As a means to delve creatively into the cultural geography in Western Canada, our socials ten students will be undertaking the creation of public service announcements on issues relating to the present states of plants and animals across several different biomes. Having practiced digital storytelling skills in writing, performing and editing a brief time-line of human history in the local area last week, their sights will be set on documenting the evolving history of human interaction with, and use of, resource species such as the Rocky Mountains’ bears, the Plains’ buffalo, and the Pacific Coast’s salmon.
They were not a nation, nor even a tribe, but a loose association of groups consisting of up to a dozen families. All were, however, united in their allegiance to Tuktu – the caribou – which, in their millions, not only furnished the necessities of life but most of whatever else these people needed. Caribou skins provided clothing (the warmest and lightest known), footwear, tents, sleeping robes, covering for kayaks, even the heads of drums. Tuktu gave meat, and fat both to eat and to fill their lamps; sinews for sewing; and antler and bone for the manufacture of innumerable hunting and domestic implements, even including children’s toys. Tuktu was life itself to human dwellers in the Barren Lands.
Each of the animals and biomes selected by the groups this week bear a similar tradition of use that reaches back to the dawn of humankind, and I look forward to seeing the class’ representations of these ecosystems as they once were, on through their current state. Even in our suburban setting, there is still a reverence for the outdoors in many of the class’ undertakings – whether natural or urban – and the energy in class today as the groups selected their biomes and animals and set out on research stemmed from a connection many members of the class feel with their local setting. In documenting the traditions of our ancestors on this land alongside modern Canadians’ stewardship of the country’s most valuable resources, the project’s lofty purpose will be to offer a message to those who will follow in our footsteps here.
“We are all five-fingered people, the holy people. My grandfather and uncles always said that when we are taught these things, they are for the people, the children, and whoever comes to you wanting your help and the medicine of our ancestors. It is our responsibility to help them.”
About a week ago, a member of our school’s professional development committee announced that, as a means of furthering conversation between our school-based pro-d days, she would be making a habit of sending (via email) a series of weekly “energizers,” or prompts to further our staff’s thinking.
Immediately, this struck me as an opportunity to introduce social media into the fabric of our staff’s dialogue (beyond our English department’s Twitter enclave: @CindyQuach @rsfindley @lidube @kecoopr, as well as our principal @djmath), and help a colleague eager to inspire and engage in dialogue do so with a much more efficient means than email. Long envious of Karl Fische and Arapahoe High School’s Fischbowl Staff Development Blog, hopefully our efforts at Gleneagle will become a blogging community of its own. But until then, I am setting my sights on spreading the word about Twitter as a means of furthering our discussions.
Hopefully, sometime this week I will be able to stage an introductory Tweetup for her – something along the lines of the ongoing introduction TeachPaperless offered a colleague new to social media last spring. But in the meantime, I have sent her the following Startup Instructions, and thought I would share them here (further points will no doubt reference my post, Building a Personal Learning Network):
There is a vibrant, global conversation of education on a 24 cycle if one wishes to engage that fully (and there are those that do). But, with the right kind of use, I think you will find an efficient, unobtrusive manner in which to continue the school, the pro-d committee, and your own dialogue and learning. I can hopefully provide some of the startup help you need to get going. We’ll start small… the great thing about this individualized pro-d is that you can take it on in doses large or small. Set aside as little as a half an hour a week to check in with your Twitter feed – once it is set up (see below) – and I don’t doubt that you’ll find yourself increasingly engaged.
First things first: sign up for an account on Twitter. Before you will want to venture into running a whole blog – if that’s where you wind up going with it – Twitter is a great way to test drive a public publishing channel with microblogging. Here are some resources to help get you started:
Once you have a base of people whom you are following, I would recommend downloading a Twitter client, like Tweetdeck to organize them into streams (think: Teachers, Writers, Current Events, etc). Also, utilize Twitter Seaches of topics like #education, or #edchat (which has now become a 24hr a day conversation of teachers from everywhere, but began – and remains – as a weekly conversation on a designated educational topic decided by a polling of participants: follow the conversation at 4pm Pacific time every Tuesday) to further the reach of your listening, and contributions to The Conversation.
