Via Flickr: Guess what our spring musical is going to be??
I’m thinking that this will be a good roughed-out version of our cover. But I want to experiment more — I don’t like how Sandy’s nose vanishes into Daddy Warbucks’s tuxedo, or how Sandy and Annie’s lack of color plays against the background. Either I need to develop some buildings (a la “NYC” or the Warbucks mansion in the background) or I need to do something to make Annie and Sandy stand out from the background somehow. More contrast, in other words. Since I can’t use color (this is for the program, as well as for the t-shirts for the cast), I’m going to have to get quite creative. Somehow I have to put the logo of our drama club in there, too, along with the dates for the event. Lots of things to change….
Two Takeaways
The designer and the visual artist in me is really pleased. After four years of practice, I can produce a passable first-draft copy of an iconic picture in American art and theater and “literature”, and the three characters are recognizable. The lettering is off, but lettering is my weakest area — and this is a first draft, in any case. There’s one little bugaboo in the upper part of Daddy Warbucks’ eye that makes me think he’s pretending to be innocent while rolling his eyes at the ceiling, which sends shivers down my spine… because I’ve read Gordon’s take on the Jimmy Savile and Jersey scandal…. and of course, Annie:The Musical! is not that story.
At the same time, though, the teacher in me is really kind of displeased. This is a bit of graphic design at school that kids should be doing. However, judging from some of the recent artwork on the covers of our programs, it’s work that either kids don’t want to do, or don’t want to do well. If a kid doesn’t want to do it, that’s one thing. If a kid doesn’t know how to do it, that’s another. Both are challenges to the program I’m supposed to be running — and it means that I have to find a way to build our graphic-design program post-haste, or create an after-school studio in graphic design, or something. But schools should be able to produce this stuff in-house, based on the skillset that teachers inculcate into students. The fact that I don’t know of any students in our little school who can do this is mildly upsetting to me. The fact that ‘m the one who’s supposed to train them to do this is alarming? Why me?
I’m went down to New Haven to visit the Eli Whitney Museum for the first time today. My God. There were not so many miracles accomplished in the carpentry shop of Jesus of Nazareth as in the carpentry shop there.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking about color. The Eli Whitney is near a place where I can buy acrylic paint in these small tubes, so I double-checked my current paint supply against the Golden Dawn color scales this morning, with an eye to filling in the absent bits with a few tubes that would fill in the missing places in my schema. I wanted to do some more work on the Kavad today.
I got my paint, but I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to work on the kavad. The Eli Whitney Museum was amazing, and it’s probably worth a visit all its own if you’re a maker and happen to be in Connecticut.
Via Flickr:
The Golden Dawn (English magical society, not Greek fascist party) developed a system of color magic that I’ve been eager to incorporate into the kavad. It’s one thing to be able to produce the color mentally. It’s quite another to produce them from tubes of paint and have the painted colors match the intended reality. Not easy.
There are four Golden Dawn color scales. Each scale is named after a court card in the Tarot: king, queen, prince and princess. There are ten basic shades or hues in each scale, and an additional twenty-two colors in each scale. So … thirty-two colors in each scale, times four. A lot of overlaps, yes… but in essence, 128 hues to work with, each with its own rules and correspondences.
The link leads to a Picture that says, “Drawing is Thinking.” There’s more text than just that, but it’s a reminder of Dave Gray’s Forms, Fields and Flows (which if you haven’t learned it yet, please do. It’s critical to any sort of design process to learn to draw.)
Anyway, the exercise:
Visual Journaling:
You need:
A Notebook
A small collection of pens or pencils (pens are better)
This exercise will help you:
Become a better artist
Become a better thinker
Develop a stronger memory
Improve your own personal discipline and self-control
Give you tools for communicating with other people visually
Help you think through problems in three and four dimensions
How often to do it:
Daily
15-20 minutes
Procedure:
Take a page in your notebook.
Date the page, and the time.
Draw a frame on it, somewhere. It must be at least one-quarter of the page, but no more than three-quarters of the page.
Draw something that fills the frame:
An abstract design
A picture of something near you
A picture from a reference photograph
Some event that happened in your day
Something from the Drawing List
A copy of a picture you like.
Fill the remaining page with a written description of your day:
What you drew
Where you were when you drew it
Why you drew this object
What you were feeling or thinking when you drew it.
Do for thirty days.
The Drawing List
If you don’t know what to draw, you can select a thing from this drawing list. The drawing list is composed of sixty items in two columns: Sunlight and Shadow. (if it’s daylight, draw from the Sunlight column. If it’s after sunset or before dawn, draw from the Shadow list.) In your drawing journal, go to one of the last pages and draw a frame for the list. Then write out the list in it.
