I am really interested in Christine Kim's work.

She explains her work as examining the physicality of sound. The Physicality of Sound seems unheard of (pun intended) – but it isn’t, or it shouldn’t be. We are physical beings and everything we perceive with our bodies is physical. But she reminds us that sound does not simply exist in one form, and does not have to be experienced in a singular way –through our ears.

Hearing people understand sound waves through the mediation of our ears; it seems abstract and bodiless, and we have developed a vocabulary for it that includes ideas applicable to sound alone, such as tone, pitch, notes, etc., and as Kim says, those of us with the ability to hear with our ears, claim ownership of sound. We can hear, and therefore we assert that our experience of sound should be prioritized. "Don't make loud noises, don't burp, don't drag your feet" etc. – but, Kim, who does not hear the way I do, explores the mediation through our other perceptual faculties, reminding us that sound does not belong to hearing people. Sound has or can have a physical form, a body in the world. It can vibrate. Or mediated through an amplifier, can create shapes – can move a paintbrush and therefore decide the composition of paint on paper. Sound can have texture.

This blog post seems very relevant to today's class/reading. Interesting to see the intersection between different cultural norms.

Gaming Panel

Issues in Gaming in the Classroom: 

"I am disappointed in the lack of education as it is, I would rather use resources to better the improvement of reading" 

"My son spends too much time playing game at home that are non-educational" 

"Addictive?" 

"Too many kids in the classroom" Will gaming take away from the personal attention of each child? 

"How and to what extent should gaming be involved?" 

"Learning and gender difference" ADD? How can we account for learning difference? 

Test scores and funding ? 

Positives in Gaming: 

"Don't you want you kid addicted to learning" 

"Could games change identity in a different way? Positive social interactions online" If a students could make decisions online maybe they could use this confidence in making decisions  in the "real world" "Shouldn't parents and teachers help to determine boundaries" 

I interact with people outside of the school community to learn and connect could this be more useful than gaming

I don't like school, games keep me engaged 

I’m finding it a little hard to concentrate this morning because they MOWED my spot. Mowed it! All the wildflowers (and all plants, minus the trees) are shorn to the ground. Devastation! I’m exaggerating, but it was slightly shocking after watching the spot grow for half the semester. It must have been mown yesterday with the rest of campus. Why do grounds mow campus so often?

I usually try to incorporate the readings, or whatever we talked about in class last time in my posting, but I’m finding it a little hard to do so today. I felt frustrated through much of class yesterday both because, though I could see the connections, I felt that feminism and environmentalism were very separate. I’ve always had trouble with both ideas, maybe just because they’re so expansive. I think that “environmental justice” is a clearer descriptor than “eco-feminism.”

But back to my site sit, since I was at a loss for words today I decided to represent my experience pictorially. Above are before and after pictures of my site, and below is a previous description of my site sit after I ran it through Wordle.com, which “reformatted” it. 

Last class, when Anne suggested that we maybe move our weekly sitting spot, I was strck distraught by this prospect. I like my spot. I've grown attached to my spot. I feel like there's so much left to do and explore there. I've come to feel  comfortably alone and have even fallen asleep there a couple times. In order to increase my exposure to it, just to make sure it's the place I really want to be, I though it'd be cool to visit it at a very different time of the day. I really wanted to see how sitting there at sunrise would effect my vision of the spot. So this morning, just past 7 am, i trudged myself over to the pond in order to have a look-see at the spot I've visited on the same day at the same time for the past 6 weeks. I took a couple pictures, but they're all pretty lame and dark, or I would show them to you. What I think is more revealing is what I wrote while lying there. 

Sunrise Reflections

Today in class (out of class?) I was excited to see how enraptured we became in our discussion of eco-feminism. I wanted to respond to it some way, and poetry usually is the best wasy I can see to do that. Often another poet voices the exact thoughts that should come to my mind. I thought this one poem was highly relevant to our discussion and notions of overturning systems of patriarchal oppression and turning it into something useful. So I thought I'd share it.

VI

Let the old man lie in the earth
(he has troubled men's thought long enough)
let the old man die,
let the old man be of the earth
he is earth,
Father,
O beloved
you are the earth
he is the earth, Saturn, wisdom,
rock, (O his bones are hard, he is strong, that old man)
let him create a new earth,
and from the rocks of this re-birth
the whole word
must suffer
only we
who are free,
 
may foretell,
may prophesy,
he,
(it is he the old man
who will bring a new world to birth)
it is he,
it is he
who already has formed a new earth.

                ~H.D. "The Master"

Image taken from: http://themarkonthewall.blogspot.com/2011/02/morning-reading-dark-glory.html

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LWbxSZ2Nxw

Hey All,

My field placement isn't until tomorrow, but I thought I'd still try to contribute by posting what is on tap for my placement work tomorrow. Teacher M at School X wants me to sort through a bunch of iPad apps and rate them and see how applicable they could be to the students at each grade level. This is a very efficent use of technology and even gamification to better enhance a students learning experience. That's all for now, but I'll be sure to post tomorrow to let everyone know how it went.