That should be an ample challenge for the extra three hours (really though, this could all take half an hour) you hopefully find this week! Let me know if I can be of any other assistance in the meantime. I’m happy to share any help that I can!
Is there anything you would recommend adding at this point? There are no doubt better Twitter lists of educators to start with since I began with the service (and compiled most of the resources I shared above). Help us build our school’s social media infrastructure with some of your favourites via the comments!
The other night my teaching partner and I, along with two of our students, gave a brief presentation to our local School Board Trustees outlining the basic tenants of our Autonomous Learner Model-inspired two-year gifted students program. At the conclusion of our small talk, our superintendent offered praise to our learners’ poise and confidence in following the Mayor’s presentation to the daunting group of elected officials, and noted that our district, and public education in general, is headed in the direction of the type of differentiated instruction paramount in the TALONS classroom. Needless to say, in an age of consistent, and staggering, budgetary shortfalls in our local school districts, it is encouraging to hear positive words from the top of our local school organizations, and to know that we are ahead of the curve.
I heard one of our vice-principals say last week that, “My daughter’s not an identified gifted student, but that’s the type of learning I want her to be doing.” (Students must be designated as ‘gifted’ and so-eligible for our district’s Student Services funding to be able to apply to TALONS.) And I agree with him; it’s not that our model would only work with gifted learners. (Indeed, George Betts intended to have the model extended to students with learning disabilities and the general population of schools.)
When I teach courses to the general student body at our school, I use the same guiding principals as I do in a class where each of my 28 students has an Ministry of Education required Individual Education Plan (as they do in the gifted program). According to my course evaluations, the high achievers learn more than they would in a class they might have otherwise aced; and the low achievers tend not to fail with the same regularity. When they do, in fact, I would chalk up much more of their inability to succeed in the classroom setting to such poor prior experiences with any of the following: English, learning, teachers, or education in general (my students are generally 14 or 15 by the time they get to me, and hence have some fairly entrenched habits and perspectives). I failed one student in all of the 60-some students I taught through English 9 last year: the straw that broke his academic back was a report – oral, video, written or in a form of their choosing – on the touring schedule of the student’s favourite band. More differentiation (or less) would not have been likely to affect the outcome, I doubt.
Really, how could one fail in a system that is based upon working toward an individualized set of goals in relation to the mandated government curriculum? Yes there will be shortcomings in ability, prior knowledge, or other limiting factors. But how well are our schools prepared to create the type of learning, and learners, we claim to seek on a daily basis?
Heidi sent me the video at the top of this post on Twitter the other day, asking if the TALONS students had seen it. And they may have: it’s a popular tv spot for a company that has seized the modern zeitgeist to create revolutionary solutions to Herculean problems, featuring counter-cultural icons who have defined the last fifty years in areas from science, to politics, to arts and music and the ongoing struggle for freedom.
When I look out across my class on a given afternoon, I am constantly witness to the germination of passions and ideas that could well become the embodiment of Apple’s urging, to Think Different. Our students are lucky to be in a classroom where such diversity is encouraged. But I wonder how well they would be served in many other ‘average’ classrooms (which I am quick to point out are not always the result of poor teaching or under-qualified teachers, but the constraints placed upon our modern classrooms), and to answer that question, I look to the educational experiences of the faces in the clip attached above, many of whom no doubt learned to become those “crazy enough to believe they could change the world” not because of their education, but in spite of it.
Albert Einstein – From Wikipedia – Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school’s regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strictrote learning. In the spring of 1895, he withdrew to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor’s note.[7] During this time, Einstein wrote his first scientific work, “The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields“.[15]
Bob Dylan- From NNDB.com - Late in 1959 Dylan enrolled in the University of Minnesota, but his love of music soon overpowered any academic ambitions and the following year, after spending a summer in Denver honing his stage persona, he dropped out and moved to New York to immerse himself in its incipient folk-revival scene. While in New York he also sought out his hero Woody Guthrie, spending as much time as he could at the ailing musicians bedside.
