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Inspired Teaching Involves Empathy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Ashoka, which defines itself as “a global organization that identifies and invests in leading social entrepreneurs,” has a blog called Changemakers that might interest readers. The March 26 post is on teaching and empathy.

Nora Cobo at the Center for Inspired Teaching writes, “While test-based assessments are essential, they reflect only one type of data and one kind of skill that students need. Schools must also focus on students’ social-emotional growth in order to create sound learning environments. Such settings help students develop interpersonal competence and improve short- and long-term academic and personal outcomes.

“Center for Inspired Teaching partners with teachers to change the school experience for students to include these critical skills. … Instead of looking at students’ behavior as something to be corrected, we train teachers to look at students’ behavior in terms of unmet needs. In particular, we ask teachers to consider students’ needs for Autonomy, Belonging, Competence, Developmental appropriateness, and Engagement — the ABCDE of learners’ needs.

“For example, a teacher may encounter a student who repeatedly gets frustrated and leaves his seat to chat with classmates when he encounters a complicated geometry problem. Rather than assuming the student has a bad attitude, the teacher strives to figure out which of the student’s needs is not being met. The teacher may discover that the student learns best when physically engaged – and offer him the option to tackle the equation by measuring distances by walking.

“Similarly, a teacher may find a student who refuses to work in a group setting, saying she just prefers to work alone. In examining the student’s unmet needs, that teacher may discover that the student longs for more autonomy with her work – and empower that student to create on her own.

“The teacher may discover, upon further engaging her skills of empathy, that other members of the group aren’t treating the student kindly, and therefore the student’s need for belonging is not being met when classroom groups are self-selected. …

“Placing empathy at the core of teachers’ practice ensures that students learn how to think, not just what to think – and go beyond covering the curriculum to learn the skills they need in order to thrive.”

More here.

Photograph: Kate Samp, Strategies for Children

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A Building that Fosters Creativity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

John pointed me to an article on the kinds of work environments that encourage innovation.

Aimee Groth at Business Insider writes, “In his article, Groupthink, the New Yorker‘s Jonah Lehrer says there are two types of brainstorming — a free-for-all exchange of ideas in a structured environment, and a random, unplanned debate. Only the second type really works.

“He says M.I.T.’s famous Building 20 … became one of the most innovative spaces in the country because it fostered the best kind of brainstorming.

“The building was created to provide extra room for scientists during WW II, reports Lehrer, and ‘violated the Cambridge fire code, but it was granted an exemption because of its temporary status. … The walls were thin, the roof leaked, and the building was broiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. Nevertheless Building 20 quickly became a center of groundbreaking research, the Los Alamos of the East Coast.’

“It wasn’t demolished after the war because there were too many students and too little space on campus. So the building became a hodgepodge of offices, with professors and students from all different departments squeezed in small spaces and long corridors. …

” ‘Walls were torn down without permission; equipment was stored in the courtyards and bolted to the roof. … The space also forced solitary scientists to mix and mingle.’ ”

More.

Makes me think of the layout at Mass Challenge, the accelerator incubator for entrepreneurs that I blogged about here. (Did I mention that a family member read that post, sent in an application under the wire, powered through layers of screening, and is now working away as part of the class of 2012?)

The Mass Challenge space is not dangerous like Building 20, but the founders probably heard about the benefits of Building 20’s layout through their connection to MIT. The Mass Challenge work space is an unfinished floor in an upscale office building on the waterfront, 1 Marina Park. Everything is open and interactive.

The harbor views are a bonus unknown at Building 20.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Looking at Leaves

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 22, 2012| 3 Comments »

Today I’m sorting through pictures I’ve been taking of leaves. I think I can identify most of them, although I will have to check in with plant-identification site MisterSmartyPlants for the soft needles (larch?).

I’m especially fond of the lacy ginkgo leaf. The purple leaf I believe to be smoke tree. The thistle leaf says, “Approach at your own risk.” The wild grape clusters are a giveaway for the broad leaves drooping over the pond.

By the way, if you like identifying plants, it’s fun to see how many you can help people with at MisterSmartyPlants.

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eBay Bans Necromancy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »

In a Wired story titled “eBay Bans Sales of Spells, Curses, Advice and Other ‘Intangibles,’ ” Liat Clark writes:

“The online auction house announced the changes as part of a routine cleanup that will also see recipe and dieting-advice lots stricken from the site.

