Thinking

The train is rolling into the station on our big passage writing project. As my co-conspirator partner-in-crime colleague cautions, it's too soon to uncork the champagne. There is still work to do, of course, in the immortal words of the Isley Brothers.

We have two other projects we're working on, too, so one train arrives for the disembarkation while another arrives and the passengers load up. And yet, we foresee a time when we'll have completed what we're doing now. Then what? We're thinking. We're big on thinking. In order to think, I always need to go looking for raw material to chip and chop. In that search, I found some items of interest:


SchoolTube: School videos. Who knew.
National Novel Writing Month: Coming up. Sharpen your pencils. And your wits.
First Book: Providing books to children in need.
National Writing Project: Writing prompts, resources, articles about writing and teaching writing.
Best Ever Teen Novels: Vote. Though how anyone could vote for anything else with To Kill a Mockingbird on the list is beyond me.


That's all I got. I'm going back in.

How to Get Good at It (Whatever It Is)

Maybe this is evidence of brainwashing from my college years, but I hold fast to the belief that the road to happiness is to become really, really good at something. How pleasant if that thing is also something at which one can earn a living. Even if not--even if that thing is carving sculptures out of butter or that strange combination of art, vocation, and drudgery of being a parent or if it is a kind of play--training one's dog, growing orchids (not my area--I'm just now trying to resurrect several that I nearly murdered from neglect followed by equally damaging obsessive attention), or building sculptures out of buttons--it's still not only a worthwhile pursuit but the highway to heaven.

Why?

1. Fun--Fun is absorbing, leads to flow, there are brain wave changes, look it up.


2. Becoming a master of something changes you deeply. You develop the confidence of the expert, which has a salutary deflating effect on the ego, thereby creating room for curiosity. You can afford to admit ignorance and to consider that you have something to learn. When I was studying Iyengar yoga and was admitted to the invitation-only level IV-V class, any pride I might have had was extinguished by the obvious truth that I was the dunce of the class. This was incredibly liberating. I felt freed of any expectations I might have had, any desire to compete (oh, people say yoga isn't competitive--baloney! If humans do it in a group, someone is going to try to dominate or show off, probably many someones) simply because I lacked the ability and experience to be able to compete at that level. Some of the people in the class had themselves been teachers for many years, others had studied in India, some had had a yoga practice for decades.


3. The joy is in the doing--not in feeling special for the doing, not in the attention one might get for the doing, but in the doing itself.

But one only learns this joy if one finds something that one really really loves to do, and then works and works and works and works at it. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.

I think about kids at school. How do they get a chance to find what they love to do and are really really good at? Some maybe just stumble across it. One of the protegees (and I desperately hope she doesn't mind I'm talking about her here) is shockingly good at content development. She's a natural. She just has this way of thinking, this combination of acuity, precision, and creativity that makes her a knockout. With only a few months experience, she's creating work of the quality I'd expect from someone with years of experience. Did she choose a career in assessment content development? No. It was sort of happenstance facilitated by a recommendation of someone who is a friend of mine and was one of my protegee's teachers. Never underestimate the power of a teacher to guide, nudge, encourage.

Maybe sometimes kids are really good at things they don't necessarily love, and maybe sometimes they love things they're terrible at. Then what? We can't all be good at everything. We can't all be suited for everything.

When I was in the sixth grade, I'd been reading all the Black Stallion books for years, and more than anything I wanted to be a jockey. I was 5' 6" and weighed 120 pounds and someone hinted to me that jockeys tend to be built more delicately. I was crushed. (I got over it.)


Last night I was making a list of things I'm not just terrible at, but monumentally and breath-takingly terrible at.