Richard Branson – From Wikipedia – Branson has milddyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student, but discovered his ability to connect with others.[6]
R. Buckminster Fuller – From Wikipedia – He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his “irresponsibility and lack of interest”. By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment.[2] Many years later he would receive a Sc.D. from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
Thomas Edison- From Wikipedia – In school, the young Edison’s mind often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him “addled“. This ended Edison’s three months of official schooling. Edison recalled later, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.” His mother homeschooled him.[2] Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker’s School of Natural Philosophy and The Cooper Union.
Muhammad Ali- From Wiki Answers – Muhammad Ali dropped out of Louisville Central High, a local basketball power, finishing 369th of 391 seniors in the class of 1960, and often traveling to fight on weekends.
Ted Turner – From Wikipedia - Turner initially majored in Classics. Turner’s father wrote saying that his choice made him “appalled, even horrified,” and that he “almost puked.”[8] Turner later changed his major to Economics, but he was expelled before receiving a diploma for having a female student in his dormitory room.[9]
Maria Callas – From Wikipedia – Initially, her mother tried to enroll her at the prestigious Athens Conservatoire, without success. At the audition, her voice, still untrained, failed to impress, while the conservatoire’s director Filoktitis Oikonomidis refused to accept her without her satisfying the theoretic prerequisites (solfege). In the summer of 1937, her mother visited Maria Trivella at the younger Greek National Conservatoire, asking her to take Mary as a student for a modest fee.
Mahatma Gandhi – From Wikipedia – In 1885, when Gandhi was 15, the couple’s first child was born, but survived only a few days; Gandhi’s father, Karamchand Gandhi, had died earlier that year.[9] Mohandas and Kasturba had four more children, all sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900. At his middle school in Porbandar and high school in Rajkot, Gandhi remained an average student academically. He passed the matriculation exam for Samaldas College at Bhavnagar, Gujarat with some difficulty. While there, he was unhappy, in part because his family wanted him to become a barrister.
Amelia Earhart – From Wikipedia – Amelia and Muriel (she went by her middle name from her teens on), remained with their grandparents in Atchison, while their parents moved into new, smaller quarters in Des Moines. During this period, Amelia received a form of home-schooling together with her sister, from her mother and a governess. She later recounted that she was “exceedingly fond of reading”[18] and spent countless hours in the large family library. In 1909, when the family was finally reunited in Des Moines, the Earhart children were enrolled in public school for the first time with Amelia entering the seventh grade at the age of 12 years.
Alfred Hitchcock – From Wikipedia – Hitchcock was sent to the Jesuit Classic school St Ignatius’ College in Stamford Hill, London.[6] He often described his childhood as being very lonely and sheltered. Hitchcock left St. Ignatius to study at the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation in Poplar, London.[12] After graduating, he became a draftsman and advertising designer with a cable company.[13]
Martha Graham – From Wikipedia – While the social status in which she was raised contributed to her access to education and refinement, it would also work against Martha. As the eldest daughter of a prominent physician, and a Presbyterian family, Martha was strongly discouraged from considering any career in the performing arts.[citation needed]
Jim Henson- From Wikipedia – In 1954, while attending Northwestern High School, he began working for WTOP-TV creating puppets for a Saturday morning children’s show. After graduating from high school, Henson enrolled at University of Maryland, College Park, as a studio arts major, thinking he might become a commercial artist.[6] A puppetry class offered in the applied arts department introduced him to the craft and textiles courses in the College of Home Economics, and he graduated with a B.S. in home economics in 1960. As a freshman, he was asked to create Sam and Friends, a five-minute puppet show for WRC-TV. The characters on Sam and Friends were already recognizable Muppets, and the show included a primitive version of what would become Henson’s most famous character, Kermit the Frog.[7]
Frank Lloyd Wright- From Wikipedia – Wright attended a Madison high school but there is no evidence he ever graduated.[3] He was admitted to the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a special student in 1886. There he joined Phi Delta Thetafraternity,[4] took classes part-time for two semesters, and worked with a professor of civil engineering, Allan D. Conover.[5] In 1887, Wright left the school without taking a degree (although he was granted an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University in 1955).
