A magician’s modern toolkit

Over at Blood and Bone, there’s an article today about resources for Technomancers.  He (she?) is writing for a magical/occult audience, but there’s a powerful list of tools that make a huge difference it keeping yourself organized as the very model of a modern magic practitioner.  It’s an interesting list of tools, and I’ll be downloading some of the suggestions. As I’ve noted here, I find the ability to use the tools of magic and magical mindset to be very useful in thinking about alternate ways to be a teacher, and a teacher of design thinking. Not all of these tools are going to be useful to all my teacher friends, but I can’t recommend the first few from Blood and Bone enough:

General Software

• Evernote is becoming absolutely critical to my process.  I drop all kinds of things into it: photographs I admire, graphs and charts, design process diagrams by other authors and other schools, scripts and lesson plans, to-do lists and materials-acquisitions list (for the DLab).  The ability to access ANYTHING in Evernote, almost anywhere – phone, web, iPad, desktop computer, is a godsend.
• Paper by fiftythree.com is becoming my go-to drawing program.  Drawing and diagramming is becoming so critical to my creative process that I can’t imagine trying to be a teacher, or a design thinker, without drawing. If you’re not drawing, you’re losing half your audience. If you’re not encouraging your students to draw — on paper, on computer, wherever — you are failing to be an effective teacher (Side note: if you don’t know Dave Gray’s “Forms, fields and flows” yet, if you haven’t COMMITTED THAT LESSON TO MEMORY, so you can give it to anyone, anywhere in the world, in 10 minutes or less, you are failing to be a 21st century teacher.  In my opinion, not humble at all.
• DayOne Journal app for iPhone, iPad, and desktop machine is my go-to journal application.  I should use Evernote, I know, but I find the process of starting a new document in EverNote for a journal entry to be clunky and difficult.  It’s probably the case that all of us teachers should be journaling a lot more than we do — which kid said what, on what day, and when, and to whom.  It’s difficult; we have other things going on; we have plenty of other demands on our time.  But we live in a digitally connected world, and we have to be prepared to justify grades, more and more,
• Gradekeeper is my tool of choice for keeping a grade book.  The fact that I can have it on my desktop and my iPad is a godsend; if I could get both versions to work from a common iCloud file, or from a server cloud storage area like Evernote, that would be awesome. For now, I work files back and forth between two places.  Brilliant and useful, though I wish the reporting features were more robust. What magicians would use this eminently teacher-centric software for, I don’t know, but it’s tremendously useful nonetheless.
• I also use the To-Do list program on my phone, as well as the voice recorder, for making recordings of things I’m trying to memorize, or to make audio notes while driving (and today I used to to record another chant, which I’ll post over at Tumblr shortly, as I did with the first [Hey, WordPress... Tumblr doesn't charge me a fee to post or present audio files... you do.  What are you going to do about that?]).

Magical Tools

I use Astrolgo (http://www.gandreas.com/iphone/astrolgo/) as my astrological tutor and charting tool. It’s a little more expensive than using astro.com, which is free, but I find it very helpful, and it’s easier to set up for someone like me who’s trying to learn more traditional astrology.

I’m using Sleep Cycle (http://www.sleepcycle.com/) as a way of tracking how many hours I’m sleeping, and how close I am to dream state, and how frequently, each night. I’ve had a REALLY irregular sleep schedule for more than a decade, and I’ve found that I need to fix my sleep schedule in order to get good habits for dreams.

I use the Mindfulness Bell by Spotlight Six Software for timing meditations.

I use TouchTarot for iPhone so I don’t have to carry around a Tarot deck with me all the time. I find that it gives me just as many reversed cards (A LOT … more than anyone else ever seems to get) as a regular deck does, which suggests strongly that I’ve got some things to fix in my life, or in my relationship with Tarot, or both.

I use Brian Browne Walker’s version of the iChing for consulting the Book of Changes. I don’t like it as much as my casual paperback book, but it’s not bad.

What’s the point?

