Passing Clouds

“ In my experience, most stuff that you start is mediocre for a really long time before it actually gets good. And you can’t tell if it’s going to be good until you’re really late in the process. So the only thing you can do is have faith that if you do enough stuff, something will turn out great and really surprise you.

—

This makes me think of a story Tim Biskup told at a talk I went to. He quoted a mentor as saying that we all have 100,000 bad drawings in us, and you have to work on getting those ones out of the way before you can get to the good ones.

This American Life’s Ira Glass on Being Wrong (via johnmartz)

A dual homage to the awesome Annie Koyama, and of course to Bill Watterson and his amazing Calvin.

“ When you’re not drawing, you fill up with bad drawings, and it takes longer to get them out of your system. Your drawing hand is like the shark that needs to keep moving so that it doesn’t die.

— John Martz’s Notebook

Friends of Type — Nerves of type

John Martz’s Notebook

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 (by Sean Stiegemeier)

“ In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

— Kurt Vonnegut via Wikipedia via … oops, forgot.

via Kottke

“ The distillation of my philosophy came to me as I was telling S how I realized she was different from almost every student I’ve taught. Whenever I ask a question requiring a higher-order thinking skill and the rest of her class stares at me as if I were speaking Klingon, she will raise her hand slowly and say, “I’m not sure, but…” That’s it! That is my education philosophy distilled to its most essential point. “I’m not sure, but…” I want all my students – all students – to feel safe enough, secure enough, challenged enough and supported enough to take the risk that S takes.

—

My Four Word Education Plan That is this blog. That is my best students. That is my best work. And it is theirs too. It is the things I love reading and the work I love parsing and absorbing. It’s how we feel less alone. It’s a hypothesis. It’s everything. It’s how we perceive things to be, it’s how we define the world we live in, it’s how we come to grok our surroundings and the patterns of the world around us. It’s how we project our identities and define ourselves. It’s how we establish ourselves as loving, caring, inquisitive people. It’s verbally piking up a stick and poking it at the blurry life path laid before us. It’s our educated guess about not just the way things are, but it’s an attempt of grasping a vision of how things could be.

If we can get our students to that point I guarantee they will learn. So how do we get them there?

I’m not sure. But…

I want to get my students to there. I want to stay here too. I’m setting up a tent and camping out. (via viafrank)

robotjohnny:

» Adrian Johnson in FitaCola