“The decision, it says, is down to ‘a large number of misclassified items and eBay policy violations’ that often lead to ‘issues that can be difficult to resolve.’

“Presumably a few angry customers unable to get a love spell working have caused eBay strife over the years. …

“Among the items that will be taken down and prohibited from August 30, 2012, are ‘advice; spells; curses; hexing; conjuring; magic; prayers; blessing services; magic potions; healing sessions; work from home businesses and information; wholesale lists, and drop shop lists.’ ”

Where will the magicians go now? Seems a shame to lose something so quixotic, but business is business, and when you can’t serve a customer, you need to rethink matters.

I especially empathized with the line about “issues that can be difficult to resolve.” The company behind this blog, Luna & Stella, always resolves issues cheerfully but is careful not to offer spells — or even dieting advice.

More here.

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Converting Sewage to Energy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2012| 2 Comments »

Conrad Wilson recently posted an intriguing story at National Public Radio. It’s about a a practical approach to sustainability: converting sewage to energy.

“It turns out,” writes Wilson, “a sewer — the place where a city’s hot showers, dishwashing water and organic matter end up — is a pretty warm place. That heat can generate energy — meaning a city’s sewer system can hold tremendous potential for heating and cooling.

“It’s just that unexpected energy source that Brainerd [Minn.] hopes to exploit.

“Scott Sjolund, technology supervisor for Brainerd Public Utilities, is standing on the corner of 6th Avenue and College Drive in Brainerd, as sewage rushes unseen through underground pipes.

” ‘Everybody heats water up … and all that gets drained down the sewer, and that’s potential energy that could be extracted. That’s part of the equation,’ Sjolund says.

” ‘Actually extracting it in an economical fashion,’ Sjolund says, is the equation’s critical second part.

“The idea for this project comes from Brainerd-based company Hidden Fuels. In 2009, the business partnered with the city and the school district and received a $45,000 grant from the federal stimulus package.

“Hidden Fuels’ Peter Nelson says the first phase of the project involved installing sensors in the city’s sewers. For more than a year, the company and the city measured the temperature and amount of sewage running through the system to create a thermal energy map.

” ‘It shows that there’s a significant amount of energy — literally enough to heat hundreds of homes — within the streets of the city of Brainerd,’ Nelson says.

“Earl Wolleat, director for buildings and grounds with the Brainerd School District, says there’s enough energy running in just one of the sewer pipes to heat the entire high school. That could save tens of thousands of dollars every winter.”

Read more.

Public Utilities’ Scott Sjolund at a sewer site. Photograph: Conrad Wilson

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Changing Neighborhood

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 19, 2012| Leave a Comment »

On mornings when I don’t walk in my neighborhood or in the Greenway near work, I’m more likely to walk around the emerging waterfront district than the Public Garden, the approach to which involves too much waiting at street lights.

The area near Seaport Boulevard and the harbor, though booming with construction today, still wears the remnants of its formerly neglected status: vistas of pitted parking lots, streets that end ­­­­­­in chain-link fences, highway underpasses filled with brown grass and fast-food wrappers. Then there is the Chapel of Our Lady of Good Voyage.

Unlocked, empty, and trusting, the tiny chapel has a basket for donations to the food pantry. Under a statue of Mary holding her infant in one hand and a ship in the other are votary candles. Someone in charge must think – or know – that no traveler seeking blessings will steal alms for the poor in front of Mary unless desperate. In which case, perhaps he will be welcome to it.

I picture Ishmael coming to a place like this (different denomination and in New Bedford) to hear the sermon on Jonah and the Whale before his ill-fated voyage with the obsessed Captain Ahab.

I wonder if sailors really go to the chapel nowadays and what will happen to it as the area develops at its rapid pace. Along the water, the mayor’s prized Innovation District is gathering steam. In the other direction, the Fort Point Channel area is bursting with restaurants, arts, and artists.

Less than 20 years ago, I visited one artist, the son of friends, who was squatting with other artists in the abandoned Fort Point warehouses where doors had no locks, broken boards and pipes littered the floors, and loose wires hung from the ceilings.

The chapel is part of that earlier world, when lighting a votary candle might have seemed like one’s best chance for making it until tomorrow.

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In Their 90s

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 18, 2012| Leave a Comment »

A 91-year-old Hindu gentleman has joined the tai chi chuan class I take Saturday mornings. His wife brings him a little after we have started, and he walks slowly between the wall of mirrors and the line of practicing students to sit in a folding metal chair, where the teacher explains the upper-body part of the exercises so he can join in. Age has not kept him from that.

