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NY Town: 500 Residents, Five Bookstores

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 9, 2018| 2 Comments »

Photos: Rachel Watson
Barbara Balliet and Cheryl Clarke, owners of Blenheim Hill Books, one of five bookstores in an upstate New York village of 500 souls.

This village sounds like heaven to a book lover. I think the people who live there must be very happy. I’m pretty sure they are well-read.

Daniel A. Gross writes at Atlas Obscura, “The village of Hobart, New York, is home to two restaurants, one coffee shop, zero liquor stores, and, strangely enough, five independent bookstores. … Fewer than 500 people live in Hobart. Yet from Main Street, in the center of town, you’re closer to a copy of the Odyssey in classical Greek, or a vintage collection of Jell-O recipes, than a gas station.

“This literature-laden state of affairs emerged just after the turn of the millennium, when two residents of Manhattan, Diana and Bill Adams, stopped in Hobart during a trip through the Catskills. ‘We were both intrigued,’ says Bill, who worked as a physician for 40 years. … He and his wife, Diana, a former lawyer, were looking for retirement activities that they could pursue into their old age.

“During that first trip, in 2001, the couple spotted a corner store for rent at the end of Main Street. After speaking with the owner, they decided to rent it on the spot, and soon they were lugging their hefty personal book collection to Hobart, one rental car-load at a time. They didn’t expect to establish a book village in the process. ‘There was no plan,’ Bill says. They weren’t even sure whether their bookstore would survive in the foothills of the Catskills, three miles from the main highway.

“But they did own a lot of books. … That was how it became possible to buy a leather-bound collection of classical verse, or a set of classic political essays, in a tiny village more than two hours from New York City. Wm. H. Adams Antiquarian Books had a relatively quiet first year. But then Don Dales, a local entrepreneur and piano teacher, decided that one good bookstore deserves another, and opened his own shop. …

“Readers, like shoppers at the mall, often wandered back and forth between the shops. As more bookstores came to town, one of Hobart’s original booksellers (no one can quite remember who) began to describe the town as ‘the only book village east of the Mississippi.’ (Other American book towns include Stillwater, Minnesota, and Archer City, Texas.) …

“Barbara Balliet and Cheryl Clarke, a couple who spent their careers at Rutgers University, moved to Hobart at around that time. Clarke was surprised to find such a tiny community, far from cities or colleges, so overrun with books. …

” ‘She says, “You find all kinds of people who like books, and they’re not just college-educated.’ When the two women arrived, they met a bookseller who was ready to sell her stock, so Balliet bought it and they hopped into business themselves.

“Both women saw right away that, compared to other Catskills towns that have lost jobs and emptied out, Hobart seemed to be coming back to life. … The bookstores were a part of that. …

“Balliet says that, although she can’t make a living off the store, she can make a tidy profit — enough to grow a garden, travel, and buy more books. …

“According to the International Organisation of Book Towns, [the first] was Hay-on-Wye, Wales, founded in 1961 by Richard Booth. … Others include Wigtown, Scotland; Featherston, New Zealand; Kampung Buku, Malaysia; and Paju Book City, South Korea.

“As Hobart evolved, individual book shops have found their own specialty, like siblings who each choose their own path. ‘We try to complement each other,’ Balliet says. ‘Each one maintained its own identity and individuality,’ adds Bill Adams. Creative Corner Books, a cozy one-room shop that specializes in craft, cooking, and DIY books, is Hobart’s only shop with a knitting corner.”

More here.

Hat tip: @michikokakutani on twitter

Photo: Blenheim Hill Books in Hobart.

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Little People Who Lived in Iran

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 8, 2018| 7 Comments »

Photo: Mohammad M. Rashed
Of the roughly 200 houses in Makhunik, Iran, 70 or 80 stand only 5.0 feet to 6.5 feet tall. Even this boy would have to stoop to get in the door.

Long before the Hobbit, stories abounded around the world about miniature races of people. In Iran, there is actually a kind of proof.

As Shervin Abdolhamidi writes at the BBC, “In the first part of Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver washes ashore on the island country of Lilliput, where he encounters the Lilliputians, who stand barely taller than [6 inches].

“While Swift’s Lilliput is merely a fantasy, a comparable village exists in the eastern extremities of Iran. Up until around a century ago, some of the residents of Makhunik, a 1,500-year-old village roughly [47 miles] west of the Afghan border, measured a [little over a yard] in height. …

“In 2005, a mummified body measuring [10 inches] in length was found in the region. The discovery fuelled the belief that this remote corner of Iran, which consists of 13 villages, including Makhunik, was once home to an ancient ‘City of Dwarfs’. Although experts have determined that the mummy was actually a premature baby who died roughly 400 years ago, they contend that previous generations of Makhunik residents were indeed shorter than usual.

“Malnutrition significantly contributed to Makhunik residents’ height deficiency. Raising animals was difficult in this dry, desolate region, and turnips, grain, barley and a date-like fruit called jujube constituted the only farming. Makhunik residents subsisted on simple vegetarian dishes such as kashk-beneh (made from whey and a type of pistachio that is grown in the mountains), and pokhteek (a mixture of dried whey and turnip).

“Arguably the most astonishing dietary anomaly was a disdain for tea – one of the hallmarks of Iranian cuisine and hospitality.