There’s a couple of occultists reading who are already thinking, how am I going to use a grade book program? Or even just a grade book? and not in an ironic or self-conscious way. That’s just the kind of people occultists are. They think through the implications of questions like that, and even if they never come up with an answer, they will have thought about it.

But I imagine that the teachers are hard-pressed to think of something they would do with any of the digital/magical tools I mentioned. What would I use a Tarot program for?  I can hear several of my teaching colleagues asking that question. Why do I need to know what planetary hour it is, or what a horoscope is?

Leaving aside the question of whether or not these things are useful because they work (because our scientific material philosophy argues emphatically that they don’t work), I’d argue that these magical tools are all useful ways of slowing our brains down. We teachers are asked to do more and more, often with less and less, and we’re rarely cultivating the kind of mindset that allows us to understand the data we’re collecting or seeing the big picture in a kid’s understanding.  The information provided by occult tools is not exactly random, and not exactly freeform.  It opens up new paths of comprehension and new ways of seeing things. A magical mindset, practiced well enough, fits together odd data points collected by the unconscious as well as the conscious mind, with a set collection of perceived wisdom consulted in a selective way, and the result is…

insight.

 

Design Thinking Workshop

Today, my school held its first major Design Thinking workshop, that was open to teachers from outside our school.  It went well, I thought.  We had four tables of four teachers (so that’s sixteen), plus two of my colleagues, me, and Diane — Diane is GREAT, she’s the manager of our state’s independent school association, CAIS, and helps do the behind-the-scenes planning and organization for all our conferences and confabs. We had four last-minute cancellations of various sorts, but that’s to be expected this close to the end of the year.

I have to say, I often lost the thread of our schedule, even though I had designed it.  It’s one of the great challenges I face as a Design Thinker and a designer in general: I need to design a schedule just so that I know what I want to cover, but then a conversation or an experience on the day of the event makes me realize I need to present things out of the scheduled order, and I shift my ordering without telling anyone.  This left my colleagues in the lurch, a little, and I need to be better about planning these kinds of shifts so they work for everyone, and not just me.

Design Thinking makes me a little ADHD.  I wind up thinking about providing folks with coffee and then that leads to “where are the cups?” and making coffee I leave the coffee pot on the counter instead of under the brewer spout, and only just get it into place in time…. and then I realize that I’ve forgotten some things in the design lab, too, and I need to go back to the lab to put out some things for later in the morning.  All of this leads to me rushing around during the conference’s half-hour of chit-chat before we begin, INSTEAD of reviewing my schedule and going over the plan with my associates.  Bad move.

Accordingly, I’ve made a list of tasks to be done — a PUNCH LIST — for next year’s conference, now.  So it’s now in the file, and ready to pull out when I go to plan next year’s event.

I’ve already decided there will be a next year’s event.

A lot of the feedback I got right away, had to do with building in more time to talk about curriculum.  I shie away from these conversations, though, because they’re hard. They’re licking your own elbow hard, because each and every one of these conversations involves getting a teacher to admit that there’s something they’re not happy about with their own teaching.  If you feel that all of your teaching is perfect, or almost perfect, or close to perfect, then there is no reason at all to include a Design Thinking component in your curriculum.

Today I realized why I shie away from that conversation…

Getting a high-powered teacher from a high-powered private school to admit that in front of a room filled with peers and colleagues from competitor schools is counter-productive.  It’s why all of my successful discussions about Design Thinking have happened one-on-one with a teacher who trusts me.  It’s why I’ve never gotten far with groups of teachers, or teachers one-on-one who have a trust issue.  It’s why it’s so important that I fix my own errors as a teacher… so that my colleagues see me going through this same design process that I’m pushing at them.

But then there’s that ugly, ugly problem… it’s really hard to find your own design flaws without feedback.  You need someone that YOU trust, to go over the design of a given lesson with you, find the faults and flaws, identify the areas for improvement, and figure out how to fix them together.  It’s EXACTLY what a mentor should do, and it’s exactly this reason why so many mentorship programs at so many schools run into problems — because the evaluation of the classroom teacher is often being done in a hierarchical pattern, rather than by a colleague interested in providing useful, collegial critique that leads to a better program.

