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Like English people, Chinese landowners also like to pay Chinese gardeners to “torture” the plants. But instead of mowing the lawn and shaping the leaves, Chinese gardeners bend the branches of trees into very “unnatural” shapes, which takes even more efforts and planning than cutting leaves and small branches – a more obsessive way to “order and shape their landscape”. And like Jamaica Kincaid stated in “Alien Soil”, the people who do all the hard work in Chinese gardens were the poor.

Central Park: "Due to possibility of strong winds, Central Park will be closed from noon Wednesday, November 7 until noon Thursday, November 8."

And there I was, convinced all this time that parks were free and open (mostly) public spaces that anyone could enjoy at any time. Was I fooled, huh? Apparently, they have working hours (or is it operating hours? available hours?), just like shops and offices. I mean, I am aware that a lot of parks in cities are privately owned, but they're free for public use (like the Zuccotti Park in New York City, a crucial site for Occupy Wall Street). However, what hadn't occurred to me before is that they are actually closed at any point of any day - I always just assumed they were always open. But now I realize that they are just businesses, part of enterprises. People usually consider parks little bundles of nature in the hearts of big, bustling cities; however, even though park do have elements of nature such as plants, insects, and animals, there is nothing natural about them - they are just as artifical and out-of-place as the concrete and steel take make up the cities. What are your thoughts on this?

Note: The quotation was posted on the official Central Park Facebook profile, maintained by the Central Park Conservancy, on November 6th, 2012, at 3:40pm.

Last Thursday we discussed hurricane Sandy. We talked about the tendency humans have developed to rebuild in the path of destruction rather than to relocate to a safer and more stable environment. We tried to answer the question of whether or not that is the rational or correct action to take in a post-disaster situation (I still am not completely sure about this). I think this tendency to rebuild kind of relates to one point that Jamaica Kincaid made in her article “Alien Soil”. The point was English people have a tendency to “obsessively order and shape their landscape”. Kincaid says the Europeans did that so much so on the island of Antigua that the island is now prone to drought. The Europeans did not work with what was already on the island when they got there, rather they tore it apart and attempted to put it back together with pieces from all around to world. They worked against the island instead of with it, which is essentially what the residence of New York and New Jersey are doing now as they attempt to rebuild their cities. Similar to how Antigua is prone to drought because of how it has been altered and built upon, the cities along the East Coast of the United States are prone to destruction because of where they have been built. We are not paying attention to the way the Earth is shaped and to the way it moves, and living accordingly. Instead we are attempting to shape it to our liking and ignoring the way it moves, seemingly to our detriment.

What?  No technology used When spelling new words, the teacher writes on the board: “saw to frnds” instead of “saw too friends.” I assume this is a strategy for helping kids learn to spell phonetically. The students learn their letters by tracing them on whiteboards in their laps. The teacher describes the letter “a” as “ a ball and a wall.” 

One child  (Student A) really wants to tell everyone something. The teacher explains that now is not the time for chatting, but for reading When the teacher says he can tell her in private at recess, he says loudly that he doesn’t need to tell her in private. “I want to tell all of yall” he says to the circle. Child R lost his lunch.  His mother must have packed it but did not remember to put it in the backpack. R starts to cry hysterically and refuses to join the line to go out to recess. When he finally does go to recess, he embraces me in a hug and does not let go. He cries the whole recess, worried that he won’t have lunch. 

So What?

It’s interesting to me to see how kids need to be reminded of when it is appropriate to talk and share and when it is not. School’s timing is so strictly scheduled, and I imagine it is difficult for kindergarten students to adjust to this in the beginning.

During class, someone said that in Minecraft "like in SIMs, you are a person and you are creating a world" while trying to sum up the satisfying appeal to the game.  I completely felt this as well while playing.  There was something satisfying to being able to control my environment and decide my own course.  This is a freedom I don't always have in everyday life because of time constraints, responsibilities, and money.  These constraints don't exist in this game.

This comment also reminded me of a project my placement teacher did last year in his geometry class.  The assignment was similar to a geometry assignment I've seen many times: design your dream house.  The twist was that the class was to use google sketch-up, a google software used to make 3D models (when I worked in a blackbox theater, the set designer did his designs on this).  Using sketch-up, the students would make a virtual 3D model of their (roofless) house, and then decorate it.