I was the world's worst secretary. When I was 21, I burst into tears at a panel job interview when I learned there would be a timed typing test (what's funny is that I'm now quite speedy on the keyboard, writing having become my life's work). I like to cook but once in a while I stop paying attention and something catches fire (generally a sleeve, although I branch out occasionally and have set fire to two wooden cutting boards and a couple of oven mitts--and I'm not even listing all the times I left a kettle on the stove and then went my way). I like to knit but the highest knitting rank I will ever achieve is that of advanced beginner, as I get confused when I see numbers and letters in the same paragraph, and so find knitting patterns impossible to read and also? Directions are boring. I am bad at sitting through anything that bores me. In fact, I am really bad at sitting still. When I'm on the phone, I have to pace or sketch or file papers or make coffee or snip dead blossoms off the rosebush. Once I did sit still long enough knit a sweater. I read the directions and then congratulated myself on my creativity in not following them. We named the sweater Moby Dick. It was of the shape and dimension of a giant hobbit--or maybe an orangutang: too short in the torso, as wide as three rather hefty people, and with arms that reached nearly to my knees. It had a fetching hood of Medieval appearance. I had to wear the sweater, at least a couple of times, because it took probably 100 hours to knit, and when I did, I looked like a deranged monk. However, the sweater was banished to the Goodwill because it endangered my life when I forgot about the billowing sleeve while making coffee. Yes, it caught fire. TWICE. You couldn't tell after I brushed off the charred yarn. I knitted a skirt, too. The skirt never caught fire, but you'd think it would have spontaneously combusted from sheer hideousness. It looked like a homemade tent fashioned from olive, orange, and purple yarn barf. I just threw it away, although it might have been a serviceable sleeping bag if I'd just sewed the hem together. I GET LOST. Getting lost is so deeply embedded in my life that I have a formula for how much getting lost time to allow depending on the distance I'm traveling: For less than an hour's drive, I allow 30 extra minutes; for more than an hour, 60 minutes; for longer trips, it's another half day. I've gotten lost going to the airport, and to the cello teacher's--where we go once a week and have done for the last two years. I've been late for planes and for job interviews (before the formula). I'm always late to doctor appointments (I've gotten lost going there, too, even though it is 15 minutes away and I think I know where the office is, but my doctor kindly tells me she never minds because it gives her a chance to catch up on her file notes.


UPDATE: Fixed typo & formatting. Same as it ever was.

Poetry Poker

Another diversion during the week of festivities was a round or three of poetry poker. I believe the idea came from Kenneth Koch. Or so I was told. So you take a pack of cards, write words or phrases on them, and then deal 5 to each player. (We tend to be lax on rules, so we let players replace cards that seemed impossible.)


Here's one round:

• I didn't mean
• tarnished
• tiny
• little box with monsters inside
• mangoes

And here's the poem:


I didn't mean 
to give you a tarnished tiny
little box with monsters inside.
I meant to give you 
mangoes.




And here's another:

• two quiet lines
• peanuts
• sea
• boiled over
• who wanted most

And here's the poem:


Two quiet lines at the bar
we ate peanuts while we waited
the peanuts tasted like
the sea boiled over.
Who wanted most
to go to the beach, then:
you or I?


It's fun. More fun than it sounds like, especially after an evening of swimming and pizza, when you're sitting in a large bright kitchen with a dear friend. My daughters like it, too. We agreed that it's more fun the more decks you have in play. We've got two now, but we think it's not enough.


There never are enough words, are there.

Life Is Art

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.   Tolstoy, "What Is Art?"

We clipped the clothespins to an egg carton to dry. Whence camest this beautifully colored egg carton, you ask? Farmers market. From the chicken lady.

The festivities went on for some time. Last night was the concluding soiree. We had friends over to make art and drink champagne.


We all brought out boxes and bins of supplies from our art closets.


You see some results above: wooden clothespins, which we painted gold, and embellished with glitter or metallic confetti or fake gems or those waxy sticks that are fun to make shapes out of.

A close-up:

My favorite is that created by Stephanie: the one with the yellow sprigs.

There were also lantern-makers among us:

Heather made these. Are they not gorgeous?

And Matisse made an appearance in Caroline's collage:

I just love this.

And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.-- Tolstoy, again, "What Is Art?"

Mi Flow

. . . en las palabras inmortales de Baby Ranks.


As discussed previously, flow is that state of optimal creativity, focus, and absorption. As described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.


Cows are pastured where my dog and I walk in the mornings. Our schedule and that of the cows don't usually coincide (those cows must have many big busy doings, for they are more often absent than present), but when they do, it's a thrill.

My dog was bred to tend and guard grazing animals. (On both sides; she's a mix of Belgian Tervuren and chow chow.) She is no slouch at guarding, as anyone who's ever walked past my car or been to my house can attest. I wouldn't want to be our mail carrier. As to her herding skills--let's just say her opportunities to prove her mettle are limited. I don't let her herd me, and my daughters just push her out of the way when she tries to herd them.


So when she catches sight of those cows--it's deep calling to deep. One can see that she feels inspired to the depths of her soul to go and herd those cows.