There were so many things wrong with today’s program, from my point of view, that I’m curious if anyone will LET it happen again.  At the same time, I think the attendees, and my colleagues, got a lot out of the day, and so it’s easy to see a lot of things RIGHT with the day.  How do we muck with the program of the day just enough so that more people want to attend, and recommend it?  How do we revise the day to provide a greater range of experiences?  How do we make the humanities folks feel like this is for them, while not alienating the math/science folks?

These are always serious design questions, and the next step is to get some feedback from participants, and colleagues, about how the day went.

Tomorrow, the students tackle the Marshmallow and Spaghetti Problem (Students: don’t watch this! Yet!).

The Mobile Disruption

My Twitter contact, Rafael Parente, brought an article to my attention just a little while ago about a conference, which Sarah Jackson reported on.  She says,

What happens next demonstrates how the availability of communications technology has grown exponentially in recent years: 89 percent of this group owns a mobile device, and they want to know how to use it in their classrooms.

“Two years ago, when we would do a workshop with 20 people, we would have to bring 10 devices. Now,” Gagnon says, “the 10 devices sit in the front of the room, and everyone pulls out their own. It’s just amazing.”

Read the rest of the article.  I’m cherry-picking, and I know it. It’s OK.  Read the article.

So let me recap: in essence, this is a program that allows you to write place-based games — to go out into a neighborhood, and encounter elements both fictional and real.  It allows one to build a guidebook to a neighborhood, a town, a city, a country… — and as long as you go to those places, you can learn from the game (or from developing the game), what’s going on in those places.  You can experience an alternate reality, or an augmented reality.

This is very cool.

But I’d like to point out that, at the very same time, there’s this professor of history living on food stamps.

And what this article misses, is that most teachers, in most classrooms, have neither the time nor the inclination to go out and learn how to be programmers.  Or designers.  Or game builders. And they spend so much of their time building and designing classroom experiences, that they are not particularly interested in building ‘augmented reality’ experiences for their students, or in learning how to teach their students to build such things.

What I think the article doesn’t capture, in its gee-whiz!-ness, is that the disruptive thing is not mobile devices in the hands of teachers, but mobile devices in the hands of students.

Teachers know that getting out of the classroom is important for kids, sure — but let me tell you, as one of five people trying to get thirty kids around Washington, DC, to see the sights and sounds of our nation’s capital, that teachers dread those field trips.  Even though we know they’re important.  Even though we know that learning happens far more effectively on those sorts of trips.  Even though those experiences are far more empowering of students than us.

Perhaps especially because these experiences empower students.

Phones in school disrupt all the normal activities. They make answers immediately available to any question. They facilitate ‘cheating’ – whatever that means in an age when huge amounts of relevant information is available.  Yet the number of schools which are teaching ‘research skills in the age of google’ seems to be quite small: because the schools are not ready to cope with the mobile disruption.

And now here’s this ARIS software, which proposes to make all the places which are not school, interactive and data-laden and rich, and accessible as learning opportunities for kids.  Which the majority of teachers in our school systems, public and private, are going to resist.

Because deep down in the leather armchairs of our souls, to use Douglas Adams’s phrase, we know that a kid with a mobile computer can and ultimately will learn more than a group of them will in a classroom with a teacher in front of them.  Mobile computing ultimately empowers kids and their parents to break free of traditional schooling in favor of homeschooling or unschooling — which breaks the very identity of schools, permanently.

Mobile computing represents the disintermediation of students and the things they’re ‘supposed’ to know… and the mediaries in this case are US, their teachers.

Moving charm

The National Museum of the American Indian has an exhibit at the moment called “land of the horse,” about how horses became part of native culture (the Pueblo Revolt in the late 1500s in 1680 had a lot to do with it), and how native culture adapted to the horse.

