Update on Makes

Okay--so I finished these mitts!  And I am so happy with them and happy with myself for sticking it out and figuring out how to knit them.  They are by far the most challenging thing I have made.  They are the Maize Mitts  from Tin Can Knits.

I am also involved in an online community (#clmooc--the same one from last summer) of educators who experiment with creative ways to make things, often using digital tools.  The idea is connect, inspire, and experiment.  For me, it's a way to try out digital tools that I could use in the classroom.  I want to try them out first before directing students to use them, so I can guide them in choosing and using these tools.  During the school year there often isn't time for me to experiment with these things.

So, the first challenge was to make something that connected with identity and the changeable-ness of it as a sort of self introduction.  My little video does not introduce me exactly, though anyone who knows me will know I love little animals and woodlands.  My video is just a short half minute of childlike whimsy.  Here it is:

Play, Work, and Learning: Reflecting on the Make Cycles

Well, the summer make cycles have ended.  I feel pretty good because I completed six out of the seven.  The only one I didn't even attempt was the one about making a game.  I really balked at that one because I never have liked games much.  I mean board games or video games or organized sports.  I was always one of those last picked for teams, and I don't have a particularly competitive nature.

However, when I was a kid the "games" I was best at were story games--you know role play games where we pretended to be people stranded on desert islands like Swiss Family Robinson, or kids exploring caves in fear of Injun' Joe.  The other kids would say, "Let's play that game again, and you tell it.  You make the best stories."  And I would spin out a "game" I'd plundered from movies mostly, and I'd always take the boy's role because it was pretty clear that they got to do all the really fun stuff while the girls parts mostly involved imagining up clothes and sweeping out huts and taking care of babies or small animals.

We also played with little dolls and built worlds for them all around the various floors of the houses of my childhood.  I remember playing with my brother, who used a Steve Austin action Million Dollar Man in a game so involved that we were both in tears at the end because the character I had died. !

The picture above is from a book I loved as a child called Knight's Castle by Edward Eager.  (Illustrated by N. M. Bodecker.)  The children in this book have done just as we did, used cans and boxes and books pilfered from here and there around the house, to create an elaborate world for their knights and ladies toys. (In the book the place becomes real at night when everyone but the children are asleep!)  The clmooc make cycle got me thinking about this kind of game, this way of playing.

We all know that play is the work of children.  And it is a joyful work that we lost ourselves in as children do today.  I think of the many times I have called my children to come home, or told them it is time to leave a friend's house, only to have them say, "But we just barely started!" I felt the same way setting up all those imaginary worlds.  We were organizing everything so carefully to prepare for play--we thought--that we didn't even get to play before time ran out.  As adults we realize that the process, the preparation for play, was the play.  The process is as valuable, and often more valuable, than the end product.

Wouldn't it be great if school work were so absorbing that children became oblivious of time?  Project based learning should be like this. Building the project--thinking it up, putting it together, making it real.   Emphasizing the process.  The make cycles this summer have sharpened my awareness of this--brought it to the front of my mind in a way that already I am eager to push to the front of my teaching.

Also, children today don't seem to play like we did, or at least not as often.  They aren't out there pretending to be this or that type of person in this or that place.  They have screen games that show so much to them they don't have to think it all up.  So, classroom projects become all the more essential for working that imaginative, playful, problem creating and solving part of the brain.  I know I felt my brain stretch this summer.  And for that I am thankful.  Way to go clmooc!  I intend to carry on.

A Story With Light

So, for the 5th Make Cycle in my online workshop, the challenge was to make a story with light.
Some people made really cool boxes with lights in them that projected stories on a wall.  Some people wrote little stories and attached LED strips to make them glow.  I thought of the children's book by Eric Carle The Very Lonely Firefly, and how pleasing the surprise lights are at the end.
But, what I wanted to do was something with iMovie so I could learn how to use it better so I can help my older students use it (or Moviemaker).
So, I went out and started gathering footage of lights in the night while the idea of a plot wrestled around in my mind.  Really, I found this so exciting!

(Actually these are all pictures from a year ago, and may already be on this blog.  But I do so love the city at night!!)

Ultimately, I decided on a kind of free form improvised poem that rambles along with the images--kind of like Jack Kerouac did in Pull My Daisy.  I had to write a lot of my words down and back up and rerecord so they synced with the images.
I have tried to load the video here many times, but it just won't work, so to watch it you will have to go to the sidebar.  Ah well.

