In Perfect Silence

Imagine a Night (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

There are stars out tonight.


A brief movie by Katrien...

There is only now.

Screen shot from film.

‘… there is no other place, there is no other time. There is only now.‘ So came the realization after life threatening surgery, leading to the conclusion ‘Don’t hold back, this is it.

This gentle human portrait speaks in a tone that I believe many of us wish we would speak in. A tone of which we’re all capable. Shot in Montreal, under the influence of extraordinarily good coffee and timeless conversation.

Gillian toured the world as a professional modern dancer, tv and film actress. She is now a creative director at the Cirque du Soleil. But as is so often the case, CVs, resumés and headlines can lay an opaque mist that obscures a person from those that care to look.

A film by Nic Askew.

3 Minutes of Video You Must Watch

My mom, Catherine, on her wedding day.

I. Entering

My friend Robyn sends a link via email with a brief note to watch a video.  He's been doing improv work with medical students and a former student sent him the link.

3 minutes. Yeah I can work that in.

II. Remembering

My mom was asymptomatic when she was diagnosed with lung and liver cancer. She had some type of required screening done prior to cataract surgery that revealed these growths. Her spirit was crushed with the diagnosis that she had advanced stage cancer in her lungs and her liver. This is a woman who 30 years earlier had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and beat it. This time though, my mom would be dead 10 months later.

III. Dwelling

The film, If Only for a Second, is about human spirit and human bodies--how our spirit resides within and beyond our physical selves.  It is a brave and spirited work and one that having lived alongside my mom while she succumbed to cancer speaks to me.

Please make/take three minutes to watch it.  I know my next contribution will be to the Mimi Foundation. They so get the largeness of spirit.



Here's a link to the website.

Exploring Layers

I. Layer 1

I have been thinking about layers for the last month since I had a conversation with Lolly Daskal.  I can't even recall how the idea of layers emerged as we were talking but it did and it has been on my mind.  I have been trying to understand leadership as layers and why leaders need to understand, be attentive to layers.

I tend to think in layers as I make art in layers.  Beyond that though, I have been noticing how layered my life is and in such ways that claiming it as my life seems a bit faulty.

This is not new.  Whitman said with such power years ago: For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I received a google + comment from Maureen Devlin which had me remembering layers again:


II. Anyone There?


So I experimented a bit today and sent out this tweet.

Rob Greco sent back a tweet recommending an amazing pictorial essay, The Basement,  that needs to be viewed. 

Karen Steffensen provided a link to a film, "Life in a Day" I had not seen and it so captivated me that I watched it  for the next 90 minutes and as I watched I painted.

Who I interact with on Twitter and Google+ becomes layers within me as well.

III. Meanwhile...

For the last two weeks I have been busy creating three e-books for a client that focus on read a loud books for K-2 children. One collection of texts focuses on the Himalayan Mountains. I have been dreaming about these mountains as I read book after book.  So it is not surprising that the painting I was making today should be influenced by what I have been seeing and visualizing for the last two weeks. What we read and view become layers within us too.

IV. Collage and Paint

Work underway...

I had no idea what I was making as I began working. I had propped up an iPad so I could see and hear the movie and set out materials to work with.  I wanted to limit the work so I set out gesso, pages from NY Times, pan pastels, different types of brushes, painter's knives, sponges.  As I played, I began to see mountains emerging and followed that path.   It led back to the Himalayas--or at least my version of the Himalayas.

Mountains Begin...

Detail from work. 

Dreaming of the Himalayas (Gesso, Newspaper, & Pastel. M.A. Reilly, 2013)

V. And This Was Going On Too

While I was working and watching the film, others were following the link that Rob had sent and were finding it fascinating too. Just think of the layers upon layers of meaning that were happening.

VI. More Layers

Our lives are merged and separated in ways that are hard to detail and yet within creative acts those layers are given voice.

It is this that I want to follow now.  The accidental mingling of ideas, interests, provocations sometimes leads to art that surfaces and finds traction and voice in what we create.

Creating is powerful and never truly our own.

Thank you. 

Lincoln, Euclid and a CCSS Cautionary Tale

Lincoln (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I. A Small Story

I couldn't help but think of how we often redress truths we have learned from one discipline in the cloak of story.  I thought about this as I viewed Steven Spielberg's Lincoln last week. In the scene below, Abraham Lincoln is determining what to say in a telegram and uses Greek mathematician, Euclid's notions of geometry as an illustrative story about reasoning and equality.  Lincoln illustrates the significance of the then pending 13th Amendment by situating Euclid's reasoning that, "Things that are equal to the same things are equal to each other" as a story.

