Blogs

I really enjoyed the class experience in Morris Woods. It was a pleasure to be surrounded by mostly plants for an hour and a half and there was such a noticble difference in environment and my experience of the way environment affects each of us as I walked out of the Morris Woods and into the English house parkinglot. My favorite aspect was the final activity - the partnered trust activity. I had explored a beech tree, without sight, and felt the vines of ivy that surrounded the right half of the beech tree and the bare, elephant skin that surrounded the other half. This tree was just perfect, I could wrap my arms around it and my hands could still meet on the other side. After rachelr carefully guided me about 10 meters away, I only had to spin once before I realized exactly which tree I had spent the past few minutes with. I wondered why that is so - how is it I could have known that instantly? As if one is recognizing an old friend, even without ever having seen him/her visually before. I wanted to apply this once more to my site and see what I found.

Sadly, there is not much to add to my field notes from last week. constructing writing and creating videos to teach students about basic ways to use technology. E.g. How to create an event in their google calendar. therefore, i haven't really interacted with how students at my placement school use technology, or how teachers use technology to interact with their students. I have however devoloped insight into the basic technology gap that is present amongst the teachers. 

Yesterday during my observation period, I decided to incorporate some of what the class discussed in regards to Caning in the City,as well as the experiences of the "Find Your Tree" exercise into my observation period. Having been inspired by both being blindly led in Morris Woods and Carmen's talk of how being physically blind changed his perceptions of his surroundings I decided to conduct my observation with my eyes closed. I wanted to see if I could be able to observe just as much sitting on my bench without visual aid as I could when I had my eyes open. Naturally trying to do so created some issues, as having my eyes closed led to some horrendous note taking but more importantly blindly observing would be vhallenging my orginal intention for choosing the spot so I could note the visual seasonal changes on the Haverford Nature Trail. But in conducting this visual-free observation time, I nonetheless was able to still take note of my surroundings in suprisingly new ways. For instance I noticed I had a better sense of how intense each gust of wind was and from which direction it was coming from, based on tiny things like feeling the wind on exposed skin or the slight rustling of dead leaves near the bench. I could suprisingly tell the differences between different vehicle engines and animal and bird calls based on small variations in the noise level that was generated (something I may have missed if I merely saw these objects and organisms and only took note of their visible differences rather than the small differences).

"My constant contact with the street through the scraping of my cane provides me with a direct, uninfluenced connection to visual information" (Carmen Papalia)

After talking about "direct, uninfluenced" experiences in class today, I feel more and more convinced that it is not possible to experience something without its being mediated by a prior experience, a facilitator, a lens, a memory, an expectation. It's quite possible that I've been brainwashed by Dewey and my Critical Issues in Education course, but I keep going back to the idea that every exprience leads to further experiences: “there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end” (Dewey, Experience & Education). In terms of the classroom experience, I do believe that students should have more authority/choice in how they can frame their experiences, but again, I think there will always be a frame of some sort that helps decide what kind of information we take in. 

I think this relates to interpretation - so I thought of a statement from Frank Kermode: "Yet the world is full of interpreters... So the question arises why would we would rather interpret than not?" Still thinking about this... looking forward to continuing this discussion in class on Monday.  

I just wanted to share this map, a projected look at where each Panem district would be based on The Hunger Games. It's a little obsessive/silly, but I thought the geography and history that the designer considered was very smart. http://aimmyarrowshigh.livejournal.com/32461.html (I found it through Entertainment Weekly this summer. Ignore the random picture that doesn't show up)

Although I'm in a journalism class, the teacher, Mr. A, also has most of the students in his ninth grade English class as well. Today, if the students had already finished their articles, he told them to use a website called NoRedInk.com, a website that runs grammer drills. To make it more appealing to students, when they sign up for the website they can pick a few of their favorite things, the NFL, country musicians, Modern Family, etc, and it uses those topics in the sentances. There are around 50 different grammar exercises they can work on, and because they sign up through a class code, Mr. A can check and see how they did on each exercise, plus how many attempts they made to get the correct answer. 

Mr. A explained that he really liked this program, even if the favorite things aspect is a little silly. He likes that it cuts down on paper use, it instantly grades their responses, and students can work on it whenever they have downtime. 

This is the first time I've seen them use this program, so I'm curious as to how much they learn from it, and whether Mr. A will address the students that make multiple attempts to figure out the right answer. Overall though, it seems pretty effective and perhaps this version of gaming appeals to some of the students. 

What? When Teacher S is absent, the entire class goes into Teacher A’s classroom. 50 kids and one lead teacher with a few aids (volunteer grandparents). This is sure to be a challenging situation. The chosen method of teaching in this situation is using the smart board to play various YouTube videos of educational merit. More specifically, they watch President Obama’s speech and a video about Veteran’s Day (with country-style patriotic music and pictures of soldiers dying and children crying). Because there are so many kids in the classroom, some of them are sitting quite far away from the screen on which these videos are playing, and therefore have difficulty seeing and paying attention.

When the teacher tries to access a certain video, she is unable to do so because of a block with the school’s internet server. She then has to spend almost 25 minutes trying to get the video and filling out various online forms. The music teacher comes in to distract the 50 kids with impromptu music while they wait.

We made a number of decisions in class today (see updated syllabus for details).

We agreed that we will take a final class-wide "ramble":
we are eco-imagining a collective event to end the semester,
which will compliment the individual Thoreauvian stroll with which you each began
(lovely thought; thanks, rachelr!)

We also agreed to go do this @ 1 p.m. on Sunday, December 2nd --
and to accomodate that time by cancelling class on Monday, Dec. 3rd.

Next to be decided is where we will go, how we will get there, and what we will do once we arrive.

Current options for where to go include the
* Tinicum Wildlife Refuge (a visitor center, observation platform, and
10 miles of trails in southwest Philly, near I-95 and the airport);
* Forbidden Drive (a 5 1/2 mile trail in the Wissahickon Valley Park in the northwest part of Philly); and
* Mill Creek (which we can access from the edge of the Bryn Mawr
campus, and would try to walk along, as far as Dove Lake).

Options for how to get to the first include taking the R5, then the R1--or renting a college van;
for the second, renting the van; and for the third, walking.

Home and Garden

Island life is hard on a house                                     sitting beside a shed named Mouse House.

How like a horse is a house,     

                                     tender I                 wonder.  

                                                                  Where is the boundary between wild and wonderful?

Swelling plants

                      will swallow the water hose whole.

Dwelling place

                      cobwebs are the burglar alarm for daddy long legs. 

Originally, my intention was to write two separate posts; one about the Morris Wood’s experience and one about what I would have said if I were in class today based on to the course notes. However, after I wrote both posts, I found that the two were inseparable and ended up combining them together.

On Morris Woods and Carmen Papalia:

It was weird to be reminded of how dependent I am on my sight; to the point where I couldn’t figure out how to move my body. I kept feeling like my brain knew what I was supposed to be doing but my leg and hand movement seemed outside of my control; even standing up straight seemed like a particularly difficult task. When I finally took off the blindfold to find my tree, I realized that I had been so busy just trying to figure out how to move my legs forward that I hadn’t been paying as much attention my physical surroundings while Emma was trying to lead me. I also realized later when we met as a group that it seemed like the other pairs had been very careful to lead their partners as best as they possibly could; helping each other along the way. Emma and I actually did the opposite, doing our best to confuse each other further. We even went as far as spinning each other around so finding the right direction back was even more impossible.