I’m not entirely sure this will work. But here goes. Thanks to Gordon’s recommendation to try out VINE, I was able to produce a trio of short videos today, including this one on the traditional geometry of the Tree of Life. It’s fast, because Vine only allows six-second videos. But it’s kinda cool, and if you watch it a few times, you can probably figure out how the geometry of the Tree fits together. Enjoy!
Yesterday, I went to MakerFaire in New York City. I felt out of place and rather unskilled compared with all those folks who were making electronics and elaborate recreations of famous buildings with toothpicks, and investigating outer space with weather balloon spacecraft attached to payload capsules with cameras and parachutes and … aiee… Felt very off-putting.
Then my friend Andrew Carle (Twitter handle @tieandjeans and well worth following) and I met a fellow named Matt Barinholtz, of KidsMakeThingsBetter.com. Matt has an interesting business model. He started out with a shop in Maryland, where he instructed kids in making things. They weren’t always intrigued, but he thought that by showing them what they could do, and what they could build, that gradually they would become awakened to the joy of making things. This has generally been very successful, and the result has been that he’s taking their show on the road. They’ve built a mobile shop of some kind, and they travel around Maryland doing demonstrations and programs throughout the state. Unlike the SparkTruck, though, which has a national audience, Matt’s operation is mostly confined to Maryland. Confined? Wrong word. Focused.
I genuinely forget whether Matt said it or I said it or Andrew said it, but I want to attribute it to Matt. He asked, “The problem with Make Magazineand all the rest of it, is that it’s for people who want to know how it’s done. But the why is the interesting part. The why is a lot harder to get across.” This is not an exact quotation, but this was the gist of it. The Why Make? was huge in his mind. (And we said this as we were standing behind a fully-functional gypsy wagon that was designed to ride behind a four cylinder car — glued and screwed together, as the explanatory sheets of paper tacked to the outside said, to keep it from falling apart while rattling down the road at full speed. Horse-drawn wagons rarely have that much fuss.)
On Friday night (to back up for a bit) Andrew C and I were wandering around Manhattan, looking at public spaces, and thinking about what makes public spaces good and what makes them bad. Armchair architecture is a good thing for laid-back makers like myself to tackle, because it’s a thought experiment — it turns out that a mix of commercial and retail space is good for public spaces; so are fountains and greenery; so is a mixture of pedestrian pathways and seating areas, but not a mingling of the two; and so on.
We were standing in front of the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center, across from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and Andrew noted how many different things come together there: a Neo-Gothic cathedral swathed in modern aluminum scaffolding; an early 20th century Art-Deco celebration of the power of Capitalism; a modern sculpture with reference to ancient Greece, with its reminders about moving the world with posture and leverage. I noted that the old ways are often always with us, in new guises.
We split up for a while, Andrew and Matt and I, but the two Andrews came back together for a talk that never happened, by Sofy on the intersection of “Magic and Making”. There was a gentleman there, a maker and a professor at the Cooper Union in New York who teaches a class on sound art — not music making, but things that produce sound in a way that is about learning from the sound (like John Cage’s 30 minutes in the anechoic chamber at MIT, learning about the sound of his heart beating and his nervous system electricalizing). I remarked, among the conversation about the audience for Sophy’s talk, about how medieval grimoires were really about learning how to do things, like make paper and forge knives, and make lion-skin belts out of leather, and so on… and that the learning process that the magician went through, in making his own copy of the book, in learning to make inks and pigments, in sewing his or her own robes… was really (in part — some of my magical colleagues would argue that it was about making contact with the spirits, and the learning process was a by-product) about getting a broad-based Maker-education in the makery of his or her time.
I’m drifting back and forth in time now in my memory palace, thinking about all that I’ve learned this weekend, between Andrew, Matt, @jaymesdec, @amptMN, and others… watching kids building NerdyDerby cars. Watching a digital CNC carve a wooden statue of Venus from a scan of an ancient Greek original. Watching a multi-ton life-size model of the 1963 game Mousetrap unwind, a giant Rube-Goldberg contraption, to smash the hood of a car… watching butterfly bicycles parade endlessly around the circle where Katy Perry the Unicorn spouted perpetual fire…. watching a Mentos and Coke extravaganza.
