Taiji Day 366: Bit of a let-down, really.

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Topher after a morning in the Design Lab getting set up for a workshop this morning. (I’m teaching fourth graders the core skills of graphic design in a 2-hour workshop: page layout, hand-lettering and font selection, thumbnailing, color choice, page hierarchy, and so on.) After that, I worked on a couple of art projects at home (and gave myself a mild burn with the wood-burner — a wonderful tool but dangerous as all get-out; though admittedly not as bad as a buzz saw). Then I went up to my local metaphysical shop to get candles for a thank-offering to the angels today, Day 366 (I haven’t figured out what I’m going to label tomorrow’s work).

While I was there, I ran into someone who I’d done a prayer card for, based around a pair of angels from the Mansions of the Moon: one of the angels was the angel of the day, and one of them was the angel when she was next going to see a doctor about her cancer. That was maybe two weeks ago that I did this. Today, I find out that that doctor’s visit went swimmingly well, and she asked for another one, for her next appointment. I made it for her, right then and there, and wound up being given all the candles and things I was planning to buy. We’re all connected, right?

And I wound up making another card based on the 26th Mansion of the Moon: The Forespout of the Bucket, showing a woman washing and combing her hair. And after my little candle-shopping trip, I came home and made her in my book. Here she is: You can’t get as good results from looking at a picture of her, as drawing her yourself, but she’s plenty strong for a lot of different kinds of work. And this customer — customer? friend — also got the First Mansion, on the other side of the card. Because she needs Tagriel to wash and comb the cancer right out of her system; and Geniel to chase it off.

So, all things considered, yesterday was a pretty awesome day: completion of a year of tai chi; anticipation of a great day tomorrow and a clean-up of the Design Lab; lunch with a friend; some artwork; some magic work; and some down-time for meditation and rest. Lovely.

In that light, today’s tai chi practice was a bit of a let-down. I mean, sure… I’m stronger than I was a year ago, but I’m not stronger than yesterday. It’s like… it’s like when I turned forty. I was forty for a a week, and everybody was asking me if I felt older or if I was worried now that I was on the wrong side of the Big 4-zero!? And of course, I didn’t. I didn’t feel any different on one side of the number than on the other. It’s just a day.

Because, as much as we’d like to believe that things will be different on the exact day, they aren’t. And today’s no different. I had an absolutely terrific Ward off Left early in the form; and I missed my left hand-touch in the Windmill Kick near the end. Yesterday, my Golden Pheasants were rock-solid, but my Low Kicks were unexciting. How often are all of these practiced moves going to be magical, all on the same day? Not often. But when they are, it should clue us in: there’s no guarantee that the rest of the day will be magical. It all depends on how awake you are.

Am I as awake today as I was yesterday? Maybe, maybe not. How about tomorrow? Will the day ever arrive when I have an absolutely perfect practice?

Who cares? This is today’s practice. Enjoy it.

25th Mansion of the Moon

25th Mansion of the Moon

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
My black whiteboard marker was starting to run out of steam toward the end of of my drawing session. Sorry about that. But here we have the "Sator qui serit arborem" — the planter who plants trees.

The Planter is an image for the preservation of trees, and for a good harvest.

22nd Mansion of the Moon

22nd Mansion of the Moon
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Today and part of yesterday, the Moon was in the 22nd Mansion: Fortune of the Sacrificers.

This is supposed to be an auspicious day to flee intolerable situations and difficult circumstances, and to break free of limitations. The name of the angel is actually Geliel, and I think the sigil or image turned out pretty well: it shows the interplay of Mercury, Venus and Mars forces pretty well, I think.

Via Flickr:
I wanted to work on this art project. But I don’t have a whiteboard at home. So I made do with a notebook. Here’s the 22nd mansion of the Moon: Geliel, the angel appointed to watch over swift escapes, ends to intolerable situations, rapid changes, and liberation from constraint.

I thought long and hard about drawing this image and then had a brief chat with a friend, who reminded me that I’m not charging the image, just making it.

Clerestory Learning: Hands in Motion: Gestures and Learning

Recently, Science Daily reported on a University of Chicago study that suggests gesturing aids students in learning, not just recall. In the study, students were taught gestures at the same time the teacher presented new concepts in math. The results: “Students who repeated the correct gesture during the lesson solved more problems correctly than students who repeated the partially correct gesture, who, in turn, solved more problems correctly than students who repeated only the words” (ScienceDaily, 2009).

