Another blog (Day 218/365)

Posted on by Dale

No, never fear, I am not starting another blog. At least, not one for me, and not one that you will ever read. Today I worked on the Newnan Crossing 100 Book Club blog. We’ve been trying to get it up and running since October, and on Monday I decided that it was time to implement it whether it was exactly in the shape I wanted it or not. After all, it was ready for me to put students in as users, and they would each have their own blog.

I had originally wanted to use the multi-user version of WordPress, called WordPress MU, but apparently there were installation issues. (All the tech end of this is being handled by the school system’s IT people, specifically Mike. He’s been great.) So we switched to Drupal, with which I have been unfamiliar.

WordPress is a dedicated blogging software package. Drupal is a “content management system,” whatever that means. All I know is that it has a lot more buttons to push and boxes to check to make it do what you want it to do, and sometimes those boxes and buttons are distributed in non-intuitive ways.

Anyway, I got all the kids put in, with nifty passwords that look random but actually are rememberable for the kid. I got it to look like a nice place to be. And we’re ready to start training the 8-10 year-olds how to blog.

The idea is that they read a book from a preselected list of award-winners or starred reviews, then blog about their reading. I’ve trained them (although I have no doubt that training was shallow and noneffective in 80% of them) not to write about the book, but about their reading.

After they post, then I and the other Book Club members can comment on it. Lo, a conversation about reading occurs. Children, these are advanced readers, who otherwise would be zooming through “short books” and racking up AR™ points just to rack up AR™ points are now thinking about what they’re reading. They’re making predictions. They’re discussing an author’s use of language. They’re deciding what makes a book good. And they’re learning, most importantly, to write.

If this works, I shall be called blessed.

Hedgehogs (Day 217/365)

Posted on by Dale

I had fun, fun, fun today: I began working with Sherry Lambert’s kindergarten class during their music block time, turning them into our adorable horde of hedgehogs.

First I explained that I was doing a play (that actually got some recognition and some excitement from two or three of them) and that I was going to invite their parents to let them be in it.

Then I showed them the book and read them The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives. They liked it, although I’m sure most of it went right over their heads, “incommodious load” indeed.

Then I showed them the hedgehog videos I had found on YouTube. We ooh’ed and aah’ed over the cuteness of the little critters. We discussed how they sniffed and waggled their pointy little noses, and we tried sniffing our neighbors. We observed how they walked, and finally we saw how they can curl up into the cutest little ball (and are even cuter when they uncurl.)

Then we went back to their mat and began to practice what we had seen. We sniffed, we waddled, we curled up and uncurled. Great fun was had by all.

I told them I knew Ms. McDonough (our wonderful music teacher) had taught them how to march, actually a good guess, and they all immediately showed me. I asked them to do it in slow march, and they did that.

Finally, we asked ourselves if it were possible, just possible, that we might be able to march like hedgehogs? Experimentation soon showed that it was, yes!, possible.

All in all, a fabulous day in Hedgehog Land.

Moving forward (Day 216/365)

Posted on by Dale

Amazingly I was quite creative today.

At school, I finished the hearing impaired morning announcement video. Everyone thinks I’m just grand to have accomplished it, and I guess Final Cut Express looks impressive enough to dazzle most people. Actually, I did do a good job with it. It looks very nice.

I received confirmation that the Cultural Arts Commission is in agreement to help us out with William Blake, although I think their support at this point is still a little fuzzy. No matter, it’s enough to move forward with. I called and confirmed the dates of April 29-May 3 for rehearsals and performance at Wadsworth Auditorium. I am to write a letter to the mayor and city council referencing the Cultural Arts Commision and Global Achievers and our ties to Scotland, asking for a waiver of all fees for the space.

Bette Hickman, our intrepid producer, wants to make it open to the public, and I had come to the same conclusion. This could be a really big thing.

I got email done to all our participants, informing them of our new successive approximations.

I got a couple more measures of the Sunflower Waltz scored.