Why make? Because it’s fun. And then the question becomes How?
But, I come back to Matt’s question, which is Why Make in the First Place?
And I think about Andrew’s comment, with our backs to the Lego store in Rockefeller Center and our faces to Prometheus bringing down fire from heaven, a warrior not of the straining muscle but of the Arte. Andrew said something like, we build to get better.
The word I used in the last paragraph, “Arte,” is a kind of fancy and pompous way of saying magic. And I used it here, in kind of a fancy and pompous way, to suggest that the whole show of MakerFaire, is an attempt to use makery to magic (that is, to change consciousness in accordance with will) people into having the realization that making things is fun. It’s possible that the goal is to enliven and inspire people into believing that it’s fun to make, and that it will make your life more magical and better if you are a maker.
But to do that, I wonder back to that conversation at Sophy’s talk that didn’t happen. Before us was a whiteboard and the bulk of the museum; and to our left was a physics mini golf game where all of the challenges are efforts to make rockets (golf balls) fly courses through space to arrive at their destination. Maybe I’m right. Maybe the purpose of a grimoire was to help a person of the time develop an appreciation of the crafts and skills of his time, and, along the way, discover which craft and which branch of making and creating he or she really most enjoyed.
If that’s the case, then there’s really a need for a new kind of grimoire, isn’t there? One which is focused on exposing students, through short projects that lead into one another, into a multitude of skills and crafts and abilities, one at a time, in a semi logical but not always immediately solvable pattern.
And to that end, I contribute a beginning: a codex-bound book, with covers made of cardboard and bolted edges. A student learns a little bit about force and pressure, about drilling, about approximate measuring (as well as recognizing the need for precise measurement eventually), about working with paper as a material, about nuts and screwdrivers and bolts and washers and vise-grips (and hammers, if it comes to that).
I’m not building the grimoire, or trying to write it… The best grimoires of the Medieval and Renaissance eras were group projects, anyway — retroactively open-source, by different authors copying different rituals from different books and discarding the tools and patterns they found least useful. Again, I’m not writing the book. I’m pointing a direction.
But if you develop a short project for the Maker’s Grimoire, let me know, and I’ll link your exercise to the Maker’s Grimoire. You’ll note that I made the “What it is” video above, and then I’ve also made this (not very good!) how-to video below:
I’ll be teaching Latin to sixth graders this year; here’s my video advising them on setting up their notebooks and desks to succeed in my class this year:
Here’s a video of the outer skin of the kavad, at the end of the first day of decoration of the prototype.
What I’ve discovered from this is that my drawing talents are nowhere up to par when it comes to traditional images, like the Gemini twins or the scorpion of Scorpio, much less more complex things like the centaur-archer of Sagittarius or the fish-goat of Capricorn. So one of the things that I did was go to Google and search for drawing how-to’s on the various signs. But then, that’s what I’ve done for all kinds of things, from the Tree of Life shown here (more or less cribbed from a John Michael Greer book) to the information itself that I’m encoding upon the box.
Today has been one of the busiest days this blog has seen in a good long while — while I’m unlikely to surpass my record for most unique visitors in a month this June… Thank you for the interest, but please remember this is a prototype… I’d love feedback and comments on how to make this more effective and useful.
My friend Chris is very fond of the principle of “Least I can do” (belated happy b-day!). By this, he means what is the minimum amount of effort needed to learn something or create something successful? Again, I may not have the idea expressed exactly the way he would express it himself, but the overarching idea is, “what kind of effort do I have to put in in order to generate a useful result?”
My friend Daniel also says, “Build the whole thing, and see what you learn from your mistakes.”
My friend Scott also says, “A picture is worth a thousand words, but a part is worth a thousand pictures.”
With these three principles in mind — least effort, learn from completed prototype, and part=1000 pics, I dedicated one piece of foam-board to build a complete version of the prototype of the kavad I intend to build:
Take a look!