Specifically he tells the young telegraph operator:

Euclid's first common notion is this: Things which are equal to the same things are equal to each other. That's a rule of mathematical reasoning and its true because it works - has done and always will do. In his book Euclid says this is self evident. You see there it is even in that 2000 year old book of mechanical law it is the self evident truth that things which are equal to the same things are equal to each other.   

Although Lincoln is speaking to the operator, it seems as if he most needs to hear the story in order to finalize his decision not to sacrifice the chances for ratification of the 13th Amendment in order to end the fighting.

II. A Cautionary Tale

Australian economist, Allan Fels says, "As humans we are hardwired to tell stories and hardwired to listen to stories." At the 2011 Creative Innovation Conference, he told the audience that "70% of what we learn is through stories" and that "storytelling is essential for innovation."

I think of the scene from Lincoln and Fels' words in light of some interpretations of the ELA Common Core State Standards which advocates significant increases in students reading and teachers utilizing informational text in order for students to be "college and career ready."  By high school, 70 percent of the texts taught are supposed to be informational.  Although David Coleman, co-author of these standards says that the percentage is spread across disciplines as a response to concerns from English teachers about the role of literature, Sandra Stotsky and Mark Baurerlein insist that "Literature will inevitably have a lesser presence" in curricula.  Further they state that the claim that reading informational texts leads to being college and career ready appears to be unfounded. Baurerlein writes:

“We could find no research to support the assertion that substituting informational texts for literature will improve students’ college readiness,” said Professor Bauerlein. “In fact, experience suggests that exactly the opposite is likely to happen.”

Beyond the obvious need for human story, it is a mistake to assign specific percentages of text types to be read at a national level as such action reduces teachers' capacity to place into individual students' hands touchstone books and for students to exert agency and select works that resonate.  Keeping track of percentages may well take us off course  by redirecting our attention and energies from intellectual exercises to accounting.

It is agency, more so than titles or genre, that lead learners to become avid readers, not simply compulsory ones.  It is the breadth and depth of read and appreciated texts that allow readers to couple ideas and insights gleaned with circumstances they now confront.  It is this action of making and applying meaning to lived contexts that better represents signs of being 'ready' for adulthood.

Re-imagining Education

from video by Nic Askew

A few films to trigger thinking about what it means to educate and be educated.

RE-IMAGINING THE EXPERIENCE OF EDUCATION AND SCHOOLING

Play 

THE FILM QUESTIONS

---

One / ‘Might we have underestimated the value of ‘play’?’ Two / ‘How would your life look if seen through a playful state of mind?’ Three / ‘Might confidence sit at the heart of an extraordinary education?’ Four / ‘Might a playful frame of mind stand to transform the experience of education?’ Five / ‘Might a playful state of mind enable the strength of our true human spirit?’

Creative 

---

THE FILM QUESTIONS 

---

One / ‘In this rapidly changing world might creativity need to sit at the heart of an education for all?’

Two / ‘Might education now need to embrace these new forms of literacy for all students?’

Three / ‘Might our future call for creative, literate, self expressive and resourceful students?’

Engaged

THE FILM QUESTIONS 

---

One / ‘What might be the consequence of reframing education around the experience of the student?’

Two / ‘Might curiosity have always sat at the heart of an extraordinary education?’

Three / ‘How might our imagination bring the experience of education to life?’

Mentor

THE FILM QUESTIONS 

---

One / ‘Might we all have the opportunity to mentor another?’

Two / ‘How powerful is a single moment of validation to a young imagination?’

Three / ‘Might your influence travel further than you might imagine?’

Four / ‘Teacher or not, might you have a part to play in the education of another?’

EVERYONE | MIMI ITO

THE FILM QUESTIONS 

---

One / ‘Might the information age free us to pursue learning centered on individuals and not institutions?’

Two / ‘Perhaps each of us has a part to play in the possibility of education?’

Three / ‘Might a broader definition and responsibility for education bring us all closer together?’

Everyone

Down and Out in America

Children from the Martinique Hotel by Matt from here. 

"Success within the lives of those I’ve known for all these years is as much a matter of their inward growth—in decency, in character—as of their outward victories. And, at the end, uncertainties remain..." Jonathan Kozol, (Kindle Locations 2001-2002).

I.

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I've often puzzled over that line that Joyce penned--until today.

II.

It is the stories Jonathan Kozol tells that makes each and every work by him stay with me and well after I finish the actual reading reveal ways of seeing that I almost knew before. I finished reading Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children and am feeling anger, sadness, impotence, and gross incompetence.  The history of poor children living in Manhattan and then later in the South Bronx that Kozol writes about occurs while I am an adult.  This is a history and yet it is not one from a distant time.  It is from the time I have lived.  As such, I feel an ownership that comes alongside such neglect.