This study suggests that gestures are not only valuable for aiding recall of previously learned material, but also for constructing understanding of new concepts. Gestures aid learning!

via Clerestory Learning: Hands in Motion: Gestures and Learning.

What an awesome idea!  The article explains that kids who learn gestures that go along with mathematical concepts then learn to frame their math problems in both word and gesture.  You could add Dave Gray’s visual thinking to this and teach kids to frame math in word, gesture, and visualization, actually, and give them three dimensions.

Of course, this idea is thousands of years old.  In India, they’re called mudras.  They’re used in Indonesian dancing, and in Hawai’ian hulu, and Chinese qi gong, and … well, you get the idea.  The whole concept is that a physical or kinesthetic gesture connects to a concept or core idea, and that core idea is related (often) to a breathwork pattern or tattvas — which is a visualization performed in one of the body’s energy centers called a chakra.

What is new, is apparently capable of being old again.

In progress

In progress
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

I’ve blotted out a student face in this photo (as in many others), but I think the process itself is interesting to document. Here’s a de facto white board, a sheet of white scroll paper that I unrolled over and taped to a blackboard. Students had sticky notes in five colors: I gave hints in yellow. They used orange for technologies, pink for hominid species, green for domesticated species, and blue for cultural elements.

When we began this process back at the beginning of school, this group of kids generated fewer than twenty chunks of information about the whole of the Stone Age. Thanks to this teaching style or methodology, they were able to generate more than a hundred. It’s showing up in their writing and their thinking. They discuss and argue about the placement of these elements in class, and at lunch. Kids are asking me questions about Stonehenge and the pyramids, which hasn’t happened in years. And mostly I’m just getting out of the way of their learning. It’s kind of cool.

Our next challenge is going to be to read Pyramid by David Macaulay at the same time that we read the next chapter in the book. Are they up to … (gasp) … two books at once!? I don’t know, we’ll see.

Students at work

Students at work
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

The first day of classes, I put up a scroll of paper and let the kids put sticky notes all over it. Post-It® Notes are wonderful. You can shift them around, you can engage with other people’s information, and you can draw links between them, just like they were pages in a WWW. They put up only 19 for the entirety of the Stone Age: 1.8 million years ago up until about 3000 BC and the first pyramids. It’s an appalling length of time, and we/they knew virtually nothing about it.

Fast forward to day 12 of school. Here’s some of my students at work. The first week they got bored of the Post-It® Notes, and groaned every time I pulled them out. But look: instead of 19 Post-It® Notes, we’re talking 75. And today was only ‘rough draft’ time. Tomorrow is going to be ‘final draft’ time in class. They’ll be experimenting, documenting, discussing. And the discussions they’re having!

Here’s the really cool thing. They’re not listening to me. They’re talking with each other about what happened when, and where. They’re arguing with each other. Sometimes they use words that aren’t appropriate, but they’re learning. They’re being respectful with each other. They’re learning to respect one another’s academic opinions, and manage content together. It’s a classroom of people networking.

And I’m not doing very much beyond facilitating any more. They’re doing a lot of hard work to understand the tools and skills, and the content that I’ve put into their hands, but I’m not droning in lecture formats, and they’re learning a tremendous amount. It’s a tremendous evolution in how I teach; not what I teach, but how.

I haven’t been this happy as a teacher in years.

Early farming villages

Early farming villages
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

This is the kind of thing I’ve been doing of late: drawing pictures on sticky Post-It® Notes, and creating little frameworks or visual outlines of the papers I’m expecting kids to write. It’s kind of a visual or sketchy shorthand which helps kids see or imagine the world I’m expecting them to understand. It’s not at all easy to think of a productive visual framework for them to consider, each and every day. I wish I’d photographed today’s in my history class, where I had them create sticky notes for different record-keeping types, and different complex organizations, that affected their lives, and then sort and order them by both size and complexity on a Cartesian graph. There’s some very interesting stuff that I could do with all of this, and am doing with all of it.

I’m aware that in doing it, I’m drifting very far from the poetry that used to be such an important part of my daily practice. I wonder if it matters that much, but I’ve also not had as many poetry ideas of late as I’d like. In the meantime, I seem to be drawing at least some creative energies from this kind of work, so I guess it balances out.

