My Haiku Project from Japan

We arrived .. sanity intact.

I am keeping a journal of our visit here in Japan (of course) and my goal is to write at least one haiku each day while we are here. A short poem to capture the experience. I’ll get on here and blog the haikus when I can and when I have time.

This poem is about losing an entire day as we skipped across time zones.

Hurdling time zones
like jumping picket fences
Everything stands still

Peace (from the land of the rising sun),
Kevin

 

When the teacher writes …

Over at my webcomic, Boolean Squared, I have been exploring the antics of a play written by Mr. Teach and performed by his students. The play is a twist on Alice in Wonderland, with a technological bent to it (Boolean is a virus, for example). This particular comic strip story was one of the first Boolean Squared I had done (back when I was using Strip Generator) and it was inspired by a play/musical that I wrote during my Summer Institute with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. The play — called The Note Who Got Lost in the Masterpiece — is not about technology but about music, and I always envisioned doing it with my sixth graders. So far, I have chickened out, in part because of the time needed. But a few years ago, the play won a national competition and was performed by a youth theater group in Amherst and it was an amazing experience to watch the story unfold on the stage.

The comic strip allowed me to make fun of the process of putting on a play with young kids, particularly when the teacher is the writer and an actor is Boolean (he envisions being cloned, with multiple Booleans running rampant around the stage).

You can see for yourself:

Peace (in on the webby funny pages),
Kevin

PS — Here is a podcast of my Masterpiece Play that I put into the Internet Archive a few years ago.

Library of Congress, Lincoln and Flickr

The Library of Congress continues to turn out some amazing resources on its Flickr site — pulling documents into the digital age. The latest is a small archive of old Abe Lincoln photos and considering all the hype these days about Lincoln (deserved, perhaps, but between Obama and Lincoln on the covers of my news magazines in the last two months, I have had about enough), it is interesting to see the man in actual photographs from the old days.

[Abraham Lincoln, Congressman-elect from Illinois. Three-quarter length portrait, seated, facing front] (LOC) by The Library of Congress.
(Shepherd, Nicholas H., photographer)
Peace (in history),
Kevin

Rubberbands: A quickfiction piece

It’s been some time since I have written any of my quickfiction, but I was inspired for this short piece by a magazine article I was reading about a child prodigy violinist who used to sit in his room, with rubber bands, making his clothes dresser into a musical instrument.

If you are interested is more of my quickfiction, you can see my site over at Hypertextopia. The collection of stories there is called Inside Kaleidoscope Dreams.


Rubberbands
(listen to the podcast)

You scan the floor for rubber bands. Underneath the rug. Inside the kitchen drawer. Behind the cushions of the couch. Anywhere you think they might be, you look. Of course, you have learned to be careful. Your mom will take them away, again, and shout at you, again. “Rubber bands? Rubber bands?” Her voice will echo through your head for the rest of the day, crowding out the melody. Someday, when you are older, you will have your own place and your own guitar and you won’t need rubber bands. You will sink into that freedom and know it to be paradise. For now, it is all about the rubber bands. You count them in your hand — onetwothreefourfive. Not quite enough, but enough for now. You close the door to your bedroom and push the chair against the door. The drawer of your clothes chest open reluctantly, as if it needing some oil, and one by one, you extend the rubber bands across the surface of the open spaces, fixing it so that you can adjust the length of the rubber bands as you need by moving the drawer in and out, out and in. One band becomes smaller, lower pitched, while another become longer, higher. It is a full eight minutes of adjustments, getting it all just right in your head until you can close your eyes and begin to play. The melody dances, first through your fingers, then along the vibrating hum of the rubber bands, and finally filling the room with light only you can see. You know it won’t last and it doesn’t. Either your mother will pound on the door, or your brother will shout some obscenity at you from the hallway or the dog will start barking at someone in the street and all will be broken. Today, you are shattered by a string, the snap of the rubber like a shot in the night, startling you with a surprising ferocity. The silence at first is odd and then, almost comforting, until you hear your mother yell: “All right, who took the damn rubber band from this deck of cards?”

Peace (in fictionalized worlds),
Kevin

Eponyms, Schneponyms

In our study of the English Language and the origins of words, my students did some work on the concept of Eponyms, which are words that take on the name of a person (such as Ferris Wheel or Saxophone). Students then got some time to use Powerpoint to develop a slideshow that markets a product that has their name — an eponymous product. A few students (and myself) donated work for this video (I converted PP to video with some software that I have).
One of the side reasons for doing this work is that I want to bring them deeper into powerpoint so that when we do our Digital Book Project later in the year, the technology is in the background as much as possible and the writing and creativity work is in the forefront. They need multiple sessions to understand the platform and to think and imagine the possibilities of a book that is not “flat” but “multimedia.”

Peace (in Kevinland),
Kevin

Off to Japan

My family and I are taking a vacation next week … to Japan. Not a virtual one, but a real one. We have family on a naval base outside of Tokyo (my brother-in-law commands a battleship), so the opportunity was too great to pass up. I showed my students the basic path we will be taking with Google Earth yesterday (which gave me a chance to talk about the features of the new version of Google Earth — we did some exploring of Mars yesterday before zooming through the galaxies).

In case you are wondering, the trip from here to there is about 6500 miles and it takes about 14 hours. And we have three kids with us. Now is the time I could use some new-fangled technology that beams you from one side of the planet to the next in less then a few seconds.

Has any of my readers been to Tokyo? Any suggestions?

Here is a map of our journey:

View Larger Map

Peace (in travel),
Kevin