Pomelo perfection

Today after school my teacher friends and I went to the corner store near the school and inside I met Helena and her plethora of perfect pomelo plants. Helena is the owner of the store and all around she has tiny pots which she has collected. Most are handmade. Sprouting out of the eclectic pots are shining round green leaves. When I asked her about it Helena told me that she saves the seeds from Pomelos (like a grapefruit but larger) and plants them in soil. She mists them every couple of days but does not water them much as the pots have no drainage holes and you don't want to drown them. If you run your hand over the leaves they smell nice, and Helena says it is especially nice to have one of these plants near your computer so if your eyes need a break you can just look at your happy little plant and feel better. I agree, my eyes like green. I was thinking about doing this with my kids. I brought in a terrarium the other day and they are all pretty keen on it. They want to water it and are constantly asking me questions. They could even make their own little pots and eat the Pomelo's. According to Helena, you can also cook the peel of the Pomelo and eat that too.

Stuntman!

I am going to be teaching gymnastics to my grade 5 class and have the good fortune of knowing a real life stunt man who has agreed to come and teach one day with me. Eli is a wonderful friend of mine who I went on an art history tour of Europe with. Together we got lost in cities from Zurich to Florence and all in between. I am both terrified and electrified by his stunt reel, check it out.

Hilarious Punctuation with Victor Borge

Lessons that change writers

I hear that the book "lessons that change writers" by Nancie twell is a good one check it out here. Maybe they have this as a resource at our schools?

What is a "Wiki"?

This is how a wiki works:

What is "Twitter" you ask?

Here you go:



I don't use twitter, but I feel beter now that I know what it is.

peer editing

here is a link to a good website with a link to peer editing to help your kids learn to edit their writing. It can be a component of a "writers workshops" or not.

emily Carr mural inspiration

Some friends and I are trying to get an intermediate art club started at our school. We are thinking we would like to focus on making art to beautify the school, either with murals or hanging 3D sculpture...Here is a video of some kids who were inspired by Emily Carr to beautify their school. Pretty neat kids:

Briony Penn

Brinoy Penn has a wonderful website where you can download her drawings of all kind of life on the BC coast everything from wolves to chitons to trees and most everything in between. The pictures are really well done and quite fun.

Blatant procrastination.

This has nothing to do with teaching, and I am obviously procrastinating on finishing my already late science unit, but I must say it is pretty funny what comes up when you type "(your name) likes to" into a google search. This is a video entitled "Alicia likes to spin". Other funny ones were "Alicia likes to fight evil", "Alicia likes the crabs", "Alicia likes to party", "Alicia likes to dance Video by eardrums are like elephants", etc.

The weird thing is I really like this video, and I do like to spin. And I love to see preteen girls playing around on jungle gyms and talking about how they love each other. sweet. It may give you a bit of a neck cramp if you try to watch it, because it's filmed sideways, but i dunno, this is somehow endearing to me.

Home grown bravery children as role models

This is a video of Severn Suzuki, David Suzuki's daughter speaking on behalf of an environmental children's organization called ECO which she stated when she was 12.

Here is the link, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZsDliXzyAY
I had the video up here but it got taken off, so here is the link in case you want to see it.

Severn went to the same elementary school and highschool as I did and the other day when her father came to speak to a group of students in the faculty of education he ended his talk by playing this video.

Her words and her bravery really struck a chord with me. I turned in to a red faced leaky mess, but I think my reaction was warranted. I am constantly amazed by the courage, optimism and intelligence of children. As David pointed out they are the ones who will change the minds of their parents who may be resistant to new ideas, as we all tend to be as we get older. Resistant though they may be all parents love their children, and if we can convince the children that they should love all life and themselves as a part of that, then I have faith that they will pass this message on and carry it forward.