This post has been getting some notice recently, from back in 2007. I wanted to highlight it, and set it in some sort of common relevance, as a possible design exercise for a medieval history class. You could do something similar, I suppose, with almost any era in history. Here’s the constraints:
You’re a medieval engineer. You work for a king (or maybe a queen like Eleanor of Aquitaine). You’ve been tasked with building a castle. Not really a castle. A tower — your king/queen doesn’t have a lot of money for construction right now, and getting this tower built is a priority. There’s fast, cheap, and good… pick any two you like.
The tower has to be between forty and sixty feet tall. It’s going to be a watch tower, and the main part of the roof has to have a signal station on top of it, in the form of a large pile of sticks to be set on fire if something goes wrong. All those sticks, and that fire, have to be high up — and the knight and his military force with him have to have a place to live, and from which they can see the surrounding country.
The story of a building like a tower has got to be about 10 feet high — so this tower is four to six stories tall. It might have a low-ceilinged area, like a basement (maybe two); and it might have a high-cielinged area like a great hall. The tower isn’t going to be a grand construction. The base can’t be any larger than 30′x30 feet, and it can’t go more than 10′ deep in the ground.
There’s going to be a knight assigned to the hall. He’s going to have two squires, who will be young men between 15-18. He’ll have maybe four pages, who will be between 7 years of age and 15 years of age. There will be somewhere between 8 and 15 additional men (some infantry, some archers who will want more private quarters because they are more likely professional soldiers) stationed with him, of varying rank and social station. The knight has a wife, who will want some private quarters for herself and her husband; and they have a household of 6-10 servants.
The walls are going to have to be ten feet thick at the base to support the weight of the upper levels, and they can rarely be less than three feet thick because the building material is stone.
Now here’s the challenge:
Using graph paper at a scale of 1 square = 2 feet, design a plan and elevation for the tower.
Include — stairways between levels; cooking, eating and activity spaces like a great hall, sleeping, and (ahem!) elimination facilities for the residents, including private or semi-private living quarters for the knight and his wife; storage for food and essentials for the household for up to 4 months (winter + siege supplies); defensive positions to protect the tower-house against attack; support columns from basement to upper floors (to support the weight of the watchfire on the roof); show the position of doors and windows; positions of heating elements like fireplaces and chimney flues; water-storage capability for long sieges or winter, for cooking and cleaning.
Do not include: technology too advanced for the time period, e.g., electric light or water-driven plumbing.
Use David Macaulay’s book Castle as both inspiration and guide to certain construction techniques
Conclude with an estimation of the labor force needed to construct your proposed tower, and a rough outline of the project calendar, (e.g, dig foundation in March, make foundations in April, build 1st floor in May, etc.) Remember the limitations of the era’s technology in designing the workforce estimates and project calendar.
Extra Credit: Build a model that shows the outside of your tower.
And… Just because I’m nice, and because I want to get used to the idea of publishing and then editing, and building up a library of tools and projects: DT Medieval Engineer <- Here’s that whole exercise, pre-loaded into a PDF, ready to hand out and use in class.
I have the day off from school today, and one of the things I have to do today is do about an hour and a half of grading. It’s so easy to fall behind on grading; mostly we teachers are looking at formative assessments, and summative assessments (what they did on last night’s homework) may or may not interest us very much. But there’s also a firehose aimed at us ALL THE TIME.
Do non-teachers meet with clients for 80% of their workday, every day? If you’re in retail, sure. But you’re expected to know the product that’s in the store, which doesn’t shift all that rapidly. Lawyers and doctors, sure. They meet with clients; but they also take considerable time to prepare for those meetings, either by writing briefs or looking up laws or reading the medical histories and relevant articles in the appropriate journals.
But teachers? The retail content of our ‘store’ keeps changing. If this is Wednesday, it must be Leonardo DaVinci. Oh, wait, it’s Thursday! Must be Christopher Columbus. And all of that thought process must be planned ahead of time, even if we already have a sense of what we’re going to say. Lesson plans don’t materialize out of nothing. Sometimes there’s a program or a set of worksheets to give out; but if you assign too many worksheets too many days in a row, students get bored and unhappy. That means designing and planning projects for students to do… and that means having a sense of what the rubrics are.
Which is why, far too often on my “days off” like today, I find myself sitting at my computer, typing lesson plans or designing experiences for students, or thinking about what comes next.
How do you handle planning ahead? What teachers do you admire for how they plan ahead? Or how do they miss the boat in planning ahead?
I just spent a little time going through a group of sheets from my school’s seventh grade. Each of them filled out the Social & Service Learning Grid last Friday. Maybe someone has already invented this, but I figured this one out myself; if I’m stepping on your idea, let me know, but I hope this is useful to my colleagues at other schools. In essence, I wanted to know what the priorities of our seventh grade were — what areas really concerned them for a service learning opportunity: did they want to help raise funds to fight cancer, or did they want to help at the local homeless shelter?
The answer was, a little of both. The vertical, y-axis of this graph represents the scale of the world… are you hoping your students will do work on a local level, a state or regional level, a national or international level? They can make a mark or a dot along that line to help them decide on what scale they want to invest their service learning time.
The horizontal, x-axis of the grid represents types of service learning. At the extreme left end are all forms of extreme poverty: homelessness, desperate hunger, and people in all-pervasive crisis. We put emergency shelter and food pantries and shelters for abused women and children there. At the extreme right end are all forms of cultural excellence: music and performing arts organizations. In between are organizations that do micro-loans or that provide community grants for economic development, and the related issues of funding for cancer research and so on.
It’s not a perfect way to find out a large group’s opinions. One still has to collate the data, and then correlate that data with an actual organization or program that you want to work with. Yet it still helped me and our seventh graders sort through our opinions about what our core opinions were about where we wanted to invest or attention and care for our service learning opportunities.
Today, if I’ve not miscounted or anything, is day two hundred (UPDATE: I miscounted… it’s day 199!). I’m 166 days out from my goal of a year and a day, but today’s routine wasn’t anything especially great. There was a great transition from double punch to ride the tiger, but that’s about it.
Milestones like today often seem or feel like false progress. It’s like my diet: I had a lot of sugar and carbs last weekend, gained a lot of weight, spent most of the week losing it again, and here it is the weekend again… Lots of plans, lots of ideas about things to do and people to see, and lots of sugar and carbs in the offering. I wonder what I’ll be doing next week?
And yet, if I told people the difference between my Monday weigh-in and my Friday weigh-in, they’d be cheering and excited for me. But if I told them the recent data points over the last month, they’d be glum with me. Yet they’re both just emotions, and not really connected to the diet or my eating habits generally. And so the milestone just passed doesn’t seem all that special any more: my reaction to it is a set of false assumptions.
Back to the tai chi: the other day I had a great workout from my tai chi routine, where I was in horse stance, and a good, rock-solid horse stance, for a forty-five minute stretch of practice. Awesome, right?
Except that the last two days I’ve been sore at knees and hips because of that heavier workout. So I’ve gone considerably easier on myself than I would otherwise. The real milestone was the initiation into being able to perform a horse stance all through the usual practice, finally… But that milestone didn’t line up with today’s numerical milestone. There’s both a separateness and a unity to the two events.
Maybe this doesn’t make much sense. I’m not sure I’m done sorting it in my own mind.
I’m going to be away from my computer and most electronics for a few days. Don’t worry: I’ve scheduled a few posts to play out in the time that I’ll be away, so you won’t have to be without any discussion of the Kavad progress, and you’ll think that I’m not slacking off. The tai chi posts will have to wait until I get home, but I’ll take some detailed notes so that any insights that come to me during this time will be available on my return. It’s not that I’ve given up the practice, just that I’m going to be doing it in a place where the Intertubes don’t shine.
In preparation for this departure, though, I’ve been hastily using the Internet to compile data about the decans for use while I’m off grid. I plan to take my sketchbook with me, and consult with some of my fellow campers, about the nature of the stories each decan image tells. Accordingly, I spent a fair block of time today recording what the Hindus, ibn Ezra, Picatrix, and Agrippa had to say. My friend Nick also turned me on to another list, used by the order of the Golden Dawn, and included in Israel Regardie’s big black book. I’d forgotten the Decans made an appearance there, but now I’ve got another list to work from. Goody!
Some of my teaching colleagues are probably wondering, “what’s the point?” And I’d like to say again, if it wasn’t obvious, that it always comes back (for me) to having a languages, a model and a value system that makes teaching creativity important. Analyzing this project in those terms, I’m using my skills at research and my own skill at drawing to make something new. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or even great, to teach me something about creativity. It just has to be something I value and am willing to put time and effort into. And then it’s a source of teaching and learning about creativity.
I’m once again struck by how critical it is to know what story you’re trying to tell: without a clear sense of what part of the story goes on which leaves of the box, it’s impossible to determine how to to work up the images and intentions for the various sides of the box. In this current iteration (which wound up being 9×15″, largely due to the limitations of the paper size I was working with), the box can tell a five-fold iterative story — one story painted (or carved, I suppose, or wood-burned) on the outside of the box; a second story on the front inner panels as they’re unfolded; a third story on the back inner panels as they’re unfolded, and then the ‘story’ of the innermost shrine space is story #4. Story #5 could be told with objects in the lower drawer, and in the upper chamber inside the top lid. If I were going to do a story about Hermetics, for example, or the Seven Liberal Arts, I’d probably want to figure out a way to add two additional chambers or zones within the box, so that there could be a story for each of the “seven governors”.
If I did a box based on my 7th grade early American history, though, five might work quite well:
Pre-colonialism
European contact and exploitation
American Revolution
Westward Expansion
Civil War
And if I were to do one based on my Latin course for sixth grade, then five would also work quite well, because I’d do an arrangement something like this using my existing surfaces:
Prepositions, numbers and conjunctions (doesn’t seem grand enough for the innermost chamber)
I suppose, as well, that it could be scaled back a little bit, with simply having the outward symbols of Freemasonry on the outside, and then having three inner layers within, dealing with Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master Mason, with a simple “shrine” at the innermost part for the GAotU. It’s a potentially limited audience, though. Hmm. To build it for a Christian audience (I’m thinking, in particular, Byzantine/Orthodox) the following schema could be adopted:
Miniature icons on the outside of scenes from the four Gospels, flanked the four Living Creatures representing the evangelists and the four archangels, on the four sides of the box.
The frontispiece, a series of icons of stories from the New Testament
The rear panels, a series of icons of stories from the Old Testament
Symbols of Christian virtues (I mean real ones, like Charity and Humility and Generosity, not low taxes and corporate freedom, by the by) framing an icon of the Nativity.
pop-up panel of the Crucifixion and the tomb of Jesus, with some sort of drop-down of the Resurrection.
It could also be arranged around a mystery school’s program like Gardnerian Witchcraft or Feri by having only outer court symbols on the outside, and the progressive teachings or symbolism of the grades on the inner layers. I think that Hermetics, as I’m getting it from Frater RO, could be represented on this particular kavad in the following way without too much trouble, or adding extra layers of symbolism:
The four elements, their angels, their kings, and (possibly represented with ‘prison boxes’ within, the devils)
The Divine Poemander and the Aphorisms of Hermes.
The Seven Governors, their seals and sigils and areas of rulership
The chain of manifestation (or Tree of Life?)
Table of Practice and Altar (on top or inside?)
None of these schemes are impossible, but they’re definitely ambitious. There are, by my count, 46 distinct surfaces, and I have some thoughts about how to add in another half-dozen at least, possibly as many as 12-15 more (the drawer in the bottom, for example, could hold some parts of it.) I say this not to discourage imitators, but to demonstrate the underlying challenge is not simply to build the box. It’s also required to have a sense of what you want to say, using it. I’m beginning to have a sense of what I want to say… but I DO wonder if my artistic skills are up to it, not merely to build the box, but to plan and execute the artistic program outside and in.
An architect friend of mine says that my next step is to build a “whitewood” model out of foam board, straight pins, and glue, without tape. He says I should work out some of the construction details, and begin deciding on an aesthetic for the whole —brass hinges and screws, for example, or nails, or wooden pegs of differing woods… Yikes. Lots to think about.
The mother of one of my students is a Civil War buff. She’s more than a buff — she’s a pro historian, who’s been working on a book about Connecticut soldiers and nurses in the Civil War. Accordingly, she’s been collecting photocopies of diaries and reminisces for a while, and assembling packets about individual soldiers and families. And now she’s opening her research to my students.
On Wednesday, we’re handing out those packets to the seventh grade. Each seventh grader is getting a packet of data on one soldier or nurse, their regiment, their family. Each packet contains letters, journals, reminisces, transcripts of oral histories, and more. The student’s job is to put together a history of that person within the larger history of the Civil War: who they were, what they did, what their attitude towards slavery and the Union was, and so on. It’ll be very exciting.
But I’ve had to do a fair bit of Backwards Planning for this project. One whole week of school is lost to Spring Break for the seventh grade (not that I begrudge them the time off — I need it too). One week is their class trip to DC — which may be useful for their history project, but maybe not. One week, nearly, is academic testing. And one week at the end is their oral presentations.
I’m not ever as good as I’d like to be about planning my classes ahead of time. But it’s kind of cool to realize that it’s the first Monday in April, and I’ve planned my two American history classes through the end of the school year.
