Thought for the week

"The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

Thought for the week

"One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there."

As we head out in to 'the wilds' for our 'Project Week' expeditions, I hope we can maintain this ideal of receptiveness to whatever we may encounter.

A little bit of Zen

As a child, I developed a great fondness for the Czech writer Karel Čapek, a marvellous fabulist and wit (I particularly liked his collection of outlandish re-imaginings of famous moments in history, Apocryphal Tales). Today, alas, his work is falling into obscurity, but he has attained enduring fame as the begetter of the term 'robot' for a humanoid mechanical servant (although he would generously acknowledge that he got the idea to use this word from his elder brother Josef, a painter).

Gardening was one of Čapek's great passions, and he wrote a rather oddball book about it - which includes perhaps my very favourite piece of his, a prose poem called 'How To Grow Clouds'. A few years ago, I discovered online a delightful piece of visual poetry inspired by this piece, a stop-motion animation by a young Polish art student, Alicja Cioch (you can read about the process of making the film on her blog here, and also see some of her charming original storyboards for the project).

How to grow clouds
It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds. Probatum est.
Karel Čapek (1890-1938), translated by Andrew Malcovsky

Whenever somebody asks me for my 'philosophy of teaching', I direct them to this.

Thought for the week

"Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing."

I'm in two minds about this beard thing

Thought for the week

"If 'compromise' means reining in your selfishness a little, it's a good thing. If it means betraying your principles, it's not."

Thought for the week

"Am I really eccentric or am I just wearing a funny hat?"

Thought for the week

"That which I cannot build, I do not truly understand."

Thought for the week

"Creativity is having the courage to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

Thought for the week

"Ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory."

Shakespeare in a nutshell

Romeo and Juliet is decidedly NOT my favourite Shakespeare play. I find the contrivances of the plot so extreme as to be ludicrous, and the final double-suicide of the teen lovers leaves me utterly unmoved - indeed I find it more comical than tragic. I also consider it a bit patronising how teenagers are so often expected to find this the most engaging and accessible of Shakespeare's works just because, you know, it's about teenagers (and forbidden love, and not getting on with your parents, and all that). In my experience, most teenaged students forced to study the text share these reactions: they find it a jolly romp, but they are not moved by it. They may appreciate some of the marvellous language and characterization in it, but they do not find it speaks particularly to them or their age group.

Yet I am forced to take this as one of my set texts this year because of a rigid habit established by our parent school (next year I may - shall - rebel!). And so I am determined to rattle through it as fast as is humanly possible (not quite this fast, but very, very briskly), hoping to allow my students to enjoy it as a piece of theatre, as a performance - without getting into too much analysis.

Luckily, I find assistance in this endeavour from the admirable John Green, who has compressed all the analysis of R&J you could ever want into two 12-minute Youtube clips in his occasional CrashCourse series of tutorials.

Part II can be viewed here.

Thought for the week

"The secret to serendipity is keeping your eyes open."

Caught on camera

A couple of months ago, my Film students were getting their first practice in filming some short interviews with staff or peers, as a preliminary exercise in their new unit of study on 'Documentary'. Three of them - Yudo Wong, Abi Yee, and Ciara Jacob - decided to do me.

Thought for the week

"What is now proved was once only imagined."

Thought for the week

"There is no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end."

It's opera, Jim, but not as we know it

The school took a trip out to Yellow Dragon Park on Sunday afternoon to see a couple of short performances of excerpts from Chinese opera. I think this is the Kunqu school of Chinese opera, but I couldn't absolutely swear to it.

The popularity of the form does seem to be waning amongst the younger generations of Chinese. There was a large and enthusiastic crowd turned out for these open-air matinee performances, but they were almost all well over 70 years old.

Here are a couple of short clips I filmed from an extract the troupe performed from the convoluted local Hangzhou story, Legend of the White Snake.

Though the screeching quality of the vocals can become a little wearing (and the lyrics, it would appear, are largely incomprehensible even to native Chinese speakers), the performance is still a pleasing diversion. This piece involves a lot of broad comedy, which is quite engaging - even though the characters' motivations remain completely impenetrable to me.

Thought for the week

"Education is what's left when you've forgotten everything you were taught in school."

Two great songs about the First World War

To round off our study of WWI poetry, I shared with my students today a couple of favourite songs about WWI by the folk singer Eric Bogle. I saw him play at the Anzac Club in Toronto in 1998, while I was working there as a lawyer (quite possibly on Anzac Day - pretty close to it, anyway). He told an amusing story about how the then UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had recently professed that one of Bogle's songs, The Green Fields of France, was his favourite 'poem' about the First World War, but had gone on to mention that its author, like so many of the War's great poets, had died in the fighting. This is a dumb mistake to make - a lazy error on the part of one of Blair's speech writers, no doubt - since the piece is pretty obviously written long after the War, from the perspective of someone visiting a war cemetery.

Bogle got further free publicity from the incident when one of his formidable Scottish aunties wrote to The Times newspaper to point out to the careless Prime Minister that the poet he admired was in fact very much alive and well... "and to prove it, here are his upcoming tour dates."

As we can see from the photo montage accompanying this recording, Bogle's song was inspired by an actual grave, that of a Pte. William McBride, who was killed in 1916, at the age of 21. (This is one of the best montages of this kind I've ever seen: the images, mostly contemporary photographs, are very appropriately matched to the lyrics.)

Bogle was born in Peebles in Scotland in 1944, but emigrated to Australia as a young man. This, And The Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda'..., perhaps his most famous song (certainly in Australia, where it has become hailed as a national treasure), was written in the early 1970s, shortly after he moved there. At this time, many veterans of the 1915 Gallipoli landings were still living, still able to turn out for annual Anzac Day parades, even though they would have been mostly in their 70s and 80s. You can hear Bogle himself sing this song here; but my favourite of the many cover versions that have been made of it is this one by Shane MacGowan and The Pogues (a crazy Irish punk-folk group who enjoyed major worldwide success during the 1980s). Again, there is an excellent photo montage accompanying the music.

As an extra little musical treat in my second class, I asked one of my students, Sophia Chan, an outstanding musician, to preface this by playing Waltzing Matilda for us on her violin. She had challenged me on Monday - in reference to my latest 'Thought for the week' on my desire to share enthusiasms in the classroom - to allow her a chance to share her enthusiasm for music with the English class occasionally, and I was delighted to agree.

Thought for the week

"I try to do as little 'teaching' as possible. I prefer to be a sharer of enthusiasms."

How language changes

A colleague tipped me off to this a week or two back - an amusing animated canter through 'The History of the English Language' from the UK's Open University. The narrator (also, I suspect, the author of the piece) isn't credited on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure it's Clive Anderson.

I think I might use this in the mini-class I have to do next week for a visiting group of Year 9 students from our parent school in Hong Kong.

Foley everywhere

I think I've been having even more fun with my Film classes' current study unit on 'Sound' than my students have. The craft of Foley - adding in sound effects in post-production, often by means of ingenious fakery - is endlessly fascinating, and easily grows into something