After today’s class, I was driving home and heard Susan Stamberg interview Marian McPartland, 94, here, on National Public Radio. A fantastic jazz pianist, McPartland recorded her last Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz show only two years ago — after 33 years — but continues as artistic director. She is also the subject of a documentary called In Good Time that highlights the day in August 1958 when she was part of a famous photo of jazz greats in Harlem, below.

Speaking of nonagenarians, folksinger and activist Pete Seeger, 93, showed up on Colbert recently. At first I thought he was not answering a question and was wandering, but it soon became clear he was unfurling a story in his own way and that it would end precisely on point.

Seeger still splits logs to heat his house with wood. And his banjo playing hasn’t aged a bit.

Photograph: Art Kane/Art Kane Archives

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Movie: Fixing the Future

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »

A guy at the office reads a different blog I write, a blog for work, and knows the types of stories I like. Recently he e-mailed me about a new documentary in which the solutions to our economic problems are tackled by “just folks.” Add this to the growing list of proofs that “one and one and 50 make a million.”

“In Fixing the Future, host David Brancaccio, of public radio’s Marketplace and NOW on PBS, visits people and organizations across America that are attempting a revolution: the reinvention of the American economy. By featuring communities using sustainable and innovative approaches to create jobs and build prosperity, Fixing the Future inspires hope and renewal in a people overwhelmed by economic collapse.

“The film highlights effective, local practices such as: local business alliances, community banking, time banking/hour exchange, worker cooperatives and local currencies.” That’s what the film’s website says anyway. Read more. And if you see the movie, please let me know.

 Photographs: http://fixingthefuture.org

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Want Radio in Cherokee, Maori, Gaeilge?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 16, 2012| 2 Comments »

I have blogged several times about vanishing languages and the people who seek to preserve them.

Now it seems that community radio is getting into the act, with programs that are becoming a piece of the cultural-survival puzzle. This is happening worldwide, including in the United States.

“The swift and sure loss of indigenous language in the U.S. was hardly an accident,” writes Alexis Hauk at the Atlantic. “From the latter part of the 19th century to the latter part of the 20th, the Bureau of Indian Affairs systematically sent generations of Native American kids into boarding schools that were more focused on punishment and assimilation than on education. In a piece for NPR in 2008, Charla Bear reported on the terrible conditions that persisted at these schools for a century—how kids were given Anglo names, bathed in kerosene, and forced to shave their heads.

“In recent years, the government has taken steps to reverse some of the damage. In 1990, the Native American Languages Act was passed, recognizing the right of indigenous populations to speak their own language.”

Lobbying by Loris Taylor, the CEO and president of Native Public Media, “helped lead to the creation in 2009 of the [Federal Communications Commission]’s ‘Tribal Priority’ for broadcasting,” writes Hauk, “and then, a year later, to the establishment of the FCC Office of Native Affairs and Policy, which promotes technology and communication access on tribal lands.”

Mark Camp, deputy executive director at Cultural Survival, says that “Congress’s passage of the Community Radio Act in 2011 means that community radio stations could soon—in Camp’s words—’mushroom,’ which offers a lot of potential for Native American media on reservations, where there is usually little infrastructure and in many cases no electricity (certainly no wifi). In these areas, a low-power FM station that’s plugged into the grid in the center of town allows people with battery-powered, handheld radios to listen in to what’s happening all around them.” Read more.

Update: Asakiyume adds this link from “The Take Away.”

Arizona’s KUYI 88.1 broadcasts in Hopi to approximately 9,000 people. Photograph: KUYI

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/culture_test/kuyi%20615%20radio.jpg

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Remember the Automat

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

An early version of fast food, as many readers will recall, was the Automat. You didn’t wait for a waiter to wait on you. You took your nickels and quarters to a wall of little doors, popped the coins in where you saw what you wanted to eat, opened the little door, and then took your piece of pie or sandwich or whatever to a table where, more often than not, you dined with strangers.

I found this recent NY Times story by Sam Roberts charming.