“ ‘When I was a kid no-one drank tea. If someone drank tea, they’d joke and say he was an addict,’ recalled Ahmad Rahnama, referring the stereotype that opium addicts drink a lot of tea. The 61-year-old Makhunik resident runs a museum dedicated to Makhunik’s historic architecture and traditional lifestyle. …

“Although most of Makhunik’s 700 residents are now of average height, reminders of their ancestors’ shorter statures still persist. Of the roughly 200 stone and clay houses that make up the ancient village, 70 or 80 are exceptionally low. …

“Constructing these tiny homes was no easy feat, Rahnama said, and residents’ short stature wasn’t the only reason to build smaller houses. Domestic animals large enough to pull wagons were scarce and proper roads were limited, meaning locals had to carry building supplies by hand for kilometres at a time. Smaller homes required fewer materials, and thus less effort. Additionally, although cramped, smaller houses were easier to heat and cool than larger ones.”

Ah-ha! The wisdom of the Tiny House was tested centuries ago in a remote Iranian village! “The sun also riseth and goeth to his downsetting, and there is no new thing under the sun.”

More here.

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Hiring Overlooked Workers

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 7, 2018| 4 Comments »

Photo: Keith Bedford/Globe Staff
Djennyfer Joseph, who is from Haiti, filled an order at the Shake Shack on Newbury Street.

One of the places I volunteer to help adults learn English is Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) in Boston. The students come from all over the world as JVS is a resettlement agency as well as a job-placement agency, but the majority that I have met are either Latino or Haitian.

Although my focus is on helping people learn English, I’ve come to appreciate the way JVS prepares students for the workplace. It actually finds the jobs for them and has many partnerships with companies that need entry-level workers whether or not they speak much English yet. As Boston’s labor market gets tighter, more businesses are seeking out these workers.

Katie Johnston at the Boston Globe provides a window on the phenomenon.

“The lunch rush was just beginning at Shake Shack on Newbury Street and the all-American tasks of grilling burgers and making milkshakes were being handled by a crew made up almost entirely of immigrants — from Haiti, Senegal, Morocco, El Salvador, and Ethiopia.

“But these weren’t just people who happened to apply for a job: All of them were actively recruited by the restaurant chain, including those who spoke little English — a marked difference from years past, when only workers with strong English skills made the cut.

“Like other employers struggling to fill jobs in a tight labor market, Shake Shack has started seeking out candidates it might not have considered before. Spaulding Rehabilitation Network is opening the door to those with criminal backgrounds, in partnership with the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department. CVS is bumping up its efforts to attract workers with disabilities, while other employers are lowering experience and education requirements. …

“As Northeastern University economist Alicia Sasser Modestino puts it: ‘We have gone through all the easy-to-employ people, and we’re down to the hard-to-employ people.’

“And, as it turns out, some of these ‘hard-to-employ’ people make excellent workers.

“Djennyfer Joseph, 22, was enrolled in an English class for just three weeks at Jewish Vocational Service when her case manager called to tell her she had an interview at Shake Shack. ‘I was like, what, already?’ said Joseph, who came to the United States from Haiti in 2016. ‘It was so fast.’

“Joseph, who studied English in Haiti and also speaks French and Haitian Creole, has been at the Newbury Street restaurant for less than a year and is working toward becoming a cross-trainer, a kind of jack-of-all-trades role that comes with a bump in pay from $12 to $14 an hour. Joseph also recently became a certified nursing assistant, a profession in high demand, but plans to keep working at Shake Shack even after she finds a job in health care.

“Shake Shack managers say [the] roughly two dozen immigrants — many of them refugees — that the restaurant has hired through Jewish Vocational Service over the past year are more than making up for the decrease in the number and quality of college students and American-born adults applying for jobs there. …

“Of course, hiring these nontraditional workers can present challenges for employers, who might have to make adjustments for someone who is blind or has a limited grasp of English.

“At Shake Shack, non-native English speakers are taught specific restaurant phrases, such as ’86’ (get rid of) or ‘drop a wave’ (cook eight burgers at once). Many of them speak French, and translations are posted in the walk-in cooler and kitchen: ‘Changez vos gants means change your gloves’ and ‘Bon travail means good job.’ ”

More at the Boston Globe, here. The article also covers “Triangle in Malden, which trains and supports people with disabilities and [is seeing an uptick in] requests for workers, largely from health care and retail companies.” And you can read about how the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department helps employers place promising ex-offenders.

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Kids Learn about Indigenous Neighbors

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 6, 2018| 7 Comments »

Photo: Colombia Games
A scene from the ‘Ancient Wisdom’ smartphone games, which allow players to learn about Colombia’s indigenous peoples.

As we have discussed before, there are many cultures and languages in danger of dying out, often because few people know about them.

A Colombian game company has taken a step toward addressing that ignorance, providing school children with entertaining phone games to help them learn about their indigenous neighbors.

Joe Parkin Daniels writes for the Guardian, “In a simple wooden hut on a Caribbean beach, a young girl sits at the feet of her grandmother, who is crocheting a brightly coloured shoulder bag whose intricate design draws on the mythology of the Wayuu people.

“It’s the opening scene from a smartphone game that seeks to educate Colombian children about their country’s endangered indigenous cultures.

“Some 3.4% of the Colombia’s population belongs to 87 different indigenous groups that speak 71 languages. But experts warn that these diverse cultures are at risk of dying out, threatened by climate change and violent armed groups operating in isolated regions the state has not reached. The National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (Onic) estimates that 35 ethnic groups are at risk. …

“The games, available for iOS and Android devices, challenge players to learn the languages and cultures of the country’s indigenous groups, which vary from farming communities in the northern Darién jungle to nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Amazon. …

“The games narrate indigenous creation stories, and players must solve puzzles and draw the wild animals that populate indigenous myths.