Neither geography nor time can distance us from what happened and failed to happen in the lives of the children and families Kozol chronicles.  In the end of the 1980s while children were living at the Martinique Hotel I was living just across the river, falling in love, teaching, traveling, and beginning a doctorate at an uptown university.  The distance between that life and the one being forged at the Martinique gives me pause.

What Kozol describes feels like a nightmare--a distance that those there could not claim.

III.

We spend an inordinate amount of time discussing education in the United States and very little time, if any, discussing the economic injustices that give rise to poverty and make it feel inevitable.   Since the rise of right-wing conservatism that was fully ushered in via Ronald Reagan the conversation about shared sacrifice and equity which framed the conversations coming out of the 60s and 70s have been silenced so that we might argue about family values, education, marriage, health care, abortion while ignoring those among us who are forced to do without even the basics.

IV.

In 1988, Reagan when asked about U.S. homelessness said this:

“Well, it’s been so exaggerated. Millions, there aren’t millions. Real research reveals probably 300,000 or less, nationwide. And a lot of those are the type of people that have made that choice. For example, more than 40% of them are retarded, mentally deficient people, that is the result of the ACLU. Look at the girl in NY who went to court after Koch had ordered her to get off the street and be put in a shelter. She went to court and actually fought, under her Constitutional rights, to go on living in that cardboard box on the street.“ (from here). 

This is the same man for whom airports, libraries, and other monuments have been built to honor.  I didn't see it then and I certainly don't understand it now.  The meanness of Reagan's rhetoric continues today and is stunningly unapologetic as it finds voice in conservatives who claim to love. I don't doubt they do love, just that such love is awful stingy.  Just consider how Mitt Romney can say this without hesitation even as he tries to gain your confidence in the way of a vote:

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it." (from here). 

V.

If poverty is in need of repair?  As an artist, I have been making images of people down and out in America for the last few years. Here's one look:








Work Cited
Kozol, Jonathan (2012-08-28). Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Composing through Film: A Look at Student Work

Birdwatching, is a thirty-minute film made by high school senior, Andy Keyes.  Keyes created the film as his final exhibition for the Classics Academy and it was previewed by an audience a few weeks ago. 

It's a quirky work that is oddly compelling. As one who grew up listening to Lou Reed, the work speaks to me through the selection of music and the visual work--more so than the actual plot. I love how the camera sees the figures in the film: follows them, crosses paths with them, holds still as they move away, swoops--birdlike.



I appreciate partial stories--the ones we don't get to know too well as it allows room for the viewer to roam a bit.  We never know the whole of anything--let alone another's life.  It is the partial tellings that are most compelling in art and watching Birdwatching makes me wonder how students, like Andy, come to learn this sophistication.  For this project, Andy was mentored by filmmakers Ben Donnellon and Mike Butler (also his teacher). 

When we think about composing, we need to actively broaden our definition from the limited understanding of composition as a paper and pen matter to resituating it within multiple arts such as film, screencasts, photography, movement, orchestration, song, voice, visual arts (mixed media, painting, sketching), and remixed and multimodal works.

Below is a trailer, my son, Devon made to advertise his server.  He's 13 and self-taught--like so many other young people who find expression through image, video, and sound.



I post both of these works to suggest that we need to seriously broaden what counts as composition at school. Having students write these endless responses to written test prompts is a waste of time and we need to stop limiting the idea of composition to what a student can put on paper in a week's time.  Let's lean in and see what actual composing students are doing in innovative programs like Classic Academy and film classes, as well as out of school.  We can map the skills, dispositions, and strategies that are taught in more traditional composition classes on to these multimodal works. That's the task--not to make learners abandon their passions, but to help shape their learning through those passions and the mapping we jointly compose.

Our collective response to the Common Core State Standards cannot be limited to having students write endless argumentative, expository, or narrative essays in response to test prompts.

Visually Exploring Rhizomes

Found this video exploring rhizomes by BlairArtEd (Theories & Research in Art Ed) fascinating.

Because Story Matters: Meet Elliot Baxter

Zaji Zabalerio, a film maker (Zesty Productions), is developing an interesting series of film shorts about Elliot Baxter, a high school student, slightly out of focus with at least some of his peers. What caught my eye (and held it) are all the large spaces Zabalerio composes in the work: spaces large enough to wander about, get lost, remember.

And isn't that the function of a well told story?  The invitation to wander?

Baxter is played by Rob Carroll.  Both Zabalerio and Carroll are students at Morristown high School in Morristown, NJ.

Take a look at the first installment.

Pardigmatic Shift: Above and Beyond

Take a look at this and I am curious what you think.