Among the objects on display is a moving charm. Its purpose is to conjure a safe journey, free from predators and enemy raids along the way, and ensure a good campsite with good water and protected from the wind at the other end. These were lashed to the travois poles while transporting the tipi in its “packed” state.

Gordon has repeatedly noted that magic needs to take its place as part of the dominant narrative of human history, and here’s further proof.

This is a people who didn’t encounter horses until the early 1500s, and didn’t win their own horses until the late 1600s, and yet they’ve evolved an appropriate magical tool within two hundred years.

Roughly the same distance of time separates Dr. John Dee from The Golden Dawn — plenty of time for an odd system like Enochian to evolve into a lodge tradition, just as this kind of handicrafts begins as decorative play and becomes an spiritual tool for commanding universal forces.

Or, as a seminary professor of mine once said, “all religious activity is functional in origin but ontological upon reflection.”

Taiji Day 53: Heel to toe

My taiji instructor, back in the late ’90s, said that one should always put one’s foot down heel to toe when doing the form.  The reason is that there might be something sharp on the ground, or the surface might be uneven. Thus, he said, test the surface.  The heel goes down first in order to make contact, and give you a place to shift your weight.  Then bring the central part of your foot down, so that more contact occurs. Yet don’t commit the ball of the foot, or the toes, to the ground until you’ve found that there’s nothing sharp on the surface you’re stepping onto, and that it has enough strength to support your weight.

I practiced this today.  Nothing particular to report about it, other than that a) gravity works, and b) there aren’t any tacks on my floor. That said, there’s a place where the floorboards have separated slightly from one another, leaving a gap, that’s about four feet long.  Near the old fireplace, those two boards are still together, and they’re still matched up over by the side door.  It’s that tricky middle section where the boards are warped that you have to be careful during a turn.

We must be cautious. Floors are tricky.

Designing reading

A neighbor stopped me on the street just now to ask what she and her nephew should be reading together. “he’s six but he reads like an eight year old,” she said, “and he’s growing up fast. But he likes classic books. We’re reading Winnie-the-Pooh together right now, and he’s noticing that Christopher Robin is growing up.”

“Natalie Babbitt,” I said. “Tuck Everlasting and Goody Hall. The Devil’s Storybook and the Search for Delicious.”

“What else?” she said. “Would you make me a list?”

“Sure,” I replied. “E.B. White: Stuart Little and the Trumpet of the Swan. Or what about Charlotte’s Web or The Cricket in Times Square?”

“Make me a list,” she insisted, and we said our farewells.

What would you put on the list? It’s harder than you might think. A lot of material I see today dumbs things down for kids, or underplays their potential, or limits their options for the future. How many kids are going to take up archery because of the Hunger Games? (I’d put Little Brother on the list, but I’m perverse like that — the book contains a how-to chapter between each chapter of the story on how to subvert authorities and digital networks. Maybe that is part of what we should teach? But I digress. ) in any case, It’s not a challenge many kids can solve on their own. What stories encourage kids to be great thinkers and leaders, and tells them the stories of cunning, pluck, bravery and independent thought, as well as engineering and know how that will help them succeed in this apocalypse recession we’re apparently planning to continue through the next four to six years at least?

Taiji day 38: it obeys your commands

In the first Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi says to Luke (clearly I mean the one we all saw first, back in 1977), in response to Luke asking if the Force controls our actions, “Partly. But it also obeys your commands.”

I may not have the line quite right, and some of my friends will rag on me for that, but it’s nonetheless true that Chi will follow the watercourse way unless redirected by your action. That is, it will take the path of least resistance, and flow downstream and out to sea, and you’ll never have it again. But, it will do that anyway. Whether you do something with that flows to you, is up to you.

You have several choices. You can make yourself a deep pool — a receptacle or vessel where Chi gathers. You can fill yourself up with rocks and branches, which trouble the waters and send chaotic clouds of chi in all directions whenever you move — and you move all the time. You can build the mechanism and structure, so the chi comes into you smoothly, and exits forcefully in a directed stream. You can build other systems, so that sometimes the chi exited you along aggressive paths, and sometimes by healthful paths. Or you can do all of these.