“ ‘From one day to another these cultures could be lost,’ said Juan Nates, the CEO of Colombia Games, which recently relaunched the games. ‘When we started this project, I assumed there were three or four indigenous tribes; it was a shock to know how many there are – and how little we know about them.’

“The project was funded by the Sura Foundation, an educational subsidiary of the Sura banking group. The Sura Foundation has also sent about 200 teachers to schools to educate children about endangered cultures. …

“For Nates, raising awareness is key to preserving at-risk indigenous cultures. ‘People can’t worry about something, can’t do something, if they don’t know about it,’ he said. ‘It feels good to help with that.’ ”

Unfortunately, native children themselves usually don’t have smartphones, so it seems like the next step for a kindly philanthropist or foundation would be to get them some to use in school. (Can’t imagine anyone wants children looking at phones more than that.) And it would be nice if the different groups of kids could actually meet.

But what a good start! I’d love to see a game like this in parts of the US where there are large indigenous populations.

Finally, I don’t want to close without giving a shout-out to the Tomaquag Museum, which works to improve New Englanders’ knowledge of Rhode Island tribal culture through educational activities for children.

More at the Guardian, here.

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Protecting Wildlife on the Edge of Habitation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 5, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Photo: National Park Service
Female mountain lions (cougars) are an increasingly common sight in the mountains surrounding Southern California cities.

I like the idea of sharing space with wildlife, but there are limits. Not sure I want too many skunks in my suburban backyard or even one cougar. Richard Conniff at Yale360 explains how coexistence is working in a variety of people-inhabited places around the world.

“One morning not long ago, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka,” he writes, “I traveled with a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist on a switchback route up and over the high ridge of the Western Ghats. Our itinerary loosely followed the corridor connecting Bhadra Tiger Reserve with Kudremakh National Park 30 miles to the south.

“In places, we passed beautiful shade coffee plantations, with an understory of coffee plants, and pepper vines — a second cash crop — twining up the trunks of the shade trees. Coffee plantations managed in this fashion, connected to surviving patches of natural forest, ‘provide continuous camouflage for the predators’ — especially tigers moving through by night, my guide explained, and wildlife conflict was minimal.

“Elsewhere, though, the corridor narrowed to a thread winding past sprawling villages, and conservationists played a double game, part hand holding to help people live with large predators on their doorsteps, part legal combat to keep economic interests from nibbling into the wildlife corridor from both sides. It was a microcosm of how wildlife hangs on these days, not just in India, but almost everywhere in the world.

“For conservationists, protecting biodiversity has in recent years become much less about securing new protected areas in pristine habitat and more about making room for wildlife on the margins of our own urbanized existence.  Conservation now often means modifying human landscapes to do double-duty as wildlife habitat — or, more accurately, to continue functioning for wildlife even as humans colonize them for their homes, highways, and farms. …

“Corridor protection on the grand scale has achieved remarkable results, notably with the 2,000-mile long Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative. It aims to connect protected areas and to ensure safe passage for elk, grizzly bears, and other wildlife across 500,000 square miles of largely shared habitat, both public and privately owned.

“At the same time, research by Nick Haddad, a conservation biologist at the University of Michigan’s W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, has demonstrated substantial improvements in biodiversity from corridors as little as 25 yards in width, well within the range, he says, of ‘what’s reasonable in urban landscapes.’

Indeed, a new study from northern Botswana has found that elephants traveling from Chobe National Park to the nearby Chobe River will use corridors as small as 10 feet wide to traverse newly urbanized areas.

“Urban areas now increasingly recognize that it’s cheaper to protect clean water by buying up natural habitat both within their own borders and at the source, instead of installing expensive technology to purify it after the fact.  It’s not just about New York City purchasing huge chunks of the Catskills. North Carolina’s Clean Water Management Trust Fund, for instance, has also protected 500,000 acres of watershed and riverside habitat over the past 20 years — with enormous incidental benefits for wildlife. …

“Scientists were stunned in October by the report [that] that over a 27-year period, from 1989 to 2016, the population of flying insects at nature reserves across Germany had collapsed, down by 76 percent overall, and 82 percent in the peak mid-summer flying season. Most of the likely causes — including habitat fragmentation, deforestation, monoculture farming, and overuse of pesticides — were factors outside the borders of these ostensibly protected areas.”

For more on global efforts to protect biodiversity near human habitation (and the unlikely entities getting on board, such as power companies, highway systems, and active train systems), click here. You can also learn ways of protecting beneficial insects outside your home at my friend Jean’s Meadowmaking website, here.

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How Iceland Kicked Teen Drinking

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 4, 2018| 3 Comments »

Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor
Iceland has cut teen alcohol and drug use with fun after-school activities and a 10 pm curfew (age 18 and under).

Sometimes it takes a huge, intractable problem to motivate people to find serious solutions. That’s what Iceland discovered after it was overwhelmed by an epidemic of teen substance abuse.

Sara Miller Llana writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “In the late 1980s, when Björgvin Ívar Guðbrandsson was a teenager, alcohol and school dances went hand-in-hand. While he was later to drinking than his peers – more interested in playing soccer and guitar – when he did start around age 16, he would smuggle alcohol in his guitar case into school events.

