After Monday's trip to Morris Woods, I have starting noticing more plants that seem to be invasive or are clearly taking over with no natural enemy. Because of this, when I got to my spot, I realized that I had never actually noticed the English Ivy. Looking now, it is probably one of the stone circle's most noticeable attributes and I am kind of confused as to why I simply looked over it. This place is such a mess of different plants that I assumed that all of the green vines were parts of various ones, but after paying attention to the Ivy in Morris Woods and thinking about how it clearly does not belong there, the vines in the circle seem more noticeable, prominent, and out of place.

There is a concept in science fiction which allows a device to be created to hide things in plain sight. The device limits your perception of things by making you simply fail to notice them and occasionally notice something else instead. This can only be broken when an outside source draws your attention to what's being hidden. I just experienced real life science fiction! I know, not really, but the concept behind the technology is real. I didn't even see the English Ivy and I even perceived it as belonging to multiple plants until somebody else told me in a different situation to attend to the invasiveness of it. When I got to my site today, the presence of the ivy was almost creepy as I had never seen it before, but I had been seeing it every week at the same time.

At my field placement the 8th grade girls have been spending each class working in the same group on a series of projects.  It wasn't until this placement, however, that I realized the projects were all interrelated and revolved around the same core.  The girls chose their own groups and decided on a research topic that interested them, then together conducted empirical research by surveying their group of subjects (i.e. classmates.)  The girls first entered this data into Excel and then designed it into an aesthetic graph/visual representation.  At my most recent placement, they used the "green room" in the back of the computer lab to record and present their findings. 

Some data projects included: favorite Starbucks drinks; favorite vacation spot; which eyeshadow goes best with which complexion; favorite Broadway show.  There's obviously a lot of socioeconomic dynamics at play here (i.e. the assumption that everyone in their sample group will have seen enough Broadway shows to have a favorite) and part of me just instinctively cringed a little when I saw these bright, developing girls with so many incredible resources at their disposal choose to talk about eyeshadow. 

I originally wasn't sure how I felt about the value of teaching these girls Excel, etc, but now that I see it all fits in with a theme for the larger trimester it's easier to justify the excel unit.

I really enjoyed the class experience in Morris Woods. It was a pleasure to be surrounded by mostly plants for an hour and a half and there was such a noticble difference in environment and my experience of the way environment affects each of us as I walked out of the Morris Woods and into the English house parkinglot. My favorite aspect was the final activity - the partnered trust activity. I had explored a beech tree, without sight, and felt the vines of ivy that surrounded the right half of the beech tree and the bare, elephant skin that surrounded the other half. This tree was just perfect, I could wrap my arms around it and my hands could still meet on the other side. After rachelr carefully guided me about 10 meters away, I only had to spin once before I realized exactly which tree I had spent the past few minutes with. I wondered why that is so - how is it I could have known that instantly? As if one is recognizing an old friend, even without ever having seen him/her visually before. I wanted to apply this once more to my site and see what I found.

Sadly, there is not much to add to my field notes from last week. constructing writing and creating videos to teach students about basic ways to use technology. E.g. How to create an event in their google calendar. therefore, i haven't really interacted with how students at my placement school use technology, or how teachers use technology to interact with their students. I have however devoloped insight into the basic technology gap that is present amongst the teachers. 

Yesterday during my observation period, I decided to incorporate some of what the class discussed in regards to Caning in the City,as well as the experiences of the "Find Your Tree" exercise into my observation period. Having been inspired by both being blindly led in Morris Woods and Carmen's talk of how being physically blind changed his perceptions of his surroundings I decided to conduct my observation with my eyes closed. I wanted to see if I could be able to observe just as much sitting on my bench without visual aid as I could when I had my eyes open. Naturally trying to do so created some issues, as having my eyes closed led to some horrendous note taking but more importantly blindly observing would be vhallenging my orginal intention for choosing the spot so I could note the visual seasonal changes on the Haverford Nature Trail. But in conducting this visual-free observation time, I nonetheless was able to still take note of my surroundings in suprisingly new ways. For instance I noticed I had a better sense of how intense each gust of wind was and from which direction it was coming from, based on tiny things like feeling the wind on exposed skin or the slight rustling of dead leaves near the bench. I could suprisingly tell the differences between different vehicle engines and animal and bird calls based on small variations in the noise level that was generated (something I may have missed if I merely saw these objects and organisms and only took note of their visible differences rather than the small differences).

"My constant contact with the street through the scraping of my cane provides me with a direct, uninfluenced connection to visual information" (Carmen Papalia)

After talking about "direct, uninfluenced" experiences in class today, I feel more and more convinced that it is not possible to experience something without its being mediated by a prior experience, a facilitator, a lens, a memory, an expectation. It's quite possible that I've been brainwashed by Dewey and my Critical Issues in Education course, but I keep going back to the idea that every exprience leads to further experiences: “there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end” (Dewey, Experience & Education). In terms of the classroom experience, I do believe that students should have more authority/choice in how they can frame their experiences, but again, I think there will always be a frame of some sort that helps decide what kind of information we take in. 

I think this relates to interpretation - so I thought of a statement from Frank Kermode: "Yet the world is full of interpreters... So the question arises why would we would rather interpret than not?" Still thinking about this... looking forward to continuing this discussion in class on Monday.  

I just wanted to share this map, a projected look at where each Panem district would be based on The Hunger Games. It's a little obsessive/silly, but I thought the geography and history that the designer considered was very smart. http://aimmyarrowshigh.livejournal.com/32461.html (I found it through Entertainment Weekly this summer. Ignore the random picture that doesn't show up)

Although I'm in a journalism class, the teacher, Mr. A, also has most of the students in his ninth grade English class as well. Today, if the students had already finished their articles, he told them to use a website called NoRedInk.com, a website that runs grammer drills. To make it more appealing to students, when they sign up for the website they can pick a few of their favorite things, the NFL, country musicians, Modern Family, etc, and it uses those topics in the sentances. There are around 50 different grammar exercises they can work on, and because they sign up through a class code, Mr. A can check and see how they did on each exercise, plus how many attempts they made to get the correct answer. 

Mr. A explained that he really liked this program, even if the favorite things aspect is a little silly. He likes that it cuts down on paper use, it instantly grades their responses, and students can work on it whenever they have downtime. 

This is the first time I've seen them use this program, so I'm curious as to how much they learn from it, and whether Mr. A will address the students that make multiple attempts to figure out the right answer. Overall though, it seems pretty effective and perhaps this version of gaming appeals to some of the students. 

What? When Teacher S is absent, the entire class goes into Teacher A’s classroom. 50 kids and one lead teacher with a few aids (volunteer grandparents). This is sure to be a challenging situation. The chosen method of teaching in this situation is using the smart board to play various YouTube videos of educational merit. More specifically, they watch President Obama’s speech and a video about Veteran’s Day (with country-style patriotic music and pictures of soldiers dying and children crying). Because there are so many kids in the classroom, some of them are sitting quite far away from the screen on which these videos are playing, and therefore have difficulty seeing and paying attention.

When the teacher tries to access a certain video, she is unable to do so because of a block with the school’s internet server. She then has to spend almost 25 minutes trying to get the video and filling out various online forms. The music teacher comes in to distract the 50 kids with impromptu music while they wait.