A Writing Hack--Thinking Back to Istanbul

Istanbul

View from my apartment in Istanbul

Boy selling mussels

One of my Turkish notebooks

Typical drawer crammed with writing

Travel notes

Travel plan photocopied and folded up to take either by bicycle or motorcycle.

Writing done by a friend.  We used to (unbelievable, I know) write essays for each other!

I've always been a writer.  I mean, since I was a little kid.  I used to make up and write stories in school to stave off boredom.  I dreamed up characters and drew them and made notes for plots.  On the school bus I took notes of what I saw and thought.  I just write and write and write.  I love words, and the way these abstract arrangements of symbols create images in people's heads and those abstract things connect people in some startlingly concrete ways.

So, when the online educator challenge of the week was to "hack" our writing--use writing as a base, and turn it into something else, I was at no loss for material or ideas.  I started out thinking I would find something from my high school days and maybe make it into a cartoon, but I ended up choosing the Turkish book which was ready at hand, and pairing it up with a picture I took.  The pictures of Istanbul above, are ones that I thought about using, but ultimately didn't use.

I thought about using lists I made (I made a lot of lists about what to take on trips), or the fleeting poems I dashed off here and there to capture a place or moment, but ultimately I chose to "hack" or rather, reinvent, the notes I had taken about meetings and appointments.  I did a lot of roaming around that city, going places and meeting people.  I mean, several times a week I was off to meet someone or other.  At first I took taxis, and then I drove.  I was incredibly self reliant and bold even.  I did things I never expected.  And incredibly (to me when I think back), I did it all with a baby in tow.  So, when I made the "agenda postcard" with my notes, it reminds me of all of that.  I'm not sure what it communicates to others.  To me, its mix of languages and the photo kind of present an overview of the city and my experience there.

In writing, I see a similar characteristic within myself that I discovered about myself and those Winnebago videos.  The part I like is the making of it, the creating part.  That's the essential part.  The sharing is so secondary--and sometimes doesn't even exist.  It's like a game; it's fun.  It's about intrinsic reward rather than external.

Anyway--here is my finished "hack."

How To . . .

For the past several weeks, I have been involved in an online learning community for educators.  The focus is on making things and reflecting, often using technology.  The first "assignment" was to make a "How To."  I was just starting to make another one of my silly, terrible-on-purpose Winnebago videos, so I thought, why not just make a How To along with it?
Ha!  Easier said than done.

For starters, this third Winnebago video was way more complicated than the two previous ones.  Those first two are super short (like about a minute long) and involve no special effects.  I soon realized that I could not actually lay out the whole processes in a video without it becoming longer than the Winnebago video itself.  And in the end, no one would really be able to follow my process to come up with their own project.
And honestly--who would want to?  These things I make are intentionally so very, very bad!  The joy of making these is in the creative problem solving that comes with winging it, which is why I don't have a precise, professional end product.  The energy is in the process--like spuriously deciding to add the John Cena bit and an explosion.

Cast of characters and the script laid out on a tray

My assistant tediously photographs each frame while I tediously manipulate the props

Making sound effects

Synchronizing the sound with the images

In the end, I scrapped the idea of making the How To about the Winnebago.  I started thinking about other things I could make a How To about.  And in thinking about this, I got to thinking about how often I use How To information. 

Here's some things I have recently looked up:

How to knit continental style

How to fix a dropped stitch in knitting

How to knit a long stitch

How to load string on a weed eater

How to get rid of mice in your garden

How cure yellow/brown spots on tomato plants

How to recolor or replace floor tile grout

How to make a meme

Of course, recipes are How To, and crochet patterns--

And then there are ones I go back to again and again, like How To reset my students' passwords on Edmodo.

I was struck by the men who made the weed eater videos.  How is it they decided to do that?  "Hey, I'll take my camera out to the shop and show everyone how to . . . " So very modern.  So many questions so immediately answered.

I started to wonder what everyday thing I do that other people don't know how to do?

Stick to or start running

Make rice

Keep rabbits

Pump a bike tire

There are whole programs like those Nanny shows that tell people How To take care of their kids.

And that got me thinking about psychological How To's I could do:

How to be patient with teenagers

How to help your child through cancer

How to live in a foreign country

Of course, my job is a full day of How To:

How to find the summer reading list (that just today)

How set up a grade book

How to negotiate parent conferences

How to teach to a student's potential

How to read, to write, to stretch, to see--