“ ‘I think the adults just turned a blind eye,’ says Mr. Guðbrandsson. ‘The culture was, I think, “they’re just kids. As long as they aren’t fighting, it’s okay.” ‘

“Today, as a teacher at Langholt school in Reykjavik where he once studied, he says that if a student were to show up drunk to a dance, it would  be such a scandal that the school principal would likely call child protective services.

“In reality, that rarely happens because substance abuse on a wide scale has essentially become a ‘non-issue,’ says Guðbrandsson. Alcohol and school dances, in other words, don’t go together in Iceland today.

“This school is hardly alone. Teen drinking – as well as teen smoking, marijuana use, and abuse of other drugs – has plummeted across Iceland in the past two decades as academics, policy makers, and parents joined forces to clamp down. …

“Beyond adolescent alcohol and drug use, Iceland has shifted thinking on youth culture itself, making it by many accounts more innocent and carefree. It has expanded parents’ notions of childhood and the importance of family time, while reinforcing the maxim that it ‘takes a village’ to raise a child, says Hrefna Sigurjónsdóttir, director of the national umbrella for parental organizations in schools, Home and School, one of the key players in the federal-state government program now known as Youth in Iceland.

“She calls it an ‘awakening’ that has taken place at home, school, and beyond. ‘I think people are not confused anymore about, “is this kid an adult or not.” ‘ ”

Just-say-no substance-abuse prevention programs didn’t work.

“Substance use kept going up, says Inga Dora Sigfúsdóttir, cofounder of the Icelandic Center for Social Research and Analysis (ICSRA), which is the data hub for Youth in Iceland. ‘A group of people came together, sat down and said, “we need to find a different approach. This is obviously not working.” ‘

“One of the problems was an ambiguous view of the line between child and adulthood, she says.

“One of the most absolute rules to take effect was legal curfews: Kids ages 12 and younger must be home at 8 p.m. in the winter and 10 p.m. in the summer. Thirteen to 16-year-olds must be home at 10 p.m. in the winter and by midnight in the summer, even when the sun is still blazing. …

“Parents began to sign agreements, through schools and parental organizations, with various pledges such as not allowing unsupervised parties in their homes or spending at least an hour a day with their children. …

“Municipalities funded and expanded after-school activities, from sports to gymnastics, to music, art, and ballet. The basic idea is to keep kids busy – and out of trouble – and help them find meaning in their lives that dissuades them from seeking alcohol or drugs in the first place.

“At its heart, it takes the onus off the teens themselves – the opposite of the D.A.R.E. approach – and places it on the community. …

“ ‘It does not concern teaching individual children about responsible choices, or even about making them responsible for their own behavior,’ says Álfgeir Kristjánsson, a former data analyst at ICSRA who is now an assistant professor of public health at West Virginia University. ‘The Icelandic approach … is to strengthen the societal and protective factors and drive down risk factors.’ ”

Makes such sense. When I was a teacher decades ago, I really didn’t buy into the idea that students who got in trouble were always making “choices.” If there was trouble at home, for example, kids were often tumbling into risky behaviors because of depression or other psychological stressors. The Icelandic approach seems to have opened the eyes of more adults to the complexity of the issue.

More here.

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Actors Choose Roles, Audiences Pick Plays

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 3, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
The new director at Shakespeare’s Globe, herself an actor, wants to take the hierarchy out of theater.

I’ve been reading a fascinating book about the making of Tony Kushner’s monumental Angels in America, which you may recall is a play about AIDS, the Reagan years, the awakening of gay activism, Mormons, the unscrupulous McCarthy-ite Roy Cohn, bias, love, and theater.

I’m still in the beginning, where I’m learning about a 1970s political-theater group in San Francisco called the Eureka. One of its high-minded goals was to take hierarchy out of theater.

That’s a goal yet to be met, or yet to be met for long, as appears from this article on Shakespeare’s theater by Mark Brown at the Guardian.

“The new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe has promised to give more power to the casts and audiences of plays, saying she wants to dismantle theatre hierarchies.

“Michelle Terry announced a new season opening with Hamlet and As You Like It. Eye-catchingly, none of the actors turning up for rehearsals will know which role they are taking, with the whole ensemble choosing who plays whom.

“In a similar vein, when the plays The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night go on tour, some audiences will be able to choose which one they want to see that night. …

“Some eyebrows were raised because Terry, while a hugely accomplished Shakespearean actor, has never directed. [In January] Terry said theatre culture was too ‘director-centric. with ‘too much responsibility on one person.’ …

“The first two plays will be presented by a Globe ensemble of 12 actors, two co-directors and one designer. The ensemble will decide who plays, for example, Hamlet or Rosalind.

“Terry said she had chosen Hamlet and As You Like It because they were both written around 1599, the year the original Globe was built, and were conceived with its architecture in mind.

“The democratisation will continue later in the season when one group of eight actors will have to learn three plays. …

“Terry promised diversity across the organisation, with the bottom line being: ‘We just have to do it. We can’t keep talking about it. … If our job is to hold a mirror up to nature then we’ve got to truly reflect the society in which we live.’

“Other new measures include allowing people into rehearsals, particularly school parties who might be heartened to see that even the actors don’t understand what some words and lines might mean.”

More here.

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Saxophones Are Big in This Chinese Village

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 2, 2018| 4 Comments »

A saxophone made in China.

I’ve always liked the sound of the saxophone, and when I listen to my favorite jazz station, WICN.org, I often try to identify which kind I’m hearing — alto, tenor … Identifying instrument sounds is not my strong suit, but I’m working on it.