But none of these structure, these constrictions, these restraints, these methods, are possible without moving yourself around. Chi, or the Force, will obey your commands. But only if you’ve done the work to build the channels that chi will flow in. It’s always going to flow away from you — what work will you have it do while you have it?

Not the Expected Weekend

I left work on Friday figuring I was going to the DMV, and then to my lady’s house to squire her and her progeny on a tour of the colleges that hadn’t rejected but might do more than wait list our favorite teen.

On the drive to my lady’s house, I watched cops pull over no fewer than three other vehicles — once the vehicle right in front of, once the vehicle right behind, and once the vehicle on my immediate left.  There was a phenomenal sense of being protected, even right under the very noses of the authorities, from reprisal for the ease with which I sailed along the highways and byways on my way north.  Thank you to the powers that guided and guarded me on that trip.  Yikes.

Saturday dawned with the news that our favorite teen had been wait listed with favored status at one school, accepted at another, and been emergency-rescheduled at work.  So instead of doing our expected heart-break tour of schools that weren’t even on the Safeties list a few months ago, we could rest easy, and return to our regularly-scheduled plans for the weekend.  The teen went off to work, and we went to our previously-scheduled Saturday evening engagement.

During the course of which, I was treated to the rare and unusual treat of experiencing a full-on anti-teacher rant.

The ranter in question is not a raving lunatic.  He is a capable and competent parent, a genial and interesting soul, a productive member of several communities, and a hard-working member of society.  He’s not a conservative by any means, and moved himself, his family, and most importantly his children out of a state where he felt the government had grossly overstepped its bounds in the name of small government.  Midway through the rant, he realized I was a teacher, and backpedaled a little, distinguishing between ‘educators’ who instruct students how to learn, and not just what to learn, and ‘teachers’ who merely teach to the test.  I’m not offended on my behalf — he’s a friend, and I hear where he’s coming from — but the conditions which he described in his children’s school are just ghastly.

The kids see the teachers as behaving more like bullies than the parents.  Some of them are the typical time-servers — more interested in finishing their service so they can draw a pension.  Some are ambitious would-be authority figures, looming in classes and hallways, trying to earn enough notches in their belt and hoping to be seen as suitable for ‘vice-principals’ or ‘heads of schools’. Some are timid, broken teachers, burned out by not enough care for their professional development and bad working conditions.  Others are convinced that the students are vicious little bastards, fit only for the army or the prison.

A long time ago, I said that I didn’t know of any bad teachers.  I’m retracting that remark, as best I can.  Increasingly, it’s clear to me that our profession, and the public school systems in this country in general, are in serious trouble.  Yes, we’re under assault from right and left, but that’s in part due to our own failings.  It’s easy to blame NCLB, or the standardized testing, or idiocies like New York’s publication of teacher ratings data.  But really, a lot of those things wouldn’t have happened if our profession was honored and respected.  And if our profession isn’t honored, and isn’t respected, it has something to do with the experience of this friend of mine, this concerned parent, who feels very strongly that his kids are more at risk of psychological attack from the adults in the school than from other kids.  That’s a problem.

Altering Egregores

Is this a Dogwood or a Magnolia? Nope, turns out it's a Rose of Sharon. Changing plants leads to new insight.

Well. Last night, I went to a gathering of friends who talk about and do theurgic work — that is, they do magic as part of their spiritual path. They’re pretty awesome people, and we’ve been meeting at equinoxes for a few times.

Our preferred format for this equinox celebration was the Equinox ceremony from the Golden Dawn, as published by Israel Regardie… until this week.

See, a whole set of circumstances conspired together to prevent our scripts for the event from arriving at our gathering place last night. We laughed, we debated what to do on several levels, and debated “what it all means”. And then our current president got down to brass tacks, grabbed our one surviving GD script, and led us through a discussion of the different components of the ritual, all the way asking, “What are they trying to do in this part? How would we do it?”

