Here’s the remainder of the speech we were exploring today:
Remember to be active viewers, adding to the webs you began today.
Please have your antennae up for things that might be useful for you, for your speech – in terms of content and in terms of delivery. Remember: talent borrows; genius steals.
…tonight’s Homework Sheet™ is posted here:
Seen and Heard Lists: at least one item to each list, every day. This is part of our training in Clarity: noticing the world around us. What is actually going on?
Campaign for Mini-Brain: at least 30 minutes on your speech this evening.
Continue to consider:
Say your speech out loud at least twice in the privacy of your room.
The first time through, listen for and make notes to yourself about:
The second time through, try the whole thing as we started today (before everyone reverted to being kindergarteners…): eXaGeRaTiNG eVeRy SiNG-GLe CoN-So-NaNT.
Please have an up-to-date printed copy of your speech with you EVERY DAY from now until you deliver your speech to the class during Election Week.
Goals: for tomorrow, please consider class agreement #7: “Practice kindness with yourself and others.” Create a goal for yourself for tomorrow. Write it down in your comp book. Ask yourself, “Is this S.M.A.R.T.?”
…tonight’s Homework Sheet™ is posted here:
Seen and Heard Lists: at least one item to each list, every day. This is part of our training in Clarity: noticing the world around us. What is actually going on?
Campaign for Mini-Brain: 30 minutes tonight on your speech (more if you are behind).
Continue with the work we began exploring today.
Socratic Circle tomorrow: please make sure you have your notes ready and your copy of U.C. with you.
Goals: for tomorrow, please reconsider a goal in relation to Division 7: something specific you can do tomorrow to help increase friendly relations between our classes. Write it down in your comp book. Ask yourself, “Is this S.M.A.R.T.?”
Late Work: what is your plan?
…your friendly neighborhood Homeweek Sheet™ is posted here:
Seen and Heard Lists: at least one item to each list, every day. This is part of our training in Clarity: noticing the world around us. What is actually going on?
Class Agreement: What kinds of things do you think our class needs to agree to do? Think do rather than don’t. Dare to do it for reals – we need this. Spend about 30 minutes on this tonight.
Understanding Comics: our next Socratic Circle, on chapters 3 and 4, will be held Wednesday. Use the handout to help guide your prep. Be an active reader and an active note-taker.
Use what you learned last week to help you take a forward step this week, in terms of prep. Tip: thorough prep can increase confidence in sharing ideas.
Socials: how do you play Civilization V? Continue with your on-line exploration.
NEW JOB POSTING: The MACC Mini-Brain!
There is a new position opening up in the Capitol Hill MACC 6/7 program: the MACC Mini-Brain.
The Mini-Brain is a job similar to “class president.” The role of the Mini-Brain is to be the teacher when Prof. Pai Mei isn’t in the room or when he doesn’t feel like being the teacher. The Mini-Brain is to Prof. Pai Mei as Robin is to Batman. The Mini-Brain is a natural leader, fair and kind, and helps shape policies that affect the lives of the students of Division 3.
MACC Mini-Brain Job Description
Duties:
Term: One month
Mandatory Skills/Assets – some combination of the following:
Hello, Leaders of Tomorrow. Welcome to your first campaign.
For a combination of Social Studies, Career Education, Writing, Math, ADST, and Art, you will each create a project to determine the first MACC Mini-Brain!
Remember that letter and package from President Obama that we explored? For the Campaign for Mini-Brain project, you will each create your own version of that document. It will contain:
Big Idea: Clarity of Communication—what am I doing, visually and textually, to make my values clear and persuade my public?
First steps:
Remember: all aspects of a political campaign have been extremely well thought out—everything is there for a reason, working to shape the public’s opinion. Even the most casual-seeming of choices have been tested and planned. With each choice you make, ask, Why? How does this contribute to my message?
Also remember: there is no one way of being an effective leader, and there are not leaders and non-leaders; leadership potential exists inside us all, and there are an infinite variety of ways of expressing it—what’s yours?
Good luck!
As advertised on your Homework Sheet™, the link to the Quirks and Quarks podcast can be found be clicking here.
1. Before you begin, prepare the space around you:
2. Then prepare your materials:
Big Idea (big text and big container): Scientific Advancements
Sub-Topics (medium-sized text and medium-sized containers):
3. Draw lines to connect your Sub-Topics to your Big Idea (you can choose to connect the Questions container to the Big Idea, or have it on its own in a corner of the page).
4. Press play.
A reminder that the first few minutes of the podcast is an introduction–please do listen to it, but no need to take notes. Listen for when they start to discuss the first Sub-Topic, Climate Change.