Recently Javier C. Hernández published an unusual story about saxophones at the New York Times. It turns out the mellow instruments are quite popular in China, especially in the village that makes them.

“By day,” he reports, “the factory workers pound sheets of brass into cylinders and slather metal buttons with glue. By night, they take their creations to the street and begin to play.

“The soothing melodies flow through cornfields, street markets and public squares. They interweave with the shouts of street vendors hawking tofu and men playing mah-jongg.

“This is the music of Sidangkou, a northern Chinese village of 4,000, where one sound rules above all else: the saxophone. …

“The saxophone has never had a large following in China, in part because it was long associated with jazz, individuality and free expression. After the Communist revolution of 1949, officials denounced the instrument for producing the ‘decadent music of capitalists.’

“But here in this town, the saxophone is king.

“Sidangkou, which calls itself China’s ‘saxophone capital,’ produces about 10,000 saxophones per month at more than 70 factories, according to Chinese news media. ..

“Factories in the region now produce thousands of oboes, trumpets and tubas each year. Yet nothing seems to have captured the imagination of people here like the saxophone. …

“Assembly line workers began trying their hand at the instrument, mimicking famous players they saw on television. By the mid-2000s, saxophone fever had broken out.

“Fu Guangcheng came to Sidangkou in 1995 to work as a polisher on an assembly line. He quickly fell in love with the sound of the saxophone and started formal studies.

“ ‘It’s my career, it’s my life,’ said Mr. Fu, a factory worker. … ‘It’s a miracle that even rural people who are used to holding hoes in our hands can make Western instruments.’ …

“Many of the players are self-taught or follow along with online tutorials. … Some of the more advanced players in the village now use live-streaming apps to broadcast lessons online.”

As I was looking for photos, I discovered that Chinese depictions of Santa Claus nearly always show him playing a sax. Max Fisher of the Washington Post wondered why and discovered that no one knows. Maybe, one reader suggested, it’s because the saxophone is “cool and romantic”!

More at the New York Times, here.

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Apprenticeships Spell Success in Germany

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 1, 2018| 4 Comments »

Photo: John Ydstie/NPR
Apprentice industrial clerk Henrik Tillmann assembles a valve for a commercial aircraft galley kitchen at Hebmuller Aerospace near Dusseldorf, Germany.

The old-time way of learning a trade — by working as a low-fee apprentice for a few years — never completely died out and remains the reason Germany is a manufacturing powerhouse.

In the second of three reports at National Public Radio (NPR), John Ydstie explains.

“Manufacturing accounts for nearly a quarter of Germany’s economy. In the U.S., it’s about half that. A key element of that success is Germany’s apprenticeship training program.

“Every year, about half a million young Germans enter the workforce through these programs. They provide a steady stream of highly qualified industrial workers that helps Germany maintain a reputation for producing top-quality products.

“Henrik Tillmann is among the current crop of young apprentices. The 19-year-old is training at Hebmuller Aerospace to be an industrial clerk, which qualifies him to do a variety of jobs from materials purchasing to marketing. Each week he spends three-and-a-half days at the company’s production center, and a day and a half at a government-funded school. Before he can become a clerk, though, Tillmann must first learn how to build the valves Hebmuller sells to aerospace companies.

“He will be a better clerk, says his boss, Axel Hebmuller, because he’ll know the valves inside out when he describes them for customers. …

“Hebmuller says only 3 of the 16 people who work for his company went to university. …

“Felix Rauner, a professor at the University of Bremen, says … the U.S. approach to vocational education has been ineffective partly because it’s often not directly connected to specific jobs at real companies.

“Also, says Rauner, U.S. society has stigmatized vocational education, so most American parents see college as the only path to status and a good career for their children. Rauner says there’s a troubling trend in that direction in Germany, too. But, in Germany there’s still lots of prestige attached when someone, trained through apprenticeship, achieves master status.”

In the US, entrepreneur and philanthropist Gerald Chertavian had to pretty much reinvent the wheel for his nonprofit Year Up, building partnerships with companies to give his organization’s young adults serious internships. The internships are not quite apprenticeships but they lead to real skills and real jobs. Year Up’s expansion around the nation is proof of the pudding.

I’m also familiar with a genuine US apprenticeship effort in Rhode Island. Led by Andrew Cortés, founder of Building Futures and Apprenticeship Rhode Island, it produces the skilled construction workers that employers look for.

For more on Germany’s approach, click here.

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Turtles Head to School

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 28, 2018| 4 Comments »

Photo: Don Lyman
Threatened Blanding’s turtles have been parceled out to Massachusetts teachers and students to protect until big enough for the Grassroots Wildlife Conservation to return them to the wild.

I’m increasingly impressed with the science projects that schools are pursuing these days. My kindergarten grandchild, for example, brings home interesting science kits regularly — the latest involving batteries, wires, and electricity.

In Carlisle, Massachusetts, students are giving a leg up to tiny Blanding’s turtles, as Don Lyman, of the radio show Living on Earth (LOE), reports. The edited transcript follows.