“The Automat is being recreated at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue starting Friday for an exhibition on lunch. …

“The Automat, which first opened in Philadelphia, was democratic, because its tables accommodated customers from every class. It replaced the free lunch at saloons shuttered by Prohibition. The chrome and brass vending machines framed by Italian marble conveyed cleanliness, because the workers who prepared the food were invisible behind the spinning steel drums that fed the machines. …

“In a doctoral dissertation at Cornell University, Alec Tristin Shuldiner noted that compared with Philadelphians, New Yorkers wanted more sugar in their stewed tomatoes, favored seafood, except for oysters, craved clam chowder and chicken pies, and eschewed scrapple. …

“The playwright Neil Simon once wrote of his Automat memories, recalling that he learned more from his dining partners there than during three years at Princeton:

‘And the years went by and I turned from a day customer to a night patron, working on those first attempts at monologues and sketches at two in the morning, over steaming black coffee and fresh cheese Danish. And a voice from the stranger opposite me.

‘ “Where you from? California?”

‘ “No. I grew up in New York.”

‘ “Is that so? Where in New York?”

‘ “At this table.” ’ ”

But perhaps you’d like to read the whole thing.

Photograph: Berenice Abbott, NY Public Library

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Photographs Printed on Growing Grass

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2012| 3 Comments »

When I saw the headline at Wired, it didn’t really compute.

“Artists Create Portraits on Live Grass.” What? I don’t get it. Did the artists set up easels and paint with oils? Did they paint directly on the grass?

Writer-photographer Jakob Schiller explains.

“It all started, as these things sometimes do, by accident. In 1990, before they worked in photography, [Heather] Ackroyd and [Dan] Harvey created an art installation that covered an entire room with grass. As part of the art piece they had left a ladder leaning against a wall and when they went to remove it they saw that the ubiquitous and fast-growing plant had been imprinted with the shadow. The grass had stayed yellow where the ladder had prevented it from receiving any light.

“ ‘We didn’t know straight away what we were looking at, but we knew that we had observed something important,’ Ackroyd says.

“They began playing with the idea of manipulating the light that hits grass and by the next year were projecting light through an old 35mm Kodak projector onto a swath of grass on the wall.”

What to think as the grass withers and dies? It’s kind of a Dorian Gray scenario.

Read more about the project at Wired‘s Raw File, here.

Photograph: Ackroyd & Harvey.
Myles, Basia, Nath and Alesha, The Big Chill Festival, Eastnor Castle, between the Cotswolds and the Welsh Marches. 2007

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Daniel Phillips: Ice Cave

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 13, 2012| Leave a Comment »

A couple Sundays ago, it was so hot that all we could do was sit. When we came to ourselves, we said: Who has air conditioning besides the supermarket? Where can we go to see something interesting or entertaining without wilting?

The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is a place of wonder. It’s true that sometimes the wonder takes the form of “What the heck?!” But more often it provokes pondering and admiration. The piece below was both lovely to look at and food for thought. The artist filmed people moving obscurely behind ice. The work suggested ideas to me beyond the idea of ice (although ice itself was worth focusing on that day).

Ice often makes an appearance in art. I think of the First Night (New Year’s Eve) sculptures in Boston.  And I remember a whole ice wonderland in St. Paul one January when we lived in Minnesota. Then there is the ice story by a native of that city, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald apparently wanted to cut his ties with his hometown, but St. Paul had other thoughts, naming the theater where “A Prairie Home Companion” plays just for him, and conducting a posthumous reading of “The Great Gatsby” in his honor.

Fitzgerald’s short story “The Ice Palace” is about a southern girl who tries to adjust to the culture of her betrothed’s wintry landscape. She becomes lost and terrified in an ice palace that somehow reflects his family and his nature, and she decides her future should unfold back home in the South. I read that a long time ago, but I recall many meanings for ice in it.

Meanwhile, at the deCordova, the “Ice Cave” video seems to be about the limits of perception, about seeing through a glass darkly.

What are the people doing? we wonder. Even if we knew, would we know what it meant?

Please share your ice images with the blog.

Image from Daniel Phillips’s Ice Cave video is at the Dodge Gallery in New York.

 

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You Can’t Take It with You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I liked NY Times columnist Jim Dwyer’s recent article “A Billionaire Philanthropist Struggles to Go Broke.”

“Charles F. Feeney, 81, a man with no romantic attachment to wealth or its trappings, said the world had enough urgent problems that required attention now, before they became even more expensive to solve.

“ ‘When you’ve got the money, you spend it,’ Mr. Feeney said. ‘When you’ve spent it all, let someone else get going and spend theirs.’ …

“Last fall, Mr. Feeney gave his alma mater, Cornell University, $350 million to seal its bid to build a new campus for advanced engineering that New York City has commissioned for Roosevelt Island. …

With “grand philanthropy often comes public glory for wealthy donors, as buildings and institutes are dedicated to benefactors, their names embedded above doorways like graffiti tags chiseled in marble. No building anywhere bears Mr. Feeney’s name. Among tycoons, he has been a countercultural figure of rare force, clinging to his privacy far more fiercely than to his money.

“He set up the philanthropies in Bermuda, in large part because that would allow him to escape United States disclosure requirements. That also meant he could not take tax deductions when he contributed his holdings.”

More recently, he decided to tell his story in order to encourage other people of means to share the wealth.

“Mr. Feeney, who grew up in a working-class family in Elizabeth, N.J., served as a radio operator in the United States Air Force and attended Cornell on the G.I. Bill. He sold liquor to sailors in ports, then formed a company that ran airport duty-free shops around the world. He secretly turned over the duty-free business to the philanthropies in 1984 and continued to invest. …

“He has given away essentially everything he has made, apart from decent, though not extravagant, provisions for his four daughters and one son. They all worked through college as waiters, maids and cashiers.

“ ‘I want the last check I write to bounce,’ Mr. Feeney said.”

Read the article.

“Charles F. Feeney, 81, has already given away $6 billion through his foundations.” Photograph: Brad Vest, NY Times

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When Artists Control the Building: A Minneapolis Story

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

We lived in Minneapolis in the late 1990s and thought the theater scene there was super — many small, under-the-radar groups taking on adventurous work.

We also enjoyed going to music and art events, especially open houses in the former Warehouse District, where some of the Twin Cities’ best restaurants had sprung up.

So we weren’t surprised to learn that a national effort to tackle rundown areas in a way that benefits both local economies and artists emanates from Minneapolis.

Emily Badger writes about Artspace in Fast Company.

“The city of Minneapolis’ arts commission founded Artspace in 1979 to help connect local artists to affordable space in the city’s warehouse district. But the same artists kept coming back, priced out of their homes and studios, in need of yet another space. When [Kelley] Lindquist took over a decade later, the local arts community began to focus instead on the only permanent solution: They needed to control the buildings. Since then, Artspace has completed 30 live/work developments in 21 U.S. cities, with two more opening this fall, two more under construction, and another dozen in the pipeline.

“Lindquist recalls that in the ’80s, four other organizations — in Seattle, San Francisco, Washington and New York — were toying with a concept similar to Artspace’s (at the time, the five had been given a grant by the Apple Foundation to network with each other). Artspace is the only one of those original five that has survived to this day.

“ ‘I do honestly think that there is a prairie spirit here,’ Lindquist says, laughing. He sometimes thinks about why this idea got off the ground in Minnesota when it didn’t elsewhere. ‘Living in Minnesota is pretty rough,’ he says. ‘There can be easily six months of the year that would seem pretty hard to live in and intolerable to a lot of people. But I think it forced those of us here to try harder, and to be a little more experimental, a little more risk-taking on how do we keep our culture vibrant?’ ” Read more.

By the way, this lead came from ArtsJournal.com, a reliable source of bloggy inspiration.

Photograph: Warehouse Entertainment District

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Marsden Hartley and Fairy Tales

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 10, 2012| 5 Comments »

For an artsy, literary treat, take a look at the Project Gutenberg version of painter Marsden Hartley‘s out-of-print book, Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets, dedicated to Alfred Stieglitz.

Hard to resist an introduction like this:

“Sometimes I think myself one of the unique children among children. I never read a fairy story in my childhood. I always had the feeling as a child, that fairy stories were for grown-ups and were best understood by them, and for that reason I think it must have been that I postponed them. I found them, even at sixteen, too involved and mystifying to take them in with quite the simple gullibility that is necessary. But that was because I was left alone with the incredibly magical reality from morning until nightfall …

“I was constantly confronted with the magic of reality itself, wondering why one thing was built of exquisite curves and another of harmonic angles. It was not a scientific passion in me, it was merely my sensing of the world of visible beauty around me, pressing in on me with the vehemence of splendor, on every side. …

“It is because I love the idea of life better than anything else that I believe most of all in the magic of existence.”

(Thank you, Ellen Levy, for sending me the link.)

Art:  Marsden Hartley

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