellano’s first book on magic is called The
Arte of Glamour. The foreword is by Gordon
White, of the blog Rune Soup.
Glamour is a complex concept in magic. Originally, the word meant
or means something like “enchantment or magic,” and then gradually
morphed toward “outward seeming”, and then morphed still further
towards its current meaning, along the lines of “the quality of
being beautiful, exciting and attractive, which excites attention
and notice,” as in a way for the external appearance of something
to fail to match its internal reality. One casts a glamour spell,
in other words, to delude the observers into believing things about
yourself or another that simply are not true. The Fairy Godmother
in Cinderella, for example, casts a glamour
over her charge, to make a prince fall in love with a woman who
isn’t quite real. Except. Except, of course,
that the glamour cast is so effective, because it raises
Cinderella’s own self-worth, and breaks the chains that bind her
mind.  Her self-worth is battered by ugly stepsisters — whose
glamour serves to clothe the outward form of beauty, but does not
cover over or hide inner self-worth; and yet the glamour makes the
outward appearance of Cinderella match the inner beauty. It makes
her confident enough to dance with princes, to be the belle of the
ball, and to leave on her own terms — not as concubine to a spoiled
prince, but as suitable quarry for the royal hunt for a queen —
embodying both the power of the throne and the future bearer of
royal heirs.  This is not to suggest that Cinderella’s sole
power is as a baby-making machine, of course — only that this
option is open to her as to no one else at the royal ball…
because her outward appearance and her inner character have been
brought into alignment.  Glamour, in other words, is a magic
not exclusively to change outward appearances, although it can be
used that way.  Even more so, though, it is a magic to bring
the inner character and the outward appearance into alignment.
 As the Steve Martin character says to Rick Moranis
in My Blue
Heaven, “Sometimes
you gotta change from the outside in!”  The Fairy Godmother’s
glamourie on Cinderella is one such bit of
serious spellcraft — change the outward appearance so the inner
beauty shines through; change the outward accessories so that the
inner character is revealed; change the mode of travel so that the
capacity for regal mercy is apparent to all. So, to say that
glamour magic is only about fixing up one’s outward appearance is
to cast aspersions on the whole art.  And this glamour is not
about transforming pumpkins into coaches, or mice into coachmen, or
rags into sumptuous gowns, but about transforming one’s magic with
sumptuousness and sensuality — not, strictly speaking, sexuality,
but rather the play and interplay of senses and sensory experience
upon one’s daily life.  And THAT
is what Deb is about doing — to your magic, to your
life, to your friends (and, in my case to my students), and to your
world. Accordingly, there is only one pumpkin in Deb’s book.
 And for her, the spell here is a vehicle for transforming
one’s arrival at a party from awkward guest to mistress of the
seasonally-appropriate sensory-overload experience.  No mice,
but plenty of ideas about how to transform rags to riches on a
budget. For there is a Cinderella story threaded through what she
writes in this book.  In Cinderella’s time, to be the
fireplace-ash collector was to be lowest among the low; today, we
don’t think much of people whose job it is to handle baby fluids
like puke and burp on a regular basis.  And yet, Deb shows us
how she’s been able to transform such complicated and demanding
labor through a ritual and spiritual practice that raises her
quality of life, that makes her queen of her own
dominion, and look good doing it.
That requires vision.  It requires even greater vision — and
more than that, a degree or three of self-discipline — to bring
that vision to fruition in a way that others can read it and learn
from it and experience it themselves. As I read through
The Arte of
Glamour the first time, I thought of
six or eight people I knew whose magical practice would be
strengthened by reading it. Then, as I finished it, I thought,
“Actually, all those people already practice their magic
this way.  I just never quite noticed before, that this is how
they work…” It was as if Deb helped me take the
blinders off, and helped me see that magic didn’t have to be one
way alone, all candles and incense and stentorian commands — it was
also cocktails in a wood-paneled bar with a live jazz quartet, it
was learning to tie a new knot in a beautiful silk tie, it was
helping to paint a friend’s house on a weeknight alternating with
poetry and food and conversation
because COLOR! and SENSUALITY! and POETRY!
and FOOD! matter.  They
matter a lot. One of Deb’s big concepts is La Dolce
Vita — The Sweet Life.  The Creamy Life, almost.
 A lot of the Puritan values we grow up with in New England
are ritualistically opposed to anything resembling the sweet life.
 Instead, we get a long litany of work hard, be
content with your lot in life, if things are rotten you must have
deserved it, God wants you to be miserable here so you can have a
happy life there, you were destined for what you get.
 If Deb serves to remind me of anything today, it’s that
there’s huge value in recognizing that the 4o-hour work-week is a
magical construct which serves almost everyone else except you, the
one who has to live in it. Yet the quality of our lives matters. It
doesn’t matter if we’re peasants in 14th century France or
modern-day wage slaves — the girl who buys a tortoiseshell comb