I apologize for my late posting; my parents were up at Bryn Mawr for Parent's weekend on Sunday, and I didn't have a chance to visit my spot until this afternoon. While there, I reflected upon recent class discussions, and couldn't help but feel a little bit frustrated--and conflicted--about the role of women in present day society. I don't identify with the "radical" ideas that we discussed this past Thursday, but our discussion about ecofeminism coaxed out some bitter feelings that I've been harboring for quite some time (actually, I wouldn't exactly call it harboring...it's a common topic of discussion with my roommate). The patriarchal views which dominate American society have even penetrated the bi-co, crushing any sort of intimacy that may have been emerging between students and their curriculum, peers, and professors. This obsession eith domination is the problem. We're so focused on dominating our academics, social tiers, and athletics that many have lost their love of knowledge. William Butler Yeats once said that "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire". This is the type of education that our liberal arts institutions have attempted to provide, but that we have not truly taken advantage of. I want to return to the state where I love to write, read, and learn with out feeling like I'm robotically taking in information. However, this is easier said than done, especially gievn the academic rigor of Bryn Mawr.

Camtasia; it's the name of a program that my host teacher liason Mrs. X gave me to work on. Camtasia is a program that allows you to video record your momevement on a computer screen as well as anontating what you do on screen both orally and with video graphics. Mrs. X thought that a lot fo the teachers at school M were not tech savvy enough and did not even know how to do the simplest of tasks such as creating and editing a word document. For this reason Mrs. X put me to work on creating video recordings of how to do everyday computer tasks. This frustrated me immensely seeing as previously Mrs. X had promised me an opportnity to work in the classroom. I felt like even though I was making an impact on how teachers better used technology, I was not getting to see the impact of that technology, or the lack of impact of technology in the classroom.  

I knew plants.  I knew the sun.  I knew the wind.  My head surrounded by the buzzing of bees.  I knew the darkness of the woods at night.  I knew the smell of rain. I knew crickets in my bushes during the evening.  I knew the sound of snow under my boots during the winter and I knew the crunch of leaves under my shoes in the fall.  I knew seasons.  Now, all I am familiar with the sound of metal under my shoes.  I am comforted by the smell of oxygen that saturates the air.  This scent used to fill my nostrils after a race to the hospital when I had an asthma attack.  I know that the war changed the way I sensed the world.    The war started hundreds if not thousands of years ago, but does the time really matter? 

I am old now.  I was young when my senses became cold.  I had just had my eldest child, who had my grandchild several years ago.  It will be my grandchild’s birthday soon.  I wish to take my grandchild to experience what I have lost in the only way that we still can.  I will take my grandchild to the zoo and then we will return to my house and I will show her the pictures and the papers of what my senses were once familiar with.  We will marvel at the beauty in those pictures and we will sit in shocked silence at how precarious life once was. 

After reading Laurie Finke’s article entitled “Knowledge as Bait: Feminism, Voice, and the Pedagogical Unconscious”, I was reminded of something we discussed in our silence class, which is the notion that the classroom is a space in which learning needs to accommodate the student body’s diverse voices. What I understood from this discussion was that the fundamental building blocks of voice are found within the social context of that voice, and that the classroom is the physical space in which voice is found and complicated simultaneously. Thus, teachers who neglect the myriad of contexts that constitute voice are not creating a space in which all students can both be treated equally and receive an equal education. I found it very problematic that Finke’s analysis of the power of transference consisted of having to, in essence, force individual students to let go of their socially rooted voices in order for their “true voices” to shine. I found the latter to be problematic because there is an inherent contradiction in the idea of having a true voice. Voice cannot be removed from the social context that influences it and therefore constitutes it. Thus, I suggest that in order for individual voice to shine, the role of the classroom must be taken into consideration. A classroom must be one in which the power relation between student and teacher should be dialogical, as Paulo Freire refers to it in the dialogical method of teaching, and one in which every student’s voice is heard.

The assigned readings by native American writers-- Paula Gunn Allen, Winona LeDuke-- are the ones that excite me the most. I get tingles in my belly, a waking up feeling all over, like, here is the key! This is the thinking we need! The concept of "usufruct" (but this is a Latin word! isn't there some native vocabulary we could use for this?) makes so much more sense than our European based land ownership rules. The earth belongs to itself, and we belong to it, to use wisely and lovingly. The minute an individual "owns" a piece of land, he/she is separated from the rest of their people, their community. (Even the phrase a "piece" of land creates separation, a breaking up of something that is really whole.) So this is not just about our relationship with land, but about our relationship with each other. Could we say that the ways in which our society is broken stem directly from this broken relationship-- violently broken by our (my) ancestors when they arrived here, by our nation as it grew? This horrifies me in a way that also feels healing, like the beginning of cleaning a horribly infected wound. How can we honor and retrieve the way of life that we shattered? 

.... If I think about that question for a moment, I can't help thinking, realistically, our own way of life will have to be shattered for that to be possible. Until then, though, can we practice changing our ways, our thinking?