Pablo Picasso – From Wikipedia – the family moved to Barcelona, with Ruiz transferring to its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.[7] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the impressed jury admitted Picasso, who was 13. The student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life.
It’s not that they were each rebels, renegades or educational outliers: Martin Luther King and others were academically as endowed as many meeting with success in our modern schools. But how well are our schools and present-day classrooms equipped to produce the types of thinkers listed above?
What grade would Bob Dylan be getting in your class?
Though it may not get as much attention on this blog – a fact I hope to erode over the course of the next semester – I am also the guitar teacher at my school, and have just completed teaching the inaugural Introduction to Guitar 11 this past Friday. As a means of celebrating the completed term I set up my laptop in a rehearsal room with iMovie open, and invited students to contribute to a master recording of work they might want to share with the rest of the building, their peers, future guitar students, myself, and anyone else who stumbles upon this page or the link on Vimeo. The results are blended together in the 15′ video above, and are living proof of the often-overlooked talents hiding in our schools.
On his blog a few months back, Dean Shareskisaid something that I hope will become more and more a part of what happens in our music classrooms – both my guitar classes (2 next semester) and the varied orchestras, vocal jazz ensembles, and choirs under the tutelage of the mightily talented Ed Travato:
If we can show kids that their accomplishments are to be proud of, and that the accomplishments are not anonymous, we can teach self confidence, and true self esteem.
On a daily basis, I am wowed beyond words at the performances, compositions and general talents displayed in our wing of the building that – but for a few concerts strewn throughout the year – go largely unnoticed by these students’ peers, teachers, parents and members of our larger community. And while we do an incredible job of showcasing our brightest academic and athletic lights, the artists (musical or otherwise) in our school could be given much more attention, given that what they often create is kin to magic given their youthful energy, creativity and diverse passions. With the number of students taking guitar doubling next semester – and my proficiency with Garage Band, and iMovie improving daily – expect to hear a lot more from the Music Wing at our school.
Note on the musicians: Though the course is titled “Intro to Guitar,” a few of the players here had some working experience with other instruments or the guitar specifically before the course began. In all, the video is representative of the class’ composition, with approximately a third being “raw” beginners in September (never meaningfully held a guitar), another third with some experience, and a few more who were showing me things on a daily basis.
I couldn’t rightly follow the last mournful post concerning the demise of Vancouver’s Duthie Books with anything less than this heartwarming – and slightly political in inspiration – look at what technology has lent to what Stefana Broadbent calls the “democratization of intimacy.” As someone with a texting, emailing, (soon-to-be) video chatting mother, who lives in close contact with everyone in my life through the crystal ball of my cell phone, I appreciate the positive – and pervasive – spin put on this revolution in personal communication.
Broadbent looks at the historical underpinnings of our need to control the attention of democratic bodies, employees, and (naturally) students, and posits that there is no great threat in allowing people to direct their own attention while “on the clock,” and that such banning of personal communication is counter to a basic human need for intimacy with our friends and family.
I don’t have a No Cell Phones sign in my class (and am in fact generally excited at the prospect of my students arriving with iPhones, iTouches, and other smartphone \ palm devices). And yet I also don’t have problems (too often) with students texting, surfing, or otherwise abusing the use of these devices. In my class such tools are put to use to find and communicate and record information, to strengthen networks, and advance learning. And even when they’re not being used like that, who has time to text during one of our classes?
Some interesting moments for me:
On how many people we each know…
For 20 years, I’ve been looking at how people use channels such as email, the mobile phone, texting, etc. What we’re actually going to see is that, fundamentally, people are communicating on a regular basis with five, six, seven, of their most intimate sphere. Now, lets take some data. Facebook. Recently some sociologists from Facebook — Facebook is the channel that you would expect is the most enlargening of all channels. And an average user, said Cameron Marlow, from Facebook, has about 120 friends. But he actually talks to, has two-way exchanges with about four to six people on a regular base, depending on his gender.
Academic research on instant messaging also shows 100 people on buddy lists, but fundamentally people chat with two, three, four — anyway, less than five. My own research on cellphones and voice calls show that 80 percent of the calls are actually made to four people. 80 percent. And when you go to Skype, it’s down to two people.