Be an active note taker. Use the Pause and Rewind (back 15 seconds) buttons liberally (a lot).
No full sentences–try to use as few words as possible for each Detail.
You don’t have to write down everything – listen for the key information.
Use “chains” to break down long ideas.
Cluster the Important Details around the Sub-Topic they relate to; connect them to the Sub-Topic with lines.
There will be some complex information in here that you may not understand–how much can you get a rough sense of by context (the words and ideas that surround the tricky idea), and when do you need to press Pause and look something up in order to understand and move on?
Write down questions that occur to you around the Questions container and connect them to the container with lines.
Criteria:
Good luck!
First day of school already? How did that happen??
(from Down the Street, by Lynda Barry, Harper and Row Publishers, 1988)
Angry tree assessment on Wednesday. If you are extending yourself in this area, you might be growing a layer of bark over your skin, or perhaps you have developed the ability to photosynthesize,
See you tomorrow – I’m off to buy some chalk.
Prof. TBA…
What “monster” do you struggle with each time you face it? What creature from established lore is a good metaphor for how this monster makes you feel? What makes this monster so strong? How might you defeat it?
As if we needed any more reasons to love, respect, and trust the so-incredible-it-hurts Lynda Barry; she is a certified genius after all. But she threw another one at us with the introduction of her doodling-as-a-way-of-staying-present technique.
(images from Picture This, by Lynda Barry; published by Drawn and Quarterly;
copyright 2010 by Lynda Barry)
This seemed to mesh perfectly with what we discovered by following the advice of Lynda Barry to look into the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist during our big Brain Research project in Term One, specifically how by giving the left side of the brain the narrow focus it craves, the right hemisphere is freed up into a larger open awareness–a kind of non-thinking thinking place that we’re practicing applying to everything we do in class, whether it’s solving a complex math problem or making a great shot or strong defensive in PE.
Keeping the hand in motion: in other parts of her work, Lynda Barry equates this with how going for a walk when you’re stuck with a problem seems to loosen things up and present a solution.
“Movement is key,” she says. “I wonder why?” And what’s interesting is that this movement seems to lead to a kind of inner stillness, from which unexpected ideas emerge.
With our sense of curiosity piqued, we tried out the technique while looking at the short story that runs through the pages of Lynda Barry’s image exploration activity book about “writing the unthinkable,” What It Is:
Then we tried it again while listening to an episode from Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast that seemed to tie exquisitely to our Conscious Explorers Club meditation work: “Brené on Strong Backs, Soft Fronts, and Wild Hearts“:
A few brave souls even tried “doodling as meditation” during a guided meditation by Dr. James Maskalyk (meditation starts at around the 30:00 mark):
And then finally (for now!), we applied the technique to our big work in Social Studies–following and understanding the 2020 U.S. Election–and doodled to capture the details of a PBS NewsHour podcast in which the inestimable Judy Woodruff (the honorary Godmother of Div. 3, although she doesn’t know it) and her top-notch crew of Capitol Hill reporters, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, and Amna Nawaz share their on-the-ground experiences of the insurrection at the Capitol building on January 6:
Move over, boring bullet points. Hello, doodle. Where have you been all our lives? Oh, yah… you were with us from the very beginning. We just needed a genius to point that out.
Talent borrows; genius steals. This reading technique, “Exploding Sentences,” was stolen from the much missed Ms. Wilson (late of Cap Hill; lately of lucky, lucky University Heights), who learned it, I believe, from Faye Brownlie, from whom most/all great ideas about language instruction come.
Take a sentence (or in our case, a paragraph – it is MACC after all) (whatever that means) (ahem *Mental Asylum for Corrupted Children” ahem), then use your red pen/pencil crayon to explore the author’s use of language: what you you notice about word choice? Sentence structure? Paragraph structure? Use of figurative language? Use of punctuation? Why do you think the author made those choices? What impact do you think they wanted to have on the reader?
Then get out your blue pen: what questions can you ask of the text? What do you want to know more about?
Finally green: can you use known information to try to answer some of the your questions? Can you make predictions?
In December we finished reading Book One, The Golden Compass, of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (fasten your seat belts for Book Two, The Subtle Knife!). This is my third time reading this book out loud with a class, and each time I appreciate it more and more. It doesn’t get any better. The energy in the room is on fire. 100% engagement.
Before reading each chapter, we would “explode” one of that chapter’s paragraphs, first privately/individually, then going hive-mind to collect our ideas on the board and deepen our understanding by teaching each other.
Two things I’ve noticed:
