Narrating and Demonstrating the Work We Do
Going on about the weather is trite when the weathermeisters natter on. But when I have to get up at 3 am to check on the lambs, it is not. Verily it is not trite. In fact the past week has been an exercise in the depressive grinding of its miserable self down onto me … Continue reading Hope Full in February, the Honest-to-God Cruelest Month →
Kevin had a bit of musical bio this morning on his website. It inspired me. Real self-insight into what makes this polymath tick. And I’ll give you one clue–it’s what comes out of the horn. Yes, music. Saxophone music to be specific. Kevin’s got a real gig with his band coming up so I am … Continue reading Sing it, Saxomophone Man! →
When it is -11 degrees Fahrenheit (-24 C), the snow doesn’t so much crunch as it …squeaks. I wait in the dark at the gate. Again. Yesterday was a meal best left behind for the post trauma to come. Today I voice a prayer for ‘no new mamas’. I listen deep inside like an equitorial tracking station pinging for … Continue reading February 19, 2015 | A Shepherd’s Journal: The Fragile Crack of Frozen Stars →
I wait at the fence. Pause for the tell of a new born lamb. Nothing to skip a shepherd’s heart. Check the corners of the fields. & clank the gate chain. They think it is time to eat. I count. Pause. Hungry wooly purses and sweet silent capital. Accounted.
When I search Google for “engagement WKU” or “student engagement” I get a hot mess of stuff. In fact it clarifies for me how the word has lapsed into confusion (at least for me). The Google nGram chart below for “student engagement” indicates that before 1962 there is no record of the use of the … Continue reading Engagement: I Do Not Think It Memes What You Think It Memes →
One of my grand joys has been using a fountain pen. When we were kids my parents let us fill our own ink cartridges with syringe and a bottle of Shaeffer peacock blut “Quink”. I never had a ‘stick’ pen until I went to junior high school and I sharpened my pencils mostly with a pen knife … Continue reading Petty Joys: A Series | Part Two: If You Can’t Open It, You Don’t Own It →
(mouseover gif above) I asked students to respond to a Google Form for class last week. The point in doing so was to see what students made of the data from that form. I wanted them to look over what amounted to a snapshot of community activity. (If you are interested in the data, just … Continue reading Discoveries from ‘Data’: Not New Landscapes, New Eyes →
One of the projects I have started the year with is a Google Form survey. I have asked students to fill out this form. Tomorrow we will look at the data in this spreadsheet that the form above generated. There is an amazing cache of data in there and I have asked my students to find … Continue reading Feedforward in the Garden of Your Mind →
I am no believer in Fate, but I do pay attention to what the British philosopher David Hume called “constant conjunction”. In this case I have had two instances of “reading aloud” conjoin my path. This I do not ignore. The first was from a recent episode of the highly recommended Gweek Podcast that featured … Continue reading El Lector →
I just spent part of my morning playing on Twitter with my friends from Massachusetts, Egypt, and France. Yeah, I still get jazzed at that, a Kentucky boy living in the hills and hollars near Mammoth Cave National Park. It got me thinking about how ‘play’ has infiltrated my working world. It is part of … Continue reading Playing in the Fields, Ripping through the Streets →