I worked on the official proposal for the Cultural Arts Commission.

I created Lacuna stationery.

I started a storyboard for Sun & Moon Circus.

That should be enough, don’t you think?

Comment

Posted on by Dale

This from yesterday’s obituaries in the Times, quoting Henri Troyat on how he developed his writing style:

“I would read a paragraph of Flaubert out loud and rewrite it from memory. Then, by comparing my version with the original, I would try to understand why what I had written was an affront to what I had read.”

This is an interesting take on the writing process and on style. Very metacognitive, in that it’s clear that Troyat was not trying to emulate Flaubert. He simply looked at where his voice went wrong in transcribing a master, and in that way was consciously able to develop some inner voice of his own. I like it.

Comment

Posted on by Dale

With so much delightful going on around me in the world according to Bush, Ann Coulter, Scooter Libby, Walter Reed hospital, fired prosecutors, I’ll just highlight this little nugget, from the New York Times:

“To secure Democratic support for trade deals…, Republican leaders have signaled willingness to accept language guaranteeing the rights of workers, including a ban on child labor, for American trade partners. For six years, the administration and its Republican allies refused to include such guarantees in trade bills…” (emphasis mine, but what else can you see in this paragraph?)

These people are disgusting. If that’s the word I’m looking for.

Workshop, 3/6 (Day 215/365)

Posted on by Dale

Lots going on today. First of all, I videotaped our hearing impaired students saying the Pledge of Allegiance for their announcements for Friday morning. It’s Exceptional Children’s Week, and all week students from different areas have been leading the pledge and also telling about famous people in the past who were or would have been in special needs classes. One of the hearing impaired students signed a couple of paragraphs about Helen Keller.

Their teachers originally wanted to narrate the video, but I dissuaded them. Well, OK, I forbade them. This is the kids’ moment, and I told the teachers I would close caption the video. What about the little kids who can’t read, they asked. Their teachers will read it to them, I pointed out.

Anyway, I spent a lot of the day editing the video in Final Cut Express, structuring it like the morning announcements, putting cheesy “news” music under the lead-ins, close captioning the Pledge and the Helen Keller bit. I even put photos of Helen Keller over the shoulder of the student, cross-fading between each one.

At Lacuna workshop (Dale, Marc, Laura, Melissa, and Carol Lee in attendance), we were productive as usual, although in a different way this week. I brought my worries about the calendar to the table, and we hashed that out. Part of my worries has to do with not knowing whether we have a place to perform this, and we talked about that. I know that our producing arm is working on it, but it makes me very anxious not to know.

To make a long evening short, we decided to keep working Tuesday nights (7:30 for those who would like to join us) for the rest of March, getting together our design concepts and choreographing the two staged pieces.

The first week of April is spring break, and many of us will be in New York City. And I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we will be having lunch with Nancy Willard! She’s coming down from Poughkeepsie, and we get to meet her! I’m still excited about that.

Then, starting April 10, we will meet Tuesdays and Wednesdays and begin dragging in the casts of Man in the Marmalade Hat and Two Sunflowers. Actually, on April 10, we’ll invite the members of the chorus to come and work on a little blocking/physicalization of their part of this thing.

Sometime in April, we’ll hold a weekend color-cut-and-paste session where we can build and paint stuff we need all at once.

We buckled down and got our What We Need and Who We Need done for Man in the Marmalade Hat. (Lurkers, there’s lots you can do. More than enough. Get to work.)

We realized that at some point we need to storyboard Sun & Moon Circus so we can deliberately produce visuals for the multimedia part of the concert. I also shared that I had envisaged staging “production photos” of that and other pieces for the multimedia, i.e., photo a kid tossing up a planet balloon and use that as a visual.

Carol Lee had done a different successive approximation of a sunflower, one using a glove. We’re still undecided between the glove and the crossbar on manipulating the sunflowers. She will work on those this week.

Laura wants to work on a prototype for the hedgehog costume. (Dale will start working with Laura’s mom’s kindergarten hedgehogs this week.)