from a wandering pedlar’s pack is after as much glamour  as I
am when I buy a new purple and dark blue tie for Thursdays.
 We need a bit of richness in our lives, and we need a bit of
sensuality and color and… frankly… splendour.  We don’t
have to live beyond our means to achieve this kind of magic; we DO
have to find ways to look for it, to manage it, and to create it
where it is lacking. And Deb gives you permission to fail at this.
 Not every spell will work.  Not every glamourous outfit
will survive contact with the party (grease drippings and paint on
a new pair of pants, alas!) Not every delicious potluck party will
go according to plan.  You won’t like every cocktail, and the
jazz quartet is playing too loud.  There are days when you
will be a hot wreck of emotion because something you planned
meticulously and deliciously to be a feast for the senses is in
fact a bunch of rapidly-cooling food at a party that no one showed
up for. But Cinderella would have gone to the ball anyway. Even if
her fairy godmother hadn’t shown up, to cast a spell and throw a
glamour over everything she glanced at, Cinderella made her own
plans. She had a dress picked out from the Salvation Army, and
modified to suit her needs.  She wouldn’t have been the
bellest belle at the ball, but she would have gone.  Her shoes
were shined, and she had a tip for the bartender ready in her Vera
Bradley purse (that matched the fabric of her belt in color). Deb’s
best gifts are these, though she hardly calls them that: pluck,
courage, risk-taking, risk-management, adventurism. What my
mother’s mother used to call sportiness.  ”Go on, girl.
 Go out. Be a sport.  Who knows? Maybe your date tonight
has a tall friend.”  There are always risks to take in calling
something magic when it doesn’t look especially like “woo”, and
even in calling it magic at all. But Deb,
and Deb’s book, says, “Go on, be a sport.  The Ladies are
waiting. The bartender tonight makes a great cosmo, and the
saxophonist is awesome.  This is your life.  Live a
little. Find your own sweet life.” A Note for
Non-Magical Teachers I don’t know how much or how
many of my readership left have been sticking with me since 2009,
and the days when I was an up-and-coming teacher-blogger (I’ve left
a lot of that behind in the last few years, haven’t I? Thanks for
sticking around).  You may be wondering about the relevance of
a book about magic to your classroom, where there’s no magic unless
someone does a Harry Potter book report.
 Here’s my thoughts on a takeaway on that. One of the big
thoughts I’ve exported from magic to my own classroom is the
concept of Darshan: we benefit in
our daily lives by being in the presence of a great teacher.
 Being in their physical presence helps us absorb their habits
and modes of thought.  And the research on teachers bears this
out — students in great classrooms, in the company of great
teachers, make amazing progress in a relatively short time.
 (We’ll leave aside the other research that shows that
teachers can have an awesome year one year, and help their kids
make great progress; and be absolutely appalling the next year — as
my friend Sou says, “sometimes the chemistry can be amazing, but
the timing is wrong, and it just can’t work out”).  But I
think that we, as teachers, have to believe that a kid in our
classroom takes away from us some of our ideas about success, and
dress, and habits of life.  If we bring a brown-bag lunch to
school with a bag of potato chips and a sloppily made sandwich,
that conveys one message; a bento box with quality food conveys
another.  And parents and school districts expect us, in part,
to convey quality messages to our students even through our
non-verbal cues. So, in part, Deb’s book is about learning to ramp
up the quality of one’s non-verbal cues, both to yourself and to
those around you.  I don’t think you have to do any of the
altar work or the magical spells work she suggests in order to
radically improve the quality of
the Darshan energy you put out; you
don’t have to do “woo” magic to benefit from the kind of mind-set
rearrangement she suggests here.
 And doing the lesser levels of
work she suggests will help you do better at speaking to your own
students about the non-verbal cues they send to themselves and to
each other through what they wear, how they dress, and how they
choose to live.  If you find yourself wondering how you’re
going to make ends meet, or wonder what’s becoming of the culture
in which we live, then I think Deb’s book has some important things
to teach us, as teachers — she’s saying (as much through what she
doesn’t say as what she does) that as the educators of today’s
youth, we have a responsibility to teach kids that their outer
messages can reflect or even change inner character — as much as
inner character is broadcast through our outward glamourie.
 The average teachers’ guide doesn’t ask us to think about
that or teach about that, and yet we have to teach “that stuff” on
a fairly regular basis, through dress codes and our own outward
presentation to our students. Deb is saying, it’s important for
folks individually to be thinking about this stuff for ourselves.
 I’d add to that, it’s important for us as teachers, that we
try to be thinking about the effects of our non-verbal cues upon
the children we teach.  For they will inherit the earth, and
our non-verbal messages wind up becoming part of their long-range
symphony of the senses.  We should be conscious about how and
what messages we broadcast, and Deb’s book is a great way to begin
thinking about the issues anew. Rating:
★★★★★, for practical advice and for a sense of an overall theory of
glamour workings.