Everyone should feel that calling, right? It's a great feeling.




UPDATE: 4/2/12--Today the dog got loose and herded the cows up the hills and through the brush down to the pasture. When you get close to a cow, you are shocked by how big they are. They make a lot of noise crashing through the brush. The dog had a wonderful time, but when she turned her attention to a calf, I was worried the mother would kick her. She was back on the leash before anyone--bovine or canine--got hurt. When we passed by later, the cows seemed none the worse for the exercise. The dog is exhausted. I think it was the best day of her life. So far.

Best Day in the World, Maybe

It's coming up: World Read Aloud Day. March 7, y'all. Put it on your calendar.

LitWorld's mission is to

. . .use the power of story to cultivate literacy skills in the world's most vulnerable children through Education, Advocacy and Innovation. LitWorld creates resilience building reading and writing experiences which connect and fortify communities.

Who can't get on board with this agenda?


The best thing I ever heard anyone say about reading was that in addition to the value (in terms of acquiring knowledge and information) and sheer pleasure it gives, reading also ensures domestic harmony, because whenever one must wait for another member of one's household, one may sit oneself comfortably and read, thereby spending time profitably and enjoyably that would otherwise be wasted in grumbling. 

Read about World Read Aloud Day here.

Register to participate in World Read Aloud Day here.

Download a pdf containing an activity kit here.


I'd love to hear what you're going to read aloud. Could be anything. I'll make a list, starting with 10 Minutes till Bedtime by the wonderful, wonderful Peggy Rathmann.

NOTE: You probably noticed the change in design. No credit to me. You know how simple those templates are.


UPDATE: Great idea here at GOOD. It's a 30-Day Art Challenge for March. Already shaping up to be a good month, what with the reading and the art.

Devices of Wonder

--it's a fun interactive online exhibition from the Getty.

There is a lot of fun out there on that Innerweb Internet. Isn't it great that there is value in play?

• At the Louvre you can follow 29 online visitor trails.
• At the Met you can see a timeline of art history.
• Space out at NASA.
• Make a sky map of the constellations you see at night.
• See wild animals on the NG WildCam Africa.
• Play National Geographic Great Migrations.
• Watch sea otters play at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
• Go through the Ocean Portal at the Smithsonian.
• Look inward at BBC Science: Human Body and Mind.
• Read about what's happening in ScienceDaily.
• And in a great science blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science.
• Hang out with dawgs dogs at Dogster.
• Learn something at a TED talk.
• Look at what everyone is looking at. Why not? It's fun. Play play play play play.
• Think about stuff at BigThink.
• And speaking again of wondering, there is Wonderopolis and HowStuffWorks.

More art for the classroom:

• The Art Institute of Chicago offers this video on how to engage your children in art.
• The J. Paul Getty offers lesson plans, teaching tips, and other resources.

The Beautiful and the Confused

California is like the shockingly gorgeous woman at a party who desperately wants people to think she's not just a pretty face with cleavage a lovely landscape and so is always coming out with the polysyllabic words (the production of which seems almost painful) in the hopes that someone will finally take her seriously and stop staring at her cleavage Sierra foothills.

Someone needs to tell her that she really doesn't need to try so hard. Although maybe it is time she figure out the difference between correlation and causation.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the self-esteem campaign with a task force and everything. (You can read the full report here.) Even though all the other states like to make fun of California and New York (she being so pretty and he being so cool and rebellious), as they go, so goeth the nation. The promotion of self-esteem in children snowballed into almost a religion. Praise became as constant and unrelenting as it was--I'm sure--meaningless to the intended beneficiaries.

As with any method of symptom-mowing, that didn't quite work out as anticipated:

The long-term impact of this rah-rah mentality is already apparent. In 2004, according to Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me, 70 percent of American college freshmen reported their academic ability as “above average.” But, once ego-inflated students get to college, they’re more likely to drop out, says Twenge, when their skewed sense of self and overconfidence affects their ability to make decisions.

Because they got it backwards. Although self-esteem and high student achievement may be correlated, the cause-and-effect sequence is more likely to be that high student achievement promotes self-esteem, rather than the reverse. *Oops. Dang. How much did we spend on that report again?*


(Oddly enough, in a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon six-degrees-of-separation kind of coincidence, just when this self-esteem campaign was a little sparkly idea glimmering on the horizon, I was working as a secretary at an automobile repair shop that was owned by John Vasconcellos's brother. There simmered family tensions, is all I have to say about that. Also, such work did not enhance my self-esteem, as the owner's wife was in the habit of remarking that how interesting that I was a college graduate--she had never attended college--and yet I didn't know how to load paper into a printer. I didn't blame her; no amount of praise could have convinced me I was even a minimally adequate secretary. I was a terrible secretary, maybe the world's worst secretary, with deplorable office skills that were on a par with my knowledge of auto repair. One of my duties was to translate the mechanics' notes on the service orders into descriptions of labor  for the customers' bills. Once, after replacing a part, a mechanic scribbled "lower radiator hose" on the service order. I wrote "lowered radiator hose" on the final bill, which ignorance sort of rendered everyone, from the high school kid who pushed a broom around to the owner, speechless. )

I would like to point out that it's antithetical to serious intellectual inquiry to hijack such a discussion by misrepresenting the "basic premise" in order to promote a political and social agenda:

The basic premise is that racism and discrimination cause minorities to feel bad about themselves, and that this low self-image translates into women avoiding "hard" fields like engineering and blacks and Hispanics doing poorly in school.

Well, no, not exactly. The basic premise is that people--and let's leave race and gender out of it, shall we, because neither has much to do with the main point--who feel bad about themselves for whatever reason, tend to self-destruct--and take others with them--which can only have negative effects on not just society, but the economy, so how might it be possible to kill the snake when it is young address this problem in children so that they are able to become self-sufficient adults who are well-equipped to function and thrive, which will mean less crime, fewer teen-age pregnancies, less substance abuse, and more productivity, which will mean more money for big companies and the local and federal governments that tax them. The means may have been ill-advised, but the goal seems like one we could all get on board with to some degree of enthusiasm, if indeed it be based in fact.

Similarly, the motivation driving the California Department of Education (and those of Michigan and Oklahoma and others) to dissect creativity in order to figure out how it works and thus build it into school curriculum has to do with money business productivity. This isn't a new idea:

The world community recognizes that progress in the arts, in the professions, and in science and technology relies exquisitely on the creativity of people in these professions.

This came from Carl A. Leopold (Boyce Thompson Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York), who went on to suggest

. . . the art of scientific thinking be taught by allowing students to experience all the thrills--and missteps--of an actual science program or research.

Which indicates that independent exploration and direct experience and willingness to fail are essential to creativity. It's an orientation from which to teach, rather than a framework for a curriculum.

Once creativity is allowed in, students may gain mastery, thus building self-esteem without anyone heaping on piles of praise--praise that the students are surely smart enough to recognize as false. Everything is everything.

You Got to Tip on the Tightrope

. . . in the immortal words of Janelle Monae.





In re California legislation S.B. 789

This bill would require the advisory committee to consult, as appropriate, with individuals who are experts or have experience in innovation in the fields of business, science, technology, mathematics, engineering, and arts education on the development of a voluntary Creative and Innovative Education Index, to be based in part on the creative opportunities in each participating school, as specified. The bill would require the advisory committee to make recommendations by June 1, 2013, to the Superintendent on the extent to which this index should be part of the state’s accountability system and methods to foster creative and innovative education in the public schools.

Does it make you nervous  to think about legislators regulating creativity? It seems as disagreeable as the prospect of the business folks messing with the talent.


But maybe "regulating" is too strong a word; the bill started out like this, was amended to this, and then to this. Perhaps it's more accurate to say "considering implementing recommendations about"?


My first thought is that when deciding whether to follow a recommendation, one must carefully consider the source.


Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests that there is a creative personality.


Can creativity be taught? Or should we think about creativity as the seed of a flower that must be nurtured in order to bloom? If so, what conditions will encourage that little flower?


When in doubt, I turn to Einstein:

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

Italics mine.


Meanwhile, if (in addition to allowing them some autonomy, some freedom to experiment with what they think) we can give kids music to listen and dance to, cool stuff to mess with, and beautiful things to look at, they'll figure out what to make of it all.


They need as many opportunities to wonder as possible:

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead. . . .

Are you wondering about the tightrope? Oh, it's balance, and the need to take risks. Edwin Land said, "An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail." We all of us need to be able to boldly go without worrying about what will happen when--not if--we fumble. Fumbling isn't failure; it's part of learning.


UPDATE: Wish I'd seen this earlier. From Namaste Nancy, the reminder that creativity is for everyone.