So we wrote a new ritual, along the way developing a new theory and a new practice of magic weaving together bits of our own practice and our own development. And then we did it.

It totally worked.

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading about the ongoing discussion (OK, blooming flamewar) in the GD community, and the last outburst of it a number of years ago… and I realize that in my own magical practice I’ve been moving away from GD magic for a few years, at least. It’s no longer how any of us do our work. We’ve bowed out of the current, and I caught a sense during ritual that the egregore of the GD said a kind farewell as we went… and, I think, found a new egregore — the one we’d already been nurturing and developing, that was doing its own thing, and now doesn’t have to try to interface with the GD egregore any more; any of them.

During discussions afterward, it came out that two of our colleagues with teenagers are having a lot of challenges with the public high school that serves the town. Their children are unusual and gifted, and yet they’re getting a lot of grief from administrators and teachers for a) not conforming, and b) not really being in trouble, but not really being out of trouble, either, and c) not being utterly awesome.

And I was reminded, yet again, that it’s really hard to change the egregores of schools. It’s very difficult to change the underpinning, almost theological reality of what American schools are like. What my friends and magical colleagues objected to, was the way in which their kids’ school tried to control what their kids wore, what they said, what they said that they wanted to do and be, and how they wanted to live their life. Out of an average of seven teachers a year, for four years of high school (28 teachers) these two teens liked, and felt they had learned from, two teachers. The same two teachers. The others had seemed indifferent, and occasionally had been bigger bullies than the other students — not physically, of course, but far more in the way of mental intimidation. A 7% or so success rate of teachers helping two kids is not great.

If we as a country are going to resurrect the concept of public education, we’re going to have to do a better job of serving students and their families, because if kids are unhappy in school (particularly of their teachers) they’re not going to learn; the amygdala will see to it that the learning structures in their brains are turned off. Only, it’s going to take more than a shift of ritual structures to turn schools away from a possibly-toxic, tainted egregore such as we have now. It’s going to take some serious rethinking. At the core, though, are the three questions that our ritual president was asking:

“What were they trying to do here? Is that something worth doing? How would we do it ourselves?”

Road-Legal

Apparently I’ve been a criminal for the last 9 months. Who knew?

When I moved to start my new job here in central Connecticut, my license expired five months before I could move into my apartment. So I had a new license made with the new address, but attached the old mailing address until I got settled.

Then my change of address forms went awry. Or I never filled them out. Or I submitted them with change of voter registration but…. it hardly matters. DMV didn’t find me for more than a year. And my plates and emissions confirmation for my car both expired.

Over months, Ganesh glared at me more and more from the dashboard. There’s a little figure of the Hindu God opening the ways for me. He’s very helpful. I knew something was wrong.

Finally I realized the emissions was expired and so was the registration. Got the windshield (broken) fixed. Got the emissions system tested (failed). Got it fixed. Got retested. Success. Made a sigil to “successful at government offices” and another “rarely waits in line”.

Today I arrived at the DMV 2 minutes before closing (on a Friday!) The tiny office was still open. There was one person ahead of me in line. The DMV clerks couldn’t help him (satellite office, not main branch), so he left the counter 7 seconds after he got there.

30 seconds later, I had my new registration and confirmation that both license and registration addresses were correct.

The clerks closed up shop right behind me, with two people standing in the hall outside, holding up paperwork and looking sad-angry.

Frater RO says that working the “favor of kings” magic makes you the ruler of your personal kingdom. In 10 months I wasn’t pulled over for any moving violation or driving an unregistered vehicle or anything. There were fines, to be sure, and back payments owed on the reregistration, but the “favor of kings” doesn’t mean a free ride.

It does mean getting things done and achieving goals even when the universe should be dumping on you hardcore. Which means saying thank you for the grace given. And it means accepting grace when it’s bestowed, and passing that grace on.

But it also means that your car gets to be street-legal 30 seconds before DMV closing on a Friday.