“Lyman: On a clear but cold February day, snow from a recent storm blanketed the outdoor basketball courts at the Carlisle School. But inside the tank where two young turtles lived [Tsunami and Squirtle], it was a balmy 80 degrees or so, and the classroom itself teemed with excitement. I found myself among perhaps the only people with more questions than journalists: fifth graders. …

“Chris Denaro’s students grilled Emilie Schuler, the Director of Programs and Operations at Grassroots Wildlife Conservation, about everything from how many turtles are left in the world, to potential hazards the littlest ones face. …

“The kids were in the midst of a yearlong project to take care of two baby turtles, to give the hatchlings a head start in life, so they’d have a much better chance of surviving to adulthood and boosting the threatened species’ numbers when they’re released in the spring. … The kids were pros at feeding the turtles, giving them fresh water and weighing them, but they still had lots to learn about some amazing things the hatchlings – which they’d named Tsunami and Squirtle — could do. …

“Schuler: Can a turtle’s body – is it okay for a turtle, for its body to be 33 degrees? … That’s the really cool thing. It’s like kind of a superpower of turtles and of reptiles that they can have their body so, so cold. They can drop their body temperature like that and still be fine.

“Lyman: In order to still be okay with such a low body temperature, Blanding’s turtles have to slow down. Wa-a-ay down.

“Schuler: They’ve measured turtles that are this cold, and their heart was beating only one time every ten minutes. … Turtles have the ability to hold their breath for a really, really, really long time. Scientists have even done studies where they’ve purposely put turtles in water where they’ve bubbled out all the oxygen. Those turtles stayed under the water super-chilled for five months. …

“Your Blanding’s turtle cousins that are outside … in the winter right now … even if they were the same age as Tsunami, come April or May, when it starts getting warmer and they come out – what’s the size difference gonna be between Tsunami and their cousins?

“Lyman: The answer: around 7 or 8 times the weight! That’s the main reason why the headstart program is proving so valuable for boosting Blanding’s turtle population numbers. In just eight months, the kids make the baby turtles look like four-year olds. So they’re less attractive to predators like raccoons, herons, and bullfrogs, and much more likely to make it out in the wild.”

When I was in fifth grade, the teacher let a praying mantis egg case hatch in the classroom (and all over the school). That was certainly memorable, but I think the contemporary science projects involve more learning.

More at Living on Earth, here.

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Humor in Airline Safety Videos

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 27, 2018| 2 Comments »

Deltalina was one of the first to introduce a note of humor in an airline-safety video. The question is, Do passengers retain life-saving information better — or worse?

The last place most of us would look for humor is in an airline-safety video, but as Benjamin Schneider writes at CityLab, comedy in safety information has become a thing.

“Ever since the introduction of in-flight entertainment screens in the 1980s,” writes Schneider, “airline safety videos have been a quintessential feature of commercial aviation. …

“But since the late Aughts, these straight-faced public service announcements have almost completely disappeared, to be replaced by spunky pop-culture riffs, irreverent humor, and eye-catching production.

“In an industry governed by such strict regulations, there is very little airlines can do to differentiate themselves from their competition. So, in 2007, when the airline startup Virgin America sought to carve out its niche as the airline that ‘can make flying fun again, … the in-flight safety video was one of the few features that could be tinkered with. …

“In the video, an unlikely cast of characters, including a toreador and a tech-obsessed nun, demonstrate the safety instructions, while the video’s lead animator, Gordon Clark, winkingly describes their mundane acts. … ‘It made people relaxed when they sat on the plane,’ Clark said. …

“Ironically, airline safety virality was first achieved by a relatively strait-laced video from Delta in 2008. The masses became obsessed with the video’s lead presenter, whose theatrical ‘no smoking’ finger wag earned her something of a cult following, and the moniker ‘Deltalina.’ … In the ensuing years, airlines have pulled out nearly every gimmick imaginable to make their safety video a YouTube sensation. …

“No airline has pursued this strategy with the dedication of Air New Zealand, which has released 14 high-concept videos since 2009, racking up a total of 108 million views online. … [Their first] video’s popularity paved the way for ever more ambitious projects, like ‘The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made,’ a Lord of the Rings tribute complete with dwarves, elves, and battle scenes. …

“The contemporary crop of airline safety videos appear to have a contradiction at their heart. On the one hand, they are designed to compel passengers to pay attention to important safety information that they might otherwise ignore. On the other hand, the videos contain so much extraneous data that it can be difficult to catch the actual instructions. …

“[Some observers are] skeptical of their effectiveness. Brett Molesworth, an aviation researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, told the Wall Street Journal that people tend to remember the funny parts of these videos, rather than the safety instructions. … Les Dorr, an FAA spokesperson, said that the FAA is in the process of revising their guidelines for these presentations.”

More at CityLab, here.

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How Virtual Reality Relieves Dementia

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 26, 2018| 4 Comments »

Photo: Richard Saker for the Guardian
“Oh, this is fun. I feel as if I’m at the party.” Seniors fighting off dementia benefit from Wayback Virtual Reality.

I often think I overdid it in early 2000 repeating myself over and over to encourage an impaired relative to remember her childhood, but an article by Giulia Rhodes in the Guardian suggests that stirring up old memories can indeed be helpful to seniors with dementia.

“In a comfortable armchair, glass of sherry at her side,” writes Rhodes, “Elspeth Ford is getting to grips with her 3D goggles. …

“Elspeth, 79, is a resident at Langham Court, a dementia care home in Surrey, and today she is trialling a virtual reality project, Wayback, that has been designed especially for those living with dementia. Peering into her headset, Elspeth is temporarily transported to 2 June 1953, and a street party for the Queen’s coronation. She is enjoying a children’s fancy-dress competition. ‘I love that boy dressed as an Oxo cube,’ she laughs.

“This is the first in what will become a series of virtual reality films set at historic moments, and available free for those with dementia, their families and carers to enjoy together through a mobile phone and a pair of inexpensive 3D goggles. The idea was developed by three advertising creatives with family experience of dementia.

“For Camilla Ford, Elspeth’s daughter, it is an exciting concept. ‘It gave Mum a huge amount of pleasure and really engaged her,’ she says. … ‘She was immersed in this and it took her back to a time of happy memories, when she was productive and emotionally fulfilled.’

“Elspeth has had vascular dementia for seven years, and finding a point of contact increasingly involves moving to where she is, rather than trying to bring her into the present, says Camilla. ‘If she is in a place she can identify with, and we can see it too, we are somehow equalised. We are at a stage where we aren’t trying to create memories but to relish positive emotions, dropping the expectation of who Mum was and just being with the person in front of us.’

“Elspeth sets off for lunch with her son Dominic, still smiling. It is unlikely, says Camilla, that her mother will remember what has made her feel happy. ‘The point is that she feels uplifted, not necessarily that she knows why.’

“Dan Cole, one of Wayback’s creators, agrees. ‘If the film can open some memories, start a conversation or bring a smile, that’s a success,’ he says. The idea began to form after a drive around Camden, north London, with his father, then in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. ‘It was his old stomping ground and he kept recognising places and telling me little tales; the pub his dad drank in, where he hung about with his mates, even an alley where he once got into a scrap,’ says Dan. ‘In that fleeting moment it was so clear in his mind. I could ask questions. He could tell me things.’ …

“The resulting film was made over two days in a north-London street (satellite dishes and other modern trappings digitally removed) with a volunteer cast and crew of 187 and painstakingly sourced period props, costumes and menu (fish-paste sandwiches, notes one Langham Court resident approvingly). …

“Langham Court’s philosophy is based on the Butterfly Household model, devised by Dr David Sheard, a dementia specialist and CEO of Dementia Care Matters, who is supporting Wayback. ‘People living with dementia become more feeling beings than thinking beings,’ he says. ‘Feelings endure and are more to be trusted when facts diminish.’ ”

More.

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There’s Something about Twins and Street Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on February 25, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Joseph Eid / Agence France-Presse
Painting the word “Peace” in Arabic over 85 rooftops on a Tripoli street for a project led by twin Lebanese street artists over a three-year period.

Nearly everyone wants peace. Nearly everyone expresses that over and over. You would think we would have peace by now. One large-scale expression of the world’s fervent wish in a city badly damaged by conflict took three years to accomplish.

Agence France-Presse reports, “From the street below it’s easy to miss the workers daubing rooftops as part of an ambitious art project in two battle-scarred neighbourhoods of Lebanon’s Tripoli.

“But the Ashekman street art duo behind the project say that once they’re done, the pistachio-green rooftops they are painting will spell out the word ‘Salam’ — Arabic for ‘peace’ — on a scale visible from space.

“The project, three years in the making, is the brainchild of 34-year-old twins Mohammed and Omar Kabbani. …

“They chose a site spanning the Bab Al Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen neighbourhoods, which have fought successive rounds of armed clashes in recent years. …

“Peace has been elusive in Sunni-majority Bab Al Tebbaneh and the adjacent Alawite-majority Jabal Mohsen. Fighters from the two areas have battled each other periodically for decades, and the war in neighbouring Syria, pitting a Sunni-dominated uprising against Alawite president Bashar Al Assad, has further stirred existing enmities. …

“Ashekman’s project runs on either side of the infamous Syria Street separating the two neighbourhoods. The duo hired workers from across the divide to help them complete the project.

” ‘All of the workers live here in the neighbourhood, they lived the conflict, some of them got shot,’ Omar Kabbani said.

” ‘Two years ago they were hiding from bullets … now they’re painting their rooftops proudly.’

“The brothers are sensitive to the observation that their project does little to address the most obvious scars of fighting or the area’s desperate poverty, often identified as a catalyst of the violence.

“They say they chose paint that will seal rooftops against rain and reflect ultra-violet rays, cooling the homes below.

“And in order to paint the rooftops, they had to negotiate with residents and often had to clear large amounts of trash and debris. …

“Walid Abu Heit, 29, joined the project as a painter after hearing about it from March, a Lebanese NGO that has worked on reconciliation and rehabilitation in the rival neighbourhoods. …

“He and other workers lugged heavy tubs of paint up seven floors and began plastering a roof with the fluorescent green, which flecked his hands and boots.

” ‘It’s an amazing project,’ he said, smiling and shading his eyes from the blazing sun.

” ‘The word peace, it’s a great word … we haven’t seen it for a long time, now we’re seeing it again.’

Read more here; also at National Public Radio, here.

And ponder the power of artistic twins here, at one of my posts on street artists Os Gemeos. The Greenway’s first giant mural, which they painted, is still my favorite. It makes you think about “The Other” as a sweet little kid.

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Fun with Micro Museums

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 24, 2018| 2 Comments »

Photo: MICRO
A visitor examines the MICRO mollusk museum.

Good things come in small packages, even museums, as we saw in this 2013 post. Since then, enthusiasm for micro museums has only increased, as Margaret Carrigan reports at the Observer.

“When scientist Amanda Schochet and designer Charles Philipp unofficially started MICRO, they wanted to make the world’s smallest museum about mollusks, a passion of Schochet’s.

