My world on the web
ᔥ in Walking 56 Miles to Work ()
Let’s face it. We are all stuck indoors.
And it’s going to be a while till we travel again.Window Swap is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else’s window, somewhere in the world, for a while.
A place on the internet where all we travel hungry fools share our ‘window views’ to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.
It’s easy now to assume that one’s perspectives on race, gender, orientation, and the rest are signs of inherent virtue, but a lot of ideas currently in circulation are gifts that arrived recently, through the labors of others.
Remembering that people made these ideas, as surely as people made the buildings we live in and the roads we travel on, helps us remember that, first, change is possible, and second, it’s our good luck to live in the wake of this change rather than asserting our superiority to those who came before the new structures, and maybe even to acknowledge that we have not arrived at a state of perfect enlightenment, because there is more change to come, more that we do not yet recognize that will be revealed.
demonstrating how big the universe would be if the Earth were shrunk down to the size of a tennis ball
While I still scrutinize the motivations of any politician, government agency, employee, or contractor, I am much more aware that there is a lot going on that I may not be aware of. Learning so much in the last five years of working with government, is making me more confident in the fact that there is so much that I do not know, or understand, and that I need to always be much more cautious in how I form my opinions, and talk about how change in our world can happen.
As Harvard graduate student Holly Ellmore explains in Quartz, faking happiness on social media, while often detrimental, can also be an effective means of fighting mental illness.
The grade game is a big thing. Throughout the year every teacher and student will play it. This year we changed the game, and we changed our classroom. I was able to get feedback all the time. I was able to use technology. I learned to self-assess. I had time to revise and check my work which made my writing better. Because I showed evidence of growth and learning, I became a B student.
what if what we thought was detrimental was really beneficial?
what if the messy was better than the perfectly manicured?
what if the foreign (or at least outside influence) was better than the domestic?
We cannot just rip the ‘weeds’ out. There must be flowers in their place for the bees. This is not about ignoring the weeds to me, but accepting then for now for the place they serve.
I think that Benjamin Doxtdator captures this in a recent post on instruction in the classroom:
There is a strong and powerful role for direct instruction and using model texts, but this must take place inside a larger liberatory project that aims to undo deficit theories of language use.
It is about the intent and sometimes that is where the wish lays waiting.
Some friends of ours are about to have their second kid, and I was thinking about what a leap it is between 1 and 2, how many parents say “it’s exponential,” but how I never really understood why until I drew the diagram above and was able to really see all those relationships mapped out.
it is EASY to tweet a dichotomous statement in a succinct manner that gets people’s attention and gets 100s of retweets; but we often lose out on the grey and miss out on the opportunity to engage. If we do feel the need to make a polarizing statement, we need to be willing to engage when someone challenges us. Keep the social in social media; respond when we are respectfully challenged so the conversation can move deeper and move to the heart of the statement. We need to continually reflect, be willing to be challenged and open to others’ ideas and opinions.