On school (and work)’s division of public and private
If you think nursery, kindergarten, first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children, to make them used to staying long hours away from their family. And then the school enacts perfectly well, mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will start in offices, rituals of entry, rituals of exit, the schedules, the uniforms in this country, things that identify you, team-building activities, team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids, or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time. And of course, the major thing: learn to pay attention, to concentrate and focus your attention.
This only started about 150 years ago. It only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy, and of industrial revolution. When people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work. And when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach, where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere. So, until then, basically people were living on top of their trades. They were living on top of the land they were laboring. They were living on top of the workshops where they were working.
But no Facebook at school!
People have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations. And they are doing it massively. The Pew Institute, which produces good data on a regular basis on, for instance, in the States, says that — and I think that this number is conservative — 50 percent of anybody with email access at work, is actually doing private email from his office. I really think that the number is conservative. In my own research, we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o’clock in the morning, whatever the country. 75 percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones. 100 percent are using text.
Why we need to teach attention literacy
And every day, every single day, I read news that makes me cringe, like a 15-dollar fine to kids in Texas, for using, every time they take out their mobile phone in school. Immediate dismissal to bus drivers in New York, if seen with a mobile phone in a hand. Companies blocking access to IM or to Facebook. Behind issues of security and safety, which have always been the arguments for social control, in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who, in fact, has a right to self determine their attention, to decide, whether they should, or not, be isolated.And they are actually trying to block, in a certain sense, this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy.
It is not a matter of banning cell phones, or even giving them a constant working purpose in our classrooms (such that they are not idle and hence a distraction, or even to meet students “on their turf”), but rather, a focus on raising learners – and to continue in Broadbent’s vain: citizens – that exist within the emerging fluidity of the 24/7 social media cycle, and yet are empowered by its capabilities to unite, and connect, rather than cowed by its vapid and addictive lesser qualities.
Addendum: Literally as I published this post the first time, the following article came across my Tweetdeck feed from the New York Times – “If your kids are awake, they’re probably online.” Combined with some of the statistics above, the following is staggering to consider:
Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.
And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.
Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”
The advent of “the book itself [being] in the throes of a technological transformation, and book readers undergoing a major demographic shift” is often exalted as a revolution leaving no nostalgia for the dying bastions of literature and print that our local newspaper and independent booksellers represent. And while I most often share this excitement for the future, I cannot help but mourn for the loss of such local landmarks.
We are sad to tell you that Duthie Books 4th ave is closing.
After 53 years, the last Duthies bookstore is closing. Goodbye to all that!
The Duthie family: Cathy Legate, Celia Duthie and David Duthie, wish to thank all the customers, readers, staff, authors, and publishers who have been part of Duthie Books over the years, particularly our customers who have remained steadfast over these past 10 years at 4th Ave.
We have had 53 (mostly) happy years of bookselling in Vancouver. We have offered friendly recommendations, and stocked good books. For 53 years Duthies has provided a good book service to the city, championed BC and Canadian books, encouraged the public to read local writers, and helped to create a knowledgeable reading public. The book culture of Vancouver and BC has grown up and flourished around Duthies from publisher’s reps to publishing houses , authors, illustrators, designers, printers, literary festivals, and university writing and publishing programs have emerged in the Duthies milieu and many Duthies alumni work in all parts of the book trade.
Thank you and Good bye
Everybody knows that Independent bookstores have been under pressure from the ‘big box’ operations for many years now and it is clear that it is not going to get any better; the likes of Chapters, and Amazon are ruthless in their drive for market share and we cannot compete on price anymore. The book itself is in the throes of a technological transformation and book readers undergoing a major demographic shift.
It isn’t that I fear our burgeoning online networks won’t foster the same meccas of culture that the bound book’s trade and sale has meant to civilization, but while we straddle the boundary between old and new, I can’t help but think of what so many independent bookstores – in Little Rock, and across the American South, as well as in Vancouver and all points in between – have meant to my education, and done to help me quench my thirst for good books.
As part of our annual Eminent Person Study, our class takes a field trip into Vancouver to visit its local independent booksellers to absorb and celebrate the hubs of knowledge these places represent where they remain in our city. And I hope that we can continue in this tradition, as the power latent in walls piled floor-to-ceiling (and basement) in volumes which are each the result of the prolonged outpouring of an author’s passion are sacred places in the study of English. Like Ariana’s bookcases, they are monuments to literary souls.
We began sentence diagramming today (truly, that is; we have been studying grammar in the TALONS class now for almost two weeks, but that was all groundwork for today). Hopefully this driest of units (grammar) will eventually become a competitive and illuminating investigation of language that will help frame our spring-push through the English 9, 10 & (for some) 11 curriculum.
But in the meantime, the going will be tough. I will lecture. We will do endless exercises in a variety of formats, using student-generated examples, and there will be quizzes. A test.
For some, this will be enough. But in the vein of providing as much information, and as many resources as possible – such that, in my wildest fantasies, my students while away their evenings buried in syntax, prepositional phrases, and gerund-subjects – I offer this post as a means of preparing a compilation of grammar helpers for my young charges that I hope you will be able to help us compile into a Master List.
First off, everyone would do well to peruse the goings on in Mr. A’s class when it comes to sentence diagramming. Not only does he do a great job in the video below setting out the basics of our upcoming task, but has his class race one another in diagramming sentences, lending a special zest to this – less than titillating – English task.
Basic Sentence Parts & Patterns – a great look at most of the basic formations one will encounter in diagramming most basic sentences.
Some Amusing Political Sentences Diagrammed – All the heavy hitters are here: Bush, Obama, Lincoln, Jefferson (some of them fare better toward English grammar than others; you can decide where they sit).
Parts of Speech, Reviewed – What is a noun? What is a verb? The University of Ottawa has an astoundingly comprehensive and interactive Grammar Resource Centre, that is worth a look for its bevy of exercises, reviews and simple features. Highly recommended.
Hopefully, this is merely a start. Please join us in the comments as we move forward with this unit, and share your own favourite grammar resources in the comments (students: you too)!
I tend to side with bloggers like Dave Truss and Shelly Blake Plock, who see the advent of social media as a revolution in authorship that is transforming the way the world exchanges information. Whether politically, academically, or economically, information and access to it, and the ability to process it meaningfully – never mind the opportunity for everyone to create it – translates swiftly to power, and today’s technology is creating a tangible shift that is being felt in each and every field, not least of these: education.
Our students are faced with planning cultural outings over the course of the year that occasionally turn into full-fledged field trips. While other events are attended by handfuls of students – it is expected that each TALONS class member attends three cultural events – others take on such a pertinent range of learning opportunities, as tomorrow’s excursion downtown does, that we arrange our two blocks of study around a trip for all to benefit from.
Saskia has organized tomorrow’s adventure around catching the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibit on the early painting and photography (1860 – 1918) of the North American landscape, as well as the sketched collection of Canada’s Group of Seven, whom we have already studied as creators, and communicators of the Canadian identity.
On our way to the art gallery, we will also be visiting Vancouver’s Chinatown, and otherwise undertaking the journey from our suburb into the heart of downtown on foot and public transit, taking the bus and SkyTrain, arriving between the Olympic venues of BC andGM Place, and walking through the heart of the 2010 village.
Covering English, history, and science, our class spends a lot of time investigating, exploring and discussing our local environments and their influence on our individual and collective identities. And while the inspiration for these discussions is often the natural world – as our forays into the local woods, islands, inlets and otherwise bring about a sense of belonging in a place inhabited for some ten thousand years that cannot help but build one’s affinity – adopted or otherwise – with a sense of home, there is a strange energy that comes with our visits to The City.
In the fall, we make an annual research venture to the Vancouver Public Library and the downtown core’s independent booksellers to gather material for the initial stages of the Eminent Person Study. For many of our grade nine students, the trip is an introduction to Hastings Street, and the truly urban environment of western Canada’s temperate capital is capable of overwhelming many in the way that Manhattan must astound the youngsters of Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
Tomorrow though, these very same students head into the city with a vague sense of what to expect. Our intentions are to experience the city’s diverse culture, transit, people and public collection of art which is indisputably a national treasure. The benefits of such additions to one’s education are invaluable, as these glimpses of our urban center balance the culture of our wild places with a potency of vibrant life, architecture and identity that is unique to Vancouver. With the Olympics set to begin a month from today, we are irretrievably on the verge of the city never being the same again, and I look forward to seeing and sharing the trip with 27 sets of the youthful eyes that will take up the creation of our local, provincial and national identity in the Games’ impeding wake.
As a means of focusing the trip, and beginning the artistic creation of our collective identity beginning tomorrow (and continuing, really, every day), I will be asking the students to identify and report on a moment of experienced, realized, or witnessed Canadiana on their blogs. Whether this ends up as a blog post with a cell-phone video shot street side, or a reflection, description or meditation on a local landmark, character, or painting, I am not bothering to prescribe. But to live out the intentions of Goethe’s quotation that “A person sees in the world what they carry in their heart,” I look forward to the expressions that tomorrow afternoon yields.
As ever, I will be quick to share the postings as they come in.
Yesterday I gave my class a brief quiz to assess their knowledge of the parts of speech, as well as sentence parts. Twenty questions, multiple choice, during the grammar unit.
This is not, they tell me, fun stuff.
And I’ll admit that putting together their quiz the night before, trying to come up with examples for them to cull for nouns, verbs, and prepositions, subjects, objects, and predicates, I had been at a loss to add a luster to this most staid of assessment practices. My grammar professor in university – author of this terrific defense of being a stickler for English proficiency – composed worksheets and quizzes that were quirky glimpses of his personality I remember grinning at in homework and major tests, and I often like to do the same in my own material. But with the students’ blogs so rife with examples of original, captivating prose, I took the opportunity to piece the quiz’s examples together from their own words.
It took thirty seconds for a few smirks to turn to giggles and quickly exchanged glances between rows, and for a minute – during a grammar quiz – the class collectively grinned.
Here is the test in their own words:
1. If I peer out of my grated window, I can see the women outside the prison gates.
2. I remember my western films and drawer full of t-shirts.
3. Twenty-five years later, I came back, this time with a camera in hand.
4. She was struggling to run the house while looking after small children and living with an alcoholic husband.
5. The problem with being truthful is that it doesn’t always sell.
6. Everyone in this room is one of two things: a little kid or a grown up little kid.
7. There is no point in trying to barricade the city against German tanks that can easily blow the lovely French capital into a heap of rubble.
8. Our fingers had blisters, our voices got hoarse and our muscles ached…but it was worth it.
9. Without music, the inner me would dry out.
10. This universal language cuts through all barriers of time, place, race and culture.
11. Only now as adults, do we begin to understand the search for answers to the questions that matter most.
12. I stood up for what I believed in, and I was not afraid to fight to get it.
13. Our hope and determination led us to several victories, and at first it looked like all of our aims would be met.
14. I felt a surge of warmth run down my arm and into his and I knew that I did not hold him accountable for the actions of others as he had the courage to ask for forgiveness.
15. It was dreadful, knowing that our country had abandoned us, and if we didn’t catch a plane in the next 3 hours, we would be killed.
16. The government was very powerful, and gave us a daily terror.
17. Once Gibson found out about the Broadcaster, they called me up and I went out and talked to Tim McCarty and we wrote up a contract that day, which stated that I would help McCarty with designing the guitar, and it put my name the guitar as well.
18. We are a team and we must remain together.
19. Magic is the feeling of the beauty of the unknown, like listening to music, painting, stories, and art in general.
20. A mirror, a single pane of shimmering reflective glass, had started it all.
As a means to delve creatively into the cultural geography in Western Canada, our socials ten students will be undertaking the creation of public service announcements on issues relating to the present states of plants and animals across several different biomes. Having practiced digital storytelling skills in writing, performing and editing a brief time-line of human history in the local area last week, their sights will be set on documenting the evolving history of human interaction with, and use of, resource species such as the Rocky Mountains’ bears, the Plains’ buffalo, and the Pacific Coast’s salmon.