The video has been variously titled, some call it "the girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes" it has been viewed by well over a million people, and I am proud to think that this little girl and her visionary father live right here in my neighbourhood, and continue to have such a huge impact on not only Canada but the world.

motto

One of my mottos for the next 5 months or so.

the amazon Kindle 2.0

I just learned about this electronice book reader from amazon called the kindle. Basically it lets you download books onto this little reader and so instead of having the paper book you can have it on this little screen, which according to my source is really easy on the eyes, it looks flat, not like a computer screen. The kindle is wireless so you can download books onto it any time you want! Apparently best sellers go for about $9 on this little guy. Unfortunately the wireless is still not available in Canada, but soon!

licorice fern

This is a lovely Native fern which you can recognize by looking at the underside of the fronds at the yellow circular sori (which are made up of tiny spores). Spores are how ferns reproduce. This kind of reproduction has been around a lot longer than seeds and fruit and all that. Ferns date back from dinosaur times, to put it in 10 year-old speak, which is what I like to do these days. It is a smallish fern, and you can often see them growing as epiphytes (an organism that grows upon or attaches to a living plant) on big evergreen trees (especially big leaf maples). There are 3 varieties of this plant, and one, the Western polypody has a rhizome (horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground) which tastes like licorice. If the rhizome is white, you have the wrong one, if it tastes bitter, you have the wrong one, but if it is sweet and licoricy then you have a winner! These little sweeties have been chewed by the Squamish, Sechelt, Comox, Nuxalk, Haida and Kwakwaka'wakw people of this area and were considered an important medicine for colds and sore throats as well as a useful sweetener to be mixed with botter medicines.

Ms. Miss Mrs. what's in a name...

The other day I was walking home. A father was pushing his child in a stroller. The small child was calling out "what's that? what's that?" as children are wont to do. The child pointed at me and, predictably said "what's that?" The father answered "that's a person", I smiled. I was not being explained as a woman, a lady or a girl, but a person, felt good. Maybe that's why I have some issue with being referred to as Miss or Mrs. in school. The students seem incapable of saying just Ms. They don't even seem to know what it all means. Maybe I should teach them about that?

When I worked in preschool I was referred to y my first name, or simply as "teacher". Doctors are referred to as Doctor, Nurses as Nurse, Actors as actors....why are the titles in teaching still gendered, and why do women so often choose to be addressed with reference to their marital status? I would just go by my first name but am not allowed to according to school policy. In the U.S., the Emily Post Institute states that Ms. is the default form of address for business correspondence with a woman. If we are truly professionals, I think we at least deserve to be Ms.

In case YOU are not sure what the difference is, here is it (thank you wikipedia):
Ms (UK) or Ms. (USA) (pronounced /mɪz/ or /məz/^[1]) is an English honorific used with the last name or full name of a woman. As with Mrs. and Miss, Ms. is a contraction of the honorific "Mistress", which is the feminine of "Mister" or "Master". Unlike Miss and Mrs., however, Ms. is used properly of married, divorced, or unmarried women and therefore does not denote marital status.

Sea of Pink

Gosh it can be hard to take a decent photo of oneself. This is a pic of me in a pink dress I wore today, to be honest it was a little awkward. The weather report threatened snow and trying to get the tights to stay up, along with the knee socks, etc etc was trickier than just slipping into some jeans...Aaaanyways, today many of my colleagues and I wore pink as a stand against Bullying. Made me think once again about the symbolism of clothing as visual culture...Probably because I should be writing my artography paper right now instead of blogging, but oh well.

The reason behind all this pink is that back in September 2007 in Cambridge Ontario a boy wore a pink polo shirt to school on the first day and was harassed with homophobic taunting. A couple of grade 12 boys at the school decided to fight back against this kind of bullying. They went to a discount store and bought a bunch of cheap pink t-shirts and emailed their friends to tell them to wear pink as well. The next day it was a "sea of pink" at the school. I am excited about this little bit of home grown activism as well as the anti-homophobia/bullying message that these boys chose to send. A few weeks ago Steve Mulligan the Anti-homophobia and Diversity Consultant for the Social Responsibility and Diversity Team of the Vancouver School Board came to speak to us and he has sent me a couple of lesson plan ideas for pink day. Email me if you would like them. Here is a link to an article by the CBC about the boys in Cambridge.

Crocus

Ok, here's an easy one, crocuses are some of the first little heads to start poking up once spring is on it's way. I took a picture of this one a few days ago as I was eating my lunch near the Ponderosa buildings. The flowers are most commonly purple or yellow, and sometimes white, Easter egg colours. One interesting thing about crocuses is that the saffron crocus, or rather it's dried stigma (lady parts of plant) is where we get the spice Saffron which has been used as a medicine, spice and dye for thousands of years.

Saffron crocus morphology
	Stamens (male organs)
	Corolla (whorl of petals)
	Corm (propagation org

helping little kids learn to read

Another great site recommended by the one mom in my class!

http://www.starfall.com/

feed people and get smart

This is another site recommended by my friend from school. It asks you to choose the appropriate synonym for words presented. If you get the words right they donate 10 grains of rice to the UN world food program. It's great for learning new vocab, you could probably even use it with older kids to get them learning new words. Good for your scrabble game too!

http://www.freerice.com/

art lesson: blind contour drawing

I was sent this link by a friend from school, it is from another blog but I will pass it on here:

Observational drawing is about drawing exactly what we see — not what our brain may be telling us to hurry up and draw. (Silly brain, always in a hurry.)

When I see you drawing and looking only at your paper, I know you're not doing observational drawing — to do that, you need to look up and look up and look up again. Then I know that you are looking at something and drawing it very particularly.

Blind contour drawing is a fun way to see how accurately we can draw when we observe something very carefully, by looking at it and not looking away.

At the beginning of this lesson, we talk about outlines. We are going to draw the outline of something, in one continuous line, without lifting our pencil from the paper.

We practice by picking out a few things in the room and outlining them in the air with our index finger. Trace the edge of the item all the way around with your finger. That is what we are going to do with a pencil now.

To do blind contour drawing, we can't let our eyes see what our hand is doing, so we make a blinder.

I used a small paper plate for each student, poking a hole for the pencil to go through. This worked very well. You can also use cardboard. (Be sure to poke a hole smaller than your pencil, so the pencil fits tightly.)

Give each student something to draw. Flowers with petals and leaves with irregular shapes (e.g., oak or maple leaves) work very well. You can also take a wire and bend it into a complex shape.

Emphasize that when we're done, our drawing will almost certainly not look like the thing we're drawing — when we get all the way around, our lines won't meet up. (If they do, we'll know you were peeking! Don't peek!) Our drawings are going to look funny, and that's okay, because this is a fun brain game.

Work in the middle of your page, because your pencil is going to wander around quite a bit.

Pick a spot on the thing you are drawing and, without looking at your hand or the page, follow the edge very carefully all the way around with your eyes, drawing as you go.

When you get to the end, take a look and see what you have!

You will probably find a funny-looking line, but compare what you drew to the edge of what you were drawing — there should be areas that are very good representations. See what your hand can do when you trick your brain?

Try it a few different times on different parts of your page (or turn to a new page if necessary). Each time try to go slowly, never lift your pencil, and follow the edge exactly. Which drawing is best?

After a few goes, remove your blinder and do a regular observational drawing. Is it easier this time?

Usually observational drawings improve after blind contour drawings. Blind contour drawing forces us to really, really observe that outline very closely, and when we draw it without the blinder we usually include that extra detail more faithfully. Also, it's always encouraging to see how well you can draw something, even if you have to trick your brain to do it!

Note the bands on the tips of the petals!

Tip for encouraging children to make better observational drawings:

If they seem to be hurrying and drawing whole areas too quickly, or if they are looking mostly at the page and not referring back often enough to the thing they are drawing, sit with them and ask them to draw one detail at a time as you point it out.

Today we drew gerbera daisies. When I isolated items for one student, I asked him to draw a single petal exactly as it looked. Then I pointed to the petal next to it. Soon he was doing a much more detailed drawing.

First attempt at observational drawing following contour drawing

Second attempt, petal detail

My final tip of the day: I asked a florist if they could give me any partly- or mostly-dead flowers for my drawing class, and they gave me a huge, gorgeous bouquet for just a couple of dollars! So our second lesson for today is — just ask. People are nice. :^D)

Coastal Western Hemlock

Obviously I am not cut out for daily blogging. I am going to instead suggest a less ambitious goal of one or more plants (and some animals) a week. That seems manageable.

The other day my friend Sophie told me a story about the coastal western hemlock tree. It came up today as I had science and during my 4 hour class (ugh) the prof took us out to look at some plants, literally we only looked at 2 trees. One of these was the coastal western hemlock. I retold Sophie's story to those around me, it goes something like this:

Long ago the creator was creating. The trees were told to line up in order to receive their cones. The first trees in the line got the biggest cones. Feeling sneaky, Hemlock decided to jump the line as it wanted to have the biggest cones. The creator saw Hemlock and demanded that it move to the back of the line. Hemlock had to wait and wait and when it finally got to the front of the line only small cones were left, which is why hemlock has small cones and hangs it's head in shame.

The other tree we looked at was a yellow cedar, which the teacher said was "close enough" to the red cedar which he claimed was the dominant tree species of the area. Being a plant nerd and a bit of a stickler I tried to correct him but he shot down my suggestion that in fact, coastal western hemlock was the dominant species for this area, and that it was my understanding that red cedar liked wetter areas. To his credit, I worded this awkwardly. I later proved him wrong by looking it up online and he finally accepted defeat. A small, petty, yet satisfying victory for me.

Perspective taking

who do you see?





















How many faces in this bottom image? As a kid I had a book with these kinds of pictures where you could look at it for a while and try to find all the hidden pictures. I LOVED them and still do.
Today in socials we looked at some of these with reference to perspective taking, to show that people literally "see" things differently. Perhaps this could be useful in the classroom to take this beyond these literal interpretations to gaining better understanding of others. In order to make sense of the world our brain often has to use pre-judgments/biases, unfortunately these can impact the choices we make in unwanted ways. By "making the implicit explicit" or trying to understand where our biases lay we can hopefully try to resist the formation of stereotypes etc.

Douglas Adam story about perspective taking

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.
Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do aclue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do?

In the end I thought Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and st back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“Cookies”

a bird in the bush

read this out loud. Did you say "A Bird in the bush"

yeah? take a second look.

the word "the" is actual repeated twice


Next, let's play with some words.
What do you see?

In black you can read the word GOOD, in white the word EVIL (inside each black letter is a white letter). Now, what do you see?



You may not see it at first, but the white spaces read the word optical, the blue landscape reads the word illusion. Look again! Can you see why this painting is called an optical illusion?

What do you see here?



This one is quite tricky!
The word TEACH reflects as LEARN.

Last one.
What do you see?

You probably read the word ME in brown, but.......
when you look through ME you will see YOU!

Do you need to look again? Test Your Brain
This is really cool. The second one is amazing so please read all the way though.

ALZHEIMERS' EYE TEST

Count every ' F ' in the following text:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS...

(SEE BELOW)

HOW MANY ?
WRONG, THERE ARE 6 -- no joke.
READ IT AGAIN !
Really, go Back and Try to find the 6 F's before you scroll down.


The reasoning behind is further down.
The brain cannot process 'OF'.

Incredible or what? Go back and look again!!
Anyone who counts all 6 'F's' on the first go is a genius.


Three is normal, four is quite rare.

Send this to your friends.
It will drive them crazy.!
And keep them occupied
For several minutes..!



look at the spinning woman and if she is turning right your right side of your brain is working . If she is turning left your left side of your brain is working . If she turns both ways for you then you have a 160 or better IQ

More Brain Stuff . . From Cambridge University .

Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs psas it on !!

Plant of the Day witch hazel

I am starting to believe that you people are being genuine and not just patronizing me when you seem interested in my fascination with plants. In keeping with this I am going to try to put up one plant a day with some info in hopes that you might notice it as you walk around and that, just maybe you will fall in love with plants too, and get to know them by name, at least common name, and ideally by sight, smell and touch as well. This one is Witch-hazel, a shrub which is one of the only things that blooms at this time of year. It has strange flowers with long streamer-like petals that are sometimes yellow or reddish. Take a sniff, the scent to me is a kind of lilac and citrus blend. What do you think? The bark and leaves are astringent; the extract, also referred to as witch hazel, is used medicinally. Extracts from its bark and leaves are used in aftershave lotions and lotions for treating bruises and insect bites.
One of my very best friends has a tattoo of this beautiful plant on her shoulder. It is from a water colour botanical illustration by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who deserves an entry unto himself as he is another one of my favorite artists. More on him later. Here is the picture of the water colour. Below is a picture of the leaves and other parts which will start to grow soon. To learn more on wikipedia click here. Hope you dig it!

The groovy teacher

I think this blog needs a little comic relief. Check out Kids in the Hall skit which a friend recommended to me. It exemplifies why teachers can't always be so groovy. It's a slippery slope people!

some terms

A superstimulus or superreleaser is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus that normally releases it.

Humanism is a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appealing to universal human qualities, particularly rationality.^[1][2] It is a component of a variety of more specific philosophical systems and has been incorporated into several religious schools of thought. Humanism can be considered as a process by which truth and morality is sought through human investigation. In focusing on the capacity for self-determination, humanism rejects transcendental justifications, such as a dependence on belief without reason, the supernatural, or texts of allegedly divine origin. Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition, suggesting that solutions to human social and cultural problems cannot be parochial.^[3]

Posthumanism (or transhumanism to use the standard term) is the view that we ought to try to develop - in ways that are safe and ethical - technological means that will enable the exploration of the posthuman realm of possible modes of being. Transhumanists believe that all people should have access to such technologies. The choice of whether to use them, however, should normally rest with the individual.

Anthropocentrism (from Greek: άνθρωπος, anthropos, "human being"; and κέντρον, kentron, "center") is the belief that humans must be considered at the center of, and above any other aspect of, reality.^[1] This concept is sometimes known as Humanocentrism.

Robert Bateman rants a good rant!

Just went to "authorfest" at UBC and saw Robert Bateman among others. The interesting thing is, Robert didn't talk about his books, and he didn't even talk that much about his paintings (the nature paintings many love to hate). Mostly he spoke about his experience as a teacher (he taught highschool geography and then art for 20 years) and what his nearly 80 years on this planet have taught him (he looks great for his age BTW, must be all the fresh air). He spoke about how we need to get kids outside interacting with nature and learning to find their sense of place in it. I was so surprised to hear someone I had no particular expectations for saying all the things I have been wanting to hear someone say. Things like "Either we limit economic growth or it will limit us", "we have to save children from nature deficit disorder", with reference to video games he stated "violence should never be fun. It should elicit horror and pity". He called our culture "instant pudding world because it's slick, smooth, sweet, convenient and comes in a variety of artificial flavours...", he quoted Chief Seattle who reportedly said in 1854 that "Man did not weave the web of life - he is merely a strand in it, Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." He quoted Magaret Mead who said "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." he spoke of Rachel Carson, art history, and the nature school in the Bahamas where his son worked for some time.
In short Robert Bateman is the ranting environmental Grandfather I never had. le sigh.
to watch a video he made about the dangers of oil spills click here.
To check out Robert's "get to know program" click here.
To go staight to the teacher resources he provides on his site, click here.
He's an exceptional painter and an inspirational naturalist and a beacon for me, and I am so glad that my entire cohort, hundreds of future teachers just got an earful of his kind of learning. It's about time.

Where music should come from

You should check out this amazing little documentary that just happens to feature a bunch of my favorite artists: Coco Rosie, Devandra Banhart, Vashti Bunyan and Anthony (of Anthony and the Johnstons). It is called the eternal children, and you can watch it for free on youtube. What I love about it is that it shows these audaciously hopeful musicians who to me, are the closest things there are to fairies, and I like to hear them sing and hear why they do. Hope you like it. The "movement" they are part of is sometimes called freak folk. I just think it's amazin and fun. What art and music should be all about.

Alternative schools

Alternative schools

Windsor House School

Waldorf School in North Vancouver

Vancouver free school

The Blue School in New York

Green School Indonesia