Monthly Archives: November 2020

Conversations Continue: The Power of Crowd Annotations

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connect“connect” by katypang is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In January 2019, some of us in the CLMOOC Community decided to read the book Affinity Online by Mimi Ito and company to better understand how young people were engaging with each other and with media in online settings.

We had lots of reading and conversations, and one of the places where we gathered was in NowComment, to annotate Chapter 5 together (putting the ideas of the book into practice through shared learning in a shared space). The chapter annotation was spearheaded by Terry Elliott.

Nearly two years later, I am still getting email updates, inviting me back into new conversations in NowComment that are being built on the original ones. While I suspect these new annotators are probably in some graduate level class, I find it encouraging how annotations can live on and beyond (Hypothesis does the same thing — sending an email note when someone has commented on an annotation you have left). More than two dozen people have engaged in the chapter.

Now I am going back in, responding to new comments and perhaps engaging the conversation that started two years ago with my CLMOOC friends in new directions with others.

Come join in the conversation

Peace (sharing it),
Kevin

 

Thanks/Giving Small/Poem

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Night rain 2“Night rain 2” by Mourner is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Thankful/ Morning/ Music

(Thanksgiving 2020)

Listening
to the rain, these
rhythms of
the sky

Between
steady fall, these
moments of
gravity

Sometimes,
something’s there, this
world and its
wonder

Sometimes
nothing’s there, this
hope for the
possible

Peace (on this day and next),
Kevin

12Tone: Writing Lyrics

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This video, and all of the 12Tone videos, is great for thinking of how we might imagine the writing of lyrics for songwriting. I have all sorts of techniques, but I am also always looking for other ways to get inspired.

And then there was this one, too

Thanks to Verena for sharing this out as part of another piece of sharing she had done.

Peace (singing it),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Waiting On The Line Of Idling Cars

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(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

There’s no one to blame, really. What with the lower grade classrooms now “full in” (everyone back) and a decision by the School Committee in the summer to limit who has access to school busing by setting a distance requirement and families wary of sending kids on the buses for safety reasons, to begin with, the result at our school is an endless line of idling cars each morning and afternoon.

Yesterday, three of my students told me they were waiting in their parents’ car for nearly 20 minutes just to get dropped off at the door to enter the school. In the afternoons, the six-foot distance rule means the gym is full of students, and the hallways are now spill-over zones. It means when our work day ends, there is no way to leave the parking lot on time because the cars keep coming (not for much longer, but still).

The waiting cars snake from our back parking lot, to the main thoroughfare, past the Post Office, and nearly to the intersection with our local state highway. All those cars, idling. And with the cold weather approaching, even more so.

I’m afraid to tell my wife, whose pet peeve has long been car idlers, and the impact those idling engines have on the air and climate. She’s written letters to newspapers about it. She’s pressed our kids’ principals at our own neighborhood school to take action against parents sitting in running cars at the end of school days.

And I’m with her on this — all those cars, engines running, can’t be good for the planet.

(The School Committee is tinkering with its policy on who can ride the bus to help alleviate this a bit, but I suspect most families are in the pick-up line because of concerns about Covid19 and buses, even with the protocols and safety measures in place).

Peace (sitting here, thinking).
Kevin

Book Review: World of Wonders (In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments)

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If beautiful words were shimmers of light, this book would be luminescent. Maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole on my part for Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s book, World of Wonders (In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments), but some of these chapters just sing with poetry and such insight, as Nezhukumatathil explores her own life with connections to the Natural World, that I could barely put the book down.

(Perhaps this is also because I had recently finished with the Write Out Project or because the political landscape required some respite into something more lovely than my news feeds.)

Nezhukumatathil’s explorations into such plants and creatures as Dragon Fruit, Comb Jellies, Narwhals, Dancing Frogs, Whale Sharks, Cara Cara Oranges, and more — all situated in ways that make connections to her life as young Indian-American girl of immigrant parents, and then as academic, as wife, and then as mother — are so effective at times, it often takes the reader’s breath away.

Not every piece in this collection is a home run — some feel a bit like a stretch as she works to make connections — but when the writing works, well, wow. Her writing flows so beautifully off the page, and you can tell she is also a poet of insight.

There’s an underlying theme of acceptance running through each of the pieces of the strange in the world, of bringing that curiosity into our daily lives through inquiry and forgiveness, of understanding our places as people in the world that is larger and more diverse than we may ever truly know.

Nezhukumatathil opens and ends with stories of fireflies, and in her last chapter, she notes how many of her students that she works with not only hadn’t seen fireflies, but didn’t believe her that they even existed. And they live in places where a walk to the edge of the neighborhood would have revealed more magic than the video games and movies they were spending their time watching.

Nezhukumatathil is careful not to judge these children of the modern age (and maybe, us, too), but she is effective in sensing the things we are losing when we lose touch with the Natural World. And in reminding us to go outside and look for the magic.

Peace (seeking it at night),
Kevin

One Of Those Days (Wrong Shoes Blues)

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wrong shoes blues

You ever have one of those days?

I drove to school the other day and I was getting the classroom all ready for the morning — the scramble to make sure everything is just right — when I looked down, only to realize that I had two different shoes on my feet.

Somehow, in the rush to get out the door to get to school and with my mind crowded with lesson plans and the day ahead and everything else on my plate, I had inadvertently put one shoe on one foot and then grabbed an entirely different shoe for the other foot, and never even realized it until that moment of pause (and giggle) in the empty classroom.

Weird.

Those are the kinds of days that just make you stop and laugh and shake your head  … Crazy times.

Peace (walking it forward),
Kevin

Five Poems/Five Days

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Peace“Peace” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I’ve been writing each morning this week over at Ethical ELA with its monthly OpenWrite, which is five days of poetry prompts. I appreciate the community of writers there, and the generous spirit that unfolds in the writing shared, and comments, made.

Here are my five poems from the past five days, with the one-word themes in bold as the titles:

Thanks

The shelves have become
barren of those silly cards,
those throw-away phrases
that always tried so hard
to make us laugh, in aisles
of the grocery store and
boutique shops and kiosks
in the mall, manufactured thanks
spit out by cold machines,
while I’m still one of those few
who settles down in the quiet,
pen in hand, to carve out poems
from the bones of memory,
a crinkled paper-cut of words
tucked into the folds
of your jacket pocket

Giving

What is
hope

but a rope
for which
to climb

a chance
to take
our time

a moment
in which
we find

something within us
that brings us
together

Receiving

There was a time
when the crowd hushed,
when all of our eyes watched
the ball flung into motion

with such beautiful flight,
its shape slightly wobbled
in the air flow imbalance
of impossibility

It’s that breath before
that I remember the most,
the beauty of the possibility
of perfect reception,

and not the drop,
when the world stopped,
and the magic
of the moment, broken
open

Breath

Awake,
when sleep
departs,
listening
to rhythms
of night,
the landscape
inscrutable
but for some
small melody
still yet lingering:
mere gossamer
and translucence
and then gone

Heal

Scars
show healing,
too, knife lines
tracing wounded
worlds, places
of exposure
in which fingers
brush up against
the past, the skin
always sharing stories,
with jagged
imperfections
etched deep
inside the heart

Peace (sharing it forward),
Kevin