Visual Thinking: Learning Cycles

Visual Thinking: Learning Cycles
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

Two of the things I learned at the Learning & The Brain Conference at Avon Old Farms this year was the importance of learning cycles, and the value of face-to-face time. The brain takes in 4,000,000,000 bits of information per second through the sensorium of hearing, touch, taste, smell, sight, and kinetics.

The RAS processes this information (compresses it or filters it, we don’t know) down to 2,0000 bps, and then the Amygdala analyzes it for stress or danger. If there’s no stress or danger, the brain turns on its own reflective mode, and learning can occur, as the brain releases dopamine and seretonin, and a host of other neuro-chemicals to activate first working memory, and then long-term memory.

However, that cycle is short; you only have about 6-8 minutes of time before the neurotransmitters get re-absorbed and the mind begins to become bored. The only way to stimulate it is with a new burst of novelty that is neither stressful nor dangerous (to keep the Amygdala placated and happy).

Hence, the need to use Visual (V), Auditory (A) and Kinesthetic (K) methodologies to create novel, happy experiences so that the brain remains in a relaxed, happy, multisensory mode for a 40-minute period — the average length of a class at my school. Furthermore, there must be a priming — through homework, through classroom modification, through exposure to art, and through exposure to vocabulary — beginning a month to six weeks before the material is taught in the classroom.

Once in the classroom, this chart comes into play, quite literally. The priming feeds the cloud of energy that could/should occur in the classroom. Novelty initiates the first lesson, which encourages the students to learn by playing with, and then reviewing, a new concept every six-to-eight minutes. In a 40-minute class, this should happen 5-6 times. Furthermore, by combining this path of learning in the classroom with Ned Hallowell’s FIVE STEPS of learning, any student (EVERY student) can in fact connect-play-practice-’master’-and-be-recognized in a 40-minute period. If I as the teacher am aware that the first 8-minute period is devoted to trying to get everyone to connect to the classroom’s Daily Main Idea, then everyone should get connected. The second 8-minute period is about playing with a new concept or skill. The third is about practicing that new skill; the fourth is about working that skill to become much better at it. The last 8-minute period is about reviewing the day as a whole, and recognizing each student for what they have accomplished that day.

Then there follows a period of reflection or fermentation, where the student isn’t in your class, but is interacting with and connecting to other ideas. The ideas bubble into long-term memory, and then have a chance to re-emerge during that night’s homework. With luck, the ideas explored in class and in homework then are explored in dream that night — when we do a substantial part of the processing of information and data. Further, the homework ideally contains some element that primes the learning for a lesson in the next week, and the next month.

It’s an ideal to work for, and I’m looking forward to trying it.

Learning & Brain: Visual Thinking

Dave Gray: Visual Thinking

quiz: Demonstration that visual thinking leads to discovery

samples of DaVinci, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Ford, Einstein, Picasso, Feynman, Hawking. Their work led to new discoveries. The drawing always came from.

Exercise: Draw the process of making toast

“Belief systems that people use to perceive, contextualize, simplify, and make sense of otherwise complex problems” — Wikipedia, MENTAL MODELS

Nodes and links. Nodes are concepts in drawings. Links are the explicit or implicit connections between the elements/nodes. Most don’t use more than 10-12 nodes, 4-6 is more common.

…. image after image after image….

I don’t even know what to write any more.

Art as essential: average temperature when we started making images was -10°C the heart of the ice age. All writing, reading elements – alphabets or syllabarys – are much much younger.

Pictures. Then Tallies. Then Tokens. Then Envelopes to capture tallies. Tablets. Paper. Printing Press. Cartesian Coordinates. William Playfair. Polar Area Chart. John Venn (diagrams Gantt chart for managing workers. Flow chart by Frank B. Gilbrith, bricklayer. Isotype – inventor of Clip Art (it had an inventor??)

CHildren and cutting-edge scientists are re-wiring their brains in ways we don’t understand. We don’t have schooling models for grading power-point or YouTube videos. Visual Thinking Strategies – 12% grains in reading, 16% gains in math. Doctors who use Visual Thinking Strategies increase accurate diagnoses by 38%. Carl G. Liungman, Symbols: Encyclopedia of Western Signs and Ideograms

(Idea: Lulu.com publishes books like Dave Gray’s… they could publish mine.)