“They realized that might be easy, considering there were no real mollusk museums at all. But as they started developing content and design, the pair realized that even small museums could have a big impact.

“In a year-and-a-half, they’ve created five 6-foot-tall natural history museums that have been installed around New York City, with the latest unveiled in mid-December at the Ronald McDonald House on the Upper East Side. The goal for Schochet and Philipp is to foster equal access to fundamental knowledge by creating installations that can be found outside of the traditional museum setting. …

“With intentions to become the most-visited museum in the country within five years … Schochet and Philipp plan to debut a new MICRO museum module every year, starting with the core sciences before delving into math and art. Their first physics edition, the Museum of Perpetual Motion, [was scheduled to] launch in early February. …

“Philipp: It started as a kind of tongue-in-cheek idea just between my partner, Amanda, and I. Amanda is a computational ecologist and knew there was a really rich history of mollusks in New York, especially oysters. So when she first moved here a few years ago, we started looking into whether we could go to a museum about mollusks. But we couldn’t find one, so we joked that if we made the smallest mollusk museum it would also de facto be the largest. …

“It wasn’t until we had a four-hour wait in a doctor’s office that it seemed like there could really be a market for something like this. There was a captive audience right in front of us looking for entertainment, and something to distract them that wasn’t just whatever rerun was on the office television. It was then we realized a mini-museum could have an impact, and we bounced the idea off some friends who worked in museums who really saw some sort of potential.

“We started doing some research and found that something like 90 percent of museum visitors across the U.S. are non-Hispanic whites. We also found that there are 135 museums in Manhattan, but in the Bronx — which has a comparable population — there are only eight. These both seemed like problems that could be addressed by bringing more museums to areas where there were few institutions with larger populations of minorities. And one way to do that was make small museums that could be installed anywhere. …

“We don’t have enough room in MICRO to get into a lot of history and context, so we have to be really mindful about how to present information and how best to do it that would entice the average passerby: How do we make someone with little knowledge of the subject who is perhaps just in the middle of running an errand and totally focused on the day-to-day stuff they need to be doing interested and curious enough to spend 10 minutes learning?

“We’ve come up with some interesting ways of solving that. In the mollusk museums, we’ve installed an eye-catching hologram in the base of it that boasts a digital aquarium. And we chose to use recognizable B-movie alien characters as a way of introducing mollusks to the viewer, since we found that many of them are based on these organisms because they seem so otherworldly.” More here.

I love that they want to get their museums into the Department of Motor Vehicles. Now that is an idea whose time has come!

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A Teacher’s Hints on Creative Writing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 23, 2018| 7 Comments »

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Art: Dawn Marie Livett
Music goes hand-in-hand with other creative endeavors. This teacher writes, “Through music, from classical to popular, kids encounter themselves and experience the feelings and sensations associated with their worlds.”

Jeffrey Pflaum, a reader of this blog who taught children creative writing for many years, asked me if I’d be interested in reporting on some of his techniques. I am. This post is adapted from one of his blogs.

Pflaum writes that using experiences, reflections, and insights geared to “struggling, reluctant, and average readers and learners” in grades 3 to 6 helps them develop. “One key step to learning about any world is to know our selves first. …

“As an introduction to reading and writing I deal with kids’ inside worlds. What does each child have to know about mind, self, and imagination in order to learn? What makes up this inner universe? Why is it so important to know the contents of our worlds before studying the worlds of different subjects? …

“My lessons connect with the children’s inner lives.  It doesn’t help when education builds test walls around creativity and motivation, two huge channels to learning and developing a passion for reading. Education’s role is to open up students’ worlds so they are receptive to new ideas. … Motivation becomes self-motivation and education means self-education.”

Pflaum finds that helping children to develop self-knowledge enables them to tap their inner worlds and use their life experiences to enrich both schoolwork and everyday life. “Thoughts, ideas, feelings, fantasies, daydreams, dreams, dialogues, monologues, memories, reflections, and all the mental image pictures are the stuff of our inside worlds,” he says.

In one exercise, “kids close their eyes, visualize words in the mind, describe them orally and in writing, and then draw/sketch what they ‘see.’ Some examples of words for this practice exercise are: dog, rose, apple, room, sky, rainbow, clouds, parrot, pencil, pen.

“From here, I’ll build two-word sentences such as: Frogs hop; children play; birds fly. And then I probe what they are viewing with questions: What are you looking at? What pictures do you see in your mind? What thoughts are triggered? What feelings are connected to the image? Can you describe the mind-picture and your experience? Draw/Sketch the sentence you visualized (crayons, markers, pencil, or pen).”

Another exercise I liked had to do with using music for creative inspiration. It starts with a counting technique and progresses to listening to music, with the following instructions: “ ‘Sit back and relax. Put your heads gently down on the desks, close your eyes, and enjoy the music. When it’s over, write whatever you experienced inside yourself.’ … They learn to appreciate the contemplation process and the music as it soothes them into their worlds and journeys of self-discovery. …

“Through music, from classical to popular, kids encounter themselves and experience the feelings and sensations associated with their worlds.  They see what brings them up and down and learn to create a positive attitude towards contemplation, reflection, and self-expression.”

More ideas for teachers can be found at http://www.JeffreyPflaum.com. Some approaches might also work with adult students.

Educator Jeffrey Pflaum

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https://www.bamradionetwork.com/home/experiences-reflections-and-insights-a-project-in-reading-and-emotional-intelligence

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