Age vs. Hope

For my Dad's 61st Birthday last week I made this card (in the center) by melding an old photo of him from 1972(?) and the well know Obama poster from 2008. I meant it as an homage to my dad and a humurous reflection on the past. He took it as a parody, as in, he now has the opposite of hope because all he has is age. Woops. I even wrote a poem on the inside of the card explaining the drawing, but the print was so small that he couldn't read it.

Numb toes

Next on my agenda after finishing my earlier post was to look up why my big toes have been numb ever since day three in the woods with the kidos. I have had the same hiking boots for seven or eight years and don't recall having numb big toes in the past. It's not painful, but it is irritating and a bit disconcerting - like, are my toes going gangreen?

My super in-depth research (i.e. 20 minutes of web-browsing) leads me to believe that I have a fairly common condition experienced by hikers, and most creatively pseudonymed "Christmastoe" by tree-planters who work from May to September on steep terrain and then regain feeling in their big toes around Christmas time. Great. That puts me into February with numb toes.

At least I can talk about having Christmastoe, though.

Might be worth it.

Back from the woods

Returning from life in the woods with 10-year-olds is a rough transition. I spent last week in just such an alternate reality, which was lovely, both in its own right, and for its difference from the day-to-day goings on in my office, which are all-consuming unless you are forced to take a break. Four days in the woods will do anyone a world of good. Four days with 10-year-olds makes it magical if you let it.






This trip to the woods marks a end of sorts to my Thesis Fieldwork. I have much more material to write about than I initially anticipated. The structure of the writing itself remains a bit of mystery, but I have to get going on that before I get to far from the experiences. I just don't want it to be boring.

Incredibly dim light at the end of the tunnel

Moving into week eight of my fieldwork I took some time to sit down with the ol’ thesis proposal, which I have been evading since last spring. Today I attempted to chalk out the “Story” section, and to grapple with how I would differentiate between the content of the story section and the upcoming “Discussion” section. The story section is meant for describing literally what happened during your fieldwork. The discussion is reserved for analysis of the story. The difficulty will come in keeping my observations and opinions out of the story section, reserving them for discussion.

The good news, though, is that I can start to see how this thing is going to come together. There is an enormous amount of writing still to take place between now and then, but I can see a glimmer from the distant end of this long dark tunnel.

In keeping with my belief that all blog posts should include images, I drew you this:

New attentions leave no time to Blog Today

http://cyberpedteenlab.blogspot.com/

Drawing can be taught like any other skill...

...if you're willing to read all this text. Oy...


The New York Times on line is featuring a weekly drawing lesson from illustrator James McMullan:

1. Getting Back to The Phantom Skill: the joy of drawing
2. The Frisbee of Art: the importance of the ellipse
3. Hatching the Pot: modeling with hatching
4. The Beagle Vanishes: 1, 2, and 3 point perspective
5. Mother Nature Decoded: seeing nature as a construct of its smaller elements

Dock malfunctions, but thesis lives!

While my thesis fieldwork took a technical hiatus this weekend while I was away in Wisconsin, I have enjoyed mentally processing my own exploits as place-based activities. For instance:

I arrived a the family lake cabin to find the swimming dock, for lack of a better phrase, all f-ed up. My analysis is that the water level in the lake rose so fast (no doubt during some recent storm) that the wooden dock floated up, lifting the dock legs off the bottom of the lake. As the water level regressed, the dock was set back down, somewhat askew. Generally, one would have their dock out of the lake by mid-October, if for no other reason than the water is cold, and a human person must get into this water in order to uproot the dock legs from the mud and the much below. Tempted though I was to let this be someone else's problem, the possibility that one or two fishermen a week may have floated passed and snickered at our expense, was not a bearable blight on the Franke family name. Also, in the words of so many Double Dare contestants before me, I was motivated to "take the physical challenge!"

So, I wriggled into ye ol' hip-waders, and had a fine time wrastlin' the whole dock, section by section, out of the lake. Some sections were locked together with a little pin thingy. Some of the legs were no longer upright. Some posts wouldn't detach. Some posts fell off and began drifting away. Having no memory of how the pieces of the dock fit together in the first place, and finding that the water was in fact much deeper than usual, keeping my head and arms above water, and thus keeping the lake water out of the waders was no easy task. A few strained muscles and one hip-wader leak in the rear end, and the situation was resolved. Dock saved. Family name rescued from local ridicule. Thesis lives?

This is exactly the type of physical, place-based problem solving that I think art education can help teach. Not that this dock situation was a particularly amazing feat, or particulary art-related, but I believe that somewhere between me wanting to give up, and me finding success, lies elements of my own art education. It has to do with assessing the situation, having a confidence in your own physical abilities (including knowing when the job is too big), figuring out how things work, and then working toward a solution. I believe that art making is a great way to develop student's ability to think and act simultaneously, and to do so creatively. In the best case, these creative acts stem from the physical world of students' lives and are thus "place-based experiences of art making," a term that recurs in my thesis.

Also, I got to tour a cranberry bog where they were harvesting the berries. A very place-based activity. These guys love it so much that apparently they take vacation days from their other jobs to come harvest cranberries every year. I'm telling you, we all benefit from physically engaging with place.

This gentleman just hopped over the floating corral buoys to start raking the floating cranberries up the green conveyor into the truck. Cool!