Marc will work on design concepts for the Inn itself. We did decide that for May, we can get away with simple suggestions.

Dale will work on prototypes for the Toast Heads (the MMH’s marching band).

Melissa, were you working on something? I didn’t write it down.

Everyone is to work on visuals for the winter/spring motifs for the MMH’s banners.

Monday (Day 214/365)

Posted on by Dale

It’s a Monday, which means Masterworks Chorale has to count as my creativity. At school, we took down most of the reading caves, although I left the actual disassemblage of Hogwarts until tomorrow, when I could remember to dress appropriately for working with huge, dirty pieces of cardboard.

Worries (Day 213/365)

Posted on by Dale

I’ve started getting antsy about rehearsals for William Blake’s Inn. It’s time to begin planning our final approach, because at some point soon we have begin involving a larger number of “others”: troupe of sunflowers, marchers in MMH, hedgehogs, etc. We have to decide whether we want to invite our octet to take part in the actual staging. We have to set up times for all these people to be… where?

We have to convince someone, who?, to help with constructing sunflowers, banners, pennants; costumes for the Band. What will we do re: costume/indications for the octet as soloists? How involved does our May performance have to be in order to make its point to those we assume to be unimaginative enough to require our having to do all this?

When should we start getting the octet back together?

I’ve proposed May 3 as our performance date, but at this point we have no firm date or space for the performance. Perhaps we can plan not knowing these details, but I’m having a hard time even successively approximating what to do next.

In other news, I was very nearly creative today. After nearly two hours in an optometrist’s office in Greensboro, I retrieved my laptop and began writing this post. Then I pulled up the Sunflower Waltz and got exactly four measures fixed before they finally finished with Grayson.

Nothing (Day 212/365)

Posted on by Dale

Up at 5:30, driving to Guilford, taking the child out after the game to shop and dine. No room for creativity today.

Yes, I know, if I were serious about this 365 thing, I’d be jotting down musical phrases in my nearly empty Moleskine music notebook on the road to Greensboro. I’ll try to remember that next time.

Read Across America Day (Day 211/365)

Posted on by Dale

I spent the whole day in my media center, surrounded by reading caves for Read Across America Day. As you all know, March 2 is Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and this year was the 50th anniversary of The Cat in the Hat.the media center with reading caves

This is my media center with reading caves. Everything you see here was built by teachers and their minions on Thursday afternoon. In the foreground is the circus tent, with the Mulberry St. House behind it. Beyond that you see the houses of the Three Little Pigs, and behind that, the Wardrobe that leads into Narnia. In the very back is a starry night campground.

Right behind the Mulberry House is Hogwarts, and you cannot see the pirate ship behind that. Also invisible, beyond Narnia, is Mr. Tumnus’s cave, and to the right, out of the frame, is a beach and under the sea.

Here are some young Gryffindors reading inside Hogwarts. Gryffindor's commons roomYou can see the portraits in the stairwell. Behind the camera is the Great Hall, and under that is Slytherin’s commons room. I took the opportunity to dress up as Snape and snarl at children all day. A couple of kids actually, and correctly, addressed me as “Professor Snape.” I also identified every redheaded child as a Weasley, although I think only one was old enough to get it.

It was pretty amazing day. Kids would go nuts when they saw the transformation of the media center, and we’d give them five minutes to explore before settling down to read for about fifteen minutes. There was room for two classes at a time, although I think with a little judicious placement we could have handled three at a time.

Mr. Tumnus's caveEveryone’s favorite of the day was Mr. Tumnus’s cave. It was very cozy, and the way they used the actual shelves was quite witty. Believe it or not, that was a conscious design decision on the part of the young ladies who put it together Thursday afternoon.

All in all, a very good day. Everyone’s reaction was so positive that we decided to leave everything up until Monday afternoon. Many wanted to leave it up all week, but it shuts down the media center, as you can imagine, and we just can’t be closed that long.