Blogs

I'm planning to go to the Love Letter Train Tour on Saturday morning. I've passed so many murals on the train, but I haven't noticed their connections and meanings. Although the tour sounds like a tourist thing, I'm really excited about the new perspective it's about to bring to me. After the tour, I'm going to see  The Dream Garden since it's really close to where I'll be. And I'll stop by the Washington Square around there. I feel like it'll be a deep play experience for me, and I want to be open to all the ideas, feelings and thoughts the city gives me. I'll play the believing game as I see all the love letter murals.

I want to go visit Peter the Mint Eagle and go bird watching in Philadelphia. I became interested in Peter shortly after watch the John Steward clip in which he argues that NY pizza is better than Chicago pizza. Although it seems as if Peter and pizza are not at all connected, they are. Both are/were symbols to a large group of people at one time. As we have discussed, cities encompass vast groups of people that do not always interact and rarely agree on the importance of one thing. However, most people in Chicago are willing to argue that their pizza is pretty damn good. Pizza transcends all of the city's internal boundaries. It is not only a source of pride; it is a source of agreement. I guess what I'm searching for is a better understanding of why Peter the Mint Eagle is important to a city, or pizza is. How are people able to settle differences over a bird or a type of food? I'm essentially curious about the production of meaning in cities.

One thing I have learned from the NGLC blended learning and from working with various edu-tech tools and developers, is that the market is very much in flux. Inspired in part by the success of blended learning and the buzz around MOOCs, many companies are working on many different innovative tools and courseware packages, often in response to real needs identified by teachers and students. This is great news, but for the immediate future it means that most of us at some point will need to teach and learn with a tool that is still "in beta" and lacks the robust customer support or functionality of older, more established software.

I've written before about how difficult, yet ultimately rewarding, it can be to get used to working in a "live beta" mode, in which you publish or publicly try something you know to be half-baked, in order to get feedback on how it works in a real-world setting. A recent EdSurge article also offers some concrete logistical tips for instructors who find themselves in this position, due to the newness of the software tools they are trying to use -- such as workarounds for tools that lack "single sign-on" functionality.

WE HAVE TO READ RADICAL TEACHER AND DISCUSS THOSE ARTICLES!

& we need to start talking about writing together!

Active reading/making connections
give them highlighters to mark the text
emphasize the process…
framing note-taking as a way of putting yourself in the text
things to write in the margins: connections/reflections/

From InClass/OutClassed notes:
A moment here to think-and-talk about interactive reading strategies:
not just highlighting, but marking while you read (what do you mark?),
writing on the text, making connections w/ experiences, other readings;
most importantly: asking questions of the text. You haven't read unless
you've written on/written back to the text.

also to note for further discussion: Sara’s observation that current social science practices
of representation “are not ethical” (or, “to make people anonymous doesn’t empower them”)

I haven't finished typing up quotes but I did have one I wanted to put up here. I also chose a longer passage, thinking that depending on the situation and how many people have read, we may need a longer passage. It can also be shortened or lengthed because I thought these particular pages (189-93) really interesting.

From 189:

“The next morning, Elaine returned to South Forty at 9:00 am for an all-day workshop about job hunting. She did not think she needed this class, but George had told her she had to attend. She walked into the classroom and sat down in the second row. Nearly every chair was taken, and almost all the other students were male.

The teacher distributed manila envelopes. “This envelope is for documents,” she said. “Birth certificates, ID with a picture, release papers, rap sheet, letter from a P.O., dispositions from the courts, and any proof of your ex-offender status.”

            Before South Forty’s counselors could help anyone find a job, she explained, they needed some paperwork. The students pulled crumpled slips of paper from their pockets.

            ‘I got a copy of my bail receipt,’ one man said.

IF YOU HAVE NOT USED ALL 4 OF THE FREE SEPTA TICKETS MADE AVAILABLE TO YOU EACH SEMESTER BY RES LIFE, THEY HAVE AGREED THAT YOU CAN USE ONE FOR THIS TRIP. SO, IF THIS IS STILL A POSSIBILITY FOR YOU, PLEASE request a Student Activities SEPTA ticket (using this form) by classtime on Thursday.

By midnight on Wed, 12/3, please attach a comment here, describing your plans for your final trip into the city alone: when-and-where will you go, in search of what, using what modalities/methodologies/lenses/p.o.v's & forms of simple, critical and/or deep play? Before writing, spend several hours checking out various websites and possibilities:
Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis, @ the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
KAWS @ PAFA. 118 North Broad Street.
Maxfield Parrish and Tiffany Studios. The Dream Garden. Curtis Center. 6th & Walnut (off Independence Square).
City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program.
"Particle Falls": Sensing Change. Public Art by Andrea Polli.

 I saw this pie chart on upworth.com and immediately thought about Heidi Hartman's discussion of feminist economics! This is such a shocking statistic- that 48.5% of minimum wage workers are adult women. During Heidi Hartman's public presentation, she went through graph after graph that made clear the economic consequences of being a "woman" (which was especially reflected during the recession). Here are a few take-aways from her presentation that I thought you all would enjoy.

• The wage gap is narrowing! Men's earnnings have leveled out since the 70's, while women's have increased.
• Women have always had higher unemployment rates. Single mothers have the highest.
• People with children have higher poverty rates, especially single mothers.
• Women in low-paying jobs STILL get less money than men in the same low-paying jobs.
• Men have a higher growth rate in every industry during the recession recovery, while women have a higher loss rate in every industry but two- Manufacturing and Financial Activitites. 
• More women are attending college than men. 

The above statements are based on research done by the Institute of Women's Policy Research.

1) By now, Elaine was thirty-five years old, older than most of the other inmates. Angry young women reminded her of herself in her first years here. Often, she pulled them aside and dispensed advice, urging them to get a job and go to school....Most of the time, though, she just listened to them talk about whatever was bothering them....

Bedford Hills was full of such makeshift families, where one strong woman played the role of matriarch and cared for a few younger prisoners. At any given time, there were at least 10 prisoners whom Elaine considered her "kids"....

Her children were scared of her, and they almost always did what she said....For young women with no parents, a strong maternal figure was exactly what they wanted. "We knew she loved us, Tarsha Thompson,one of her children, recalls. "It was nice to be loved. That's something we were all lacking"....

Just like her own mother, who had always prepared enough food for their whole building, Elaine made sure nobody was left out (p. 103).

2) In Elaine's opinion, clemency was a cruel and unfair game. She saw it as part of the governor's political dance, a way for him to show concern about the injustices of the laws without actually changing them. She did not think the governor should give anyone clemency; instead, he should just repeal the laws (p. 149).

Wondering in the largest and historic library in University of California Berkeley, I noticed the sculpture on the wall, thinking about that how strange it was, which named “Apple from Heaven: The Armenian Alphabet” with, actually, three pomegranates inside instead of apples. Laughing slightly because of such a ridiculous mistake of this artwork, I broke the silence in the library and felt a little bit embarrassed.

Keeping watching this sculpture, I was absorbed. The letters were too abstract to be recognized, but they looked artistic and seemed to have deeper meaning than it looked like. The content was the Armenian Alphabet, boring, but the style that it was built was extremely interesting. Each letter was created by warped iron belts, which gave me a strong visual shock. As I knew, Armenian is a state which owns long history and high-level ancient civilization. This alphabet, as the most necessary element of language, was a symbol of the flourish Armenian civilization. Thus, the warped letters, I guessed, represented the immemorial and mysterious history of ancient Armenia.