A couple of things come to mind now that the first full-size-ish construction of this kavad is complete. First, I have to measure and cut my pieces much more carefully. As much as I might want to use the edges of the foam board as serious guides to cutting, the truth is — they’re not at right angles to one another, which means I can’t assume that the pieces I cut using that guide are going to be correct.
Second, I have to know the rough shape of all the parts, so I can lay out the board correctly ahead of time. This is going to involve a lot of straight-edge-and-compass work to get right, if I want to get that precise — if I’m thinking of it as a magical object though, I’ll WANT to get that precise (aren’t all stories magical in some sense?). One possibility is to build it as a teaching tool, to teach RO-style Hermetics at festivals and workshops and suchlike. Having the geometry of the object be very precise is one way to accomplish that goal, and it can also be part and parcel of the story of the object itself — the way number and order underlies all stories, particularly stories about the nature of the universe. Another possibility, given my recent rant about teaching creativity, is to use that kind of precise geometry to help talk about the role of previous discoveries of other creative humans in present-day creative thought. There’s also a possibility that these two functions can be combined, so it’s useful in two different aspects of my life.
If I go with one of my other ideas, “the story of America,” though, I can use the geometry of the object as a way to talk about the Freemasons in America, and their importance to the Colonial and Federal eras. Sneaking in a bit of the alternate history, in the way that Gordon … suggests? advocates? outright shouts-from-the-rooftops? … implies? (What IS the correct verb here?) is a useful component of a modern education not ruled by the ivory tower and the corporate board room.
The idea of combining Hermetics with a 3-D model/shrine to the creative process, though, really floats my boat today. So we’ll see, as I continue with this process, what continues to come forward. It is clear that I have to make some decisions on the schema of imagery within and around the kavad in order to move this project forward. I’ve dug a notebook out of my stash of art supplies, and I’m beginning some preliminary sketches. But it’s a funny thing — you can’t know what images to sketch until you have a sense of the size and shape and location of the various parts of the physical box; and you can’t complete the design of the physical box until you have a sense of the story; and you can’t have a sense of the story until you have a sense of the box and the images to go on the box… It’s all very chicken-and-egg, nonlinear, and complicated. Back to work on the prototype.
I’m trying to teach some aspects of reflective, empathetic writing, and I find that I’m having to cheat more than a little. How can we teach students to go from generic summary sentences, to being able to delve deeply into the events and explain them to a reader in a way that makes the reader feel the writer understands the past strongly?
You teach them to fake it, and hope they gradually develop the skill from the outside in.
I’m not actually sure this will work, but here’s the strategy. First, teach them to write the kind of reflective/meditative sentences that use the word “I” in their structure. Those sentences allow them to imagine ways in which their current lives are similar to the lives of people in the past.
Second, ask them to reflect their awareness of the present day back in time to the era they are studying. Ask them to flip the sentence around so that it deals with people’s real issues. Open a channel for them to speculate or imagine life in that era.
Third, refine the new sentence(s) so that it/they are about people rather than things. People have a hard time having empathy for things, even readers who love delving deeply into a good book. So, let the writers invest their imagined objects with the creativity of their long-lost human creators.
What do you think? Is this strategy for teaching kids to be empathetic writers going to work?
I’ll let you know how I think it turns out on my end in a few weeks, when I’ve had a chance to assess the results.
Choosing an essay topic can be a harrowing experience if you’ve never done it before. Follow this easy six-step process to generate the largest possible number of ideas to work from, while still having to research only one topic on the way to your actual writing process.
In this video, I show my sixth graders how to add to their dialogues by making their characters more clearly express their opinions and state exactly what they mean.
Sometimes when a dialogue gets boring, it’s useful to do this next writing technique, which is to reverse the argument. When reversing the argument in a dialogue, the smart one (Sagrado) answers the questions from the dumb one (Simplicio) with questions of his own. Then Simplicio has to explain his ideas in greater detail. This helps Sagrado win the argument more clearly and completely, because Simplicio sees the flaws in his own thinking.
It’s a useful debate technique, and a useful technique in writing dialogues.