Meet Moira, the Lab’s 3D Printer

This week, after several false starts, my class on 3D printing finally ran on Monday.

Meet Moira.  My friend @Paperbits gave her to the school when he decided to upgrade to a better model.  Deb over at Charmed Finishing School asked how she worked, so I told her:

Um…

Well, basically you take a 3-D model made in a program like SketchUp, and you run that model through a digital filter program, which strips the 3-D model down into a series of discrete layers; and then you runthat digital file through another digital filter which separates the original model into a series of moves through x-y-z coordinates, and adds in some additional instructions about how much plastic cable to advance to the melter and then to squirt onto the build-platform…

The printer itself is a Frankenstein-like contraption built out of laser-cut wood and disassembled HP paper inkjet printers, that basically consists of three interlocking motor systems — one for X-axis moves, one for Y-axis moves, and one for Z-axis moves; and a pair of heating units, one that melts ABS plastic at 220° C, and one that lightly heats up the same plastic along the base of the object you’re building to 110° C so it stays in one place as you’re building it. There’s a big reel of ABS plastic cable attached to a feeder, which uses little gear-teeth to force-feed the raw plastic to the melter. And the melter is attached to the X-Y-Z motors, so that as the plastic is melted and pushed through, it falls in little drops onto precisely located spots, and gradually builds the 3D model you designed in SketchUp…

You know what? That’s probably more than you wanted to know. She’s just a 3D printer, you know? You give her a model of what you want, and give her precise geometrical instructions, and she obeys those instructions exactly, even if that’s not actually what you want. Her name is Moira. She’s magic. 

My kids are designing things now to print out with her.  One kid wants to make a bracelet.  Another plans to build a miniature skyscraper model.  A third wants to build a rocket-ship toy.  Another wants to sculpt his own hand, and print that.  But as is always the case with good designers, I’m making them start by learning some preliminaries.  This week they learned to create orthographic drawings — top, side, and front views of the objects they intend to print. They weren’t keen on spending the first day of a computer-and-printer oriented class drawing pictures with sharpie markers and pencils.  ”Aren’t we going to print anything today?”

I’d love to print something today.  Or tomorrow. Or the next class. Really. Nothing would please me more.

But it turns out that there’s a lot of skills I want my kids to leave this class with — how to draw being the big one.  How to measure and do math, either digitally or on paper, and how to do some basic practical geometry. How to build a design in something like SketchUp.  How to build a big project from start to finish. How to overcome obstacles.  How to revise your design, which @TieandJeans pointed out is critical to designers (and I would argue, to magicians).  How to learn, which as Rufus pointed out this week is a really important skill — for designers and magicians alike.  I’ve only got six classes to do all of this, with kids from third grade (who just wants his thing made and printed now, please, would you do all the work, sir?)  up through seventh and eighth graders who already know some of this stuff and are patiently-impatiently waiting to get to the new secrets, please.  It’s exactly like a magical lodge, in that everyone’s at different grade levels, and there are secrets that ought to be communicated immediately — and yet they can’t be communicated, because there’s four years of initiation and practice between the lowest grade and the highest grade, and that’s a difficult obstacle to overcome.

As a final aside  — really, I think more designers ought to study the magical and mystical traditions, and more magicians and mystics should study design. There’s a lot for these two groups to learn from one another — and frankly, between Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Make Magazine, there’s a lot of opportunities for rich crossover between the two communities.

Creativity vs. Imagination: Moon Mansion Diptychs

Moon Mansion Diptychs
Originally uploaded by anselm23

The difference between creativity and imagination has been much on my mind lately.

Imagination appears as the ability to become ‘dreamy’, for lack of a better word, and visualize or ‘see’ things within the mental realm. It’s the capacity to form new ideas, or bring forth ideas based on things not presently or currently seen. Copying someone else’s vision — as I effectively did in these two drawings, largely based on the work of artist Nigel Jackson, from the book by Chris Warnock on the Mansions— is one thing.

But creativity is not really the same thing. I mean, we might think of them as the same thing, but they’re two different capacities. This, to me, is the power to call forth something from the imagination, and make it real or sensible or visible to someone else. I know plenty of imaginative kids, for example, but I know a lot of imaginative kids who aren’t very creative — they’re sort of lost in a fantasy realm where they are capable of dreaming themselves the heads of corporations or the most amazing rock guitarists. But those same kids don’t actually do the work that gets them moving forward toward that dream.

Likewise, I know plenty of creative kids who aren’t very imaginative. They do all sorts of little drawings, and they’re very productive — these kids wouldn’t dream of not doing their homework, because they’re actually eager to ‘create’ something, to bring something into being. But they’re not very good about bringing forth something new or unique to themselves.

There’s of course a third category, which is people who are both imaginative and creative. I wish that I fit consistently into this category, although most of the time I think I’m only one or the other; it takes a lot of time and effort to be both, and some days it’s just very hard to get anywhere near that combination of powers. It requires an incredible amount of practice to build up to the point where one can be both productive, and capable of summoning forth a vision of “things not seen” so that others can also participate in that vision.

So imagination is largely a mental skill, but creativity is largely the skill of taking mental-to-material. Where one is largely a matter of dream or day-dream, the other is a matter of tool use — whether memory or imagination or skill, or the use of actual physical tools, be they knives or drills or scissors or glue or word processors or graphics software programs or t-squares…

And I’m not at all sure that anyone would agree with these definitions, which only makes the problem harder. But I think in general that our culture makes much of imagination, without making an equal fuss over creativity. And yet, without creativity as I’ve defined it here, all the imagination in the world won’t actually get anything done.

Via Flickr:
I’ve noted in the past that paper doesn’t seem to hold a magical charge for very long…. and yet it turns out that you can make quite an interesting power simply by folding the paper in half. A friend of mine is having difficulty with her health, so this evening I made a pair of the Mansions of the Moon for her — Egibiel to drive away the bugs that make her ill, and Amutiel to bring her health. These two mansions are not normally used for matters related to health, particularly not lung-health (which is her particular issue), but she wanted something immediate. This, plus some good cold-care tea, seemed to be a good combination.

It’s worth saying that a Moon Mansion, or any sort of tool like this, is not a useful substitute for actual health care. This only serves the purpose of bringing spiritual forces to bear on a physical problem; but the realms of being are discrete and not continuous. Simply having a pair of angels watching out for your health in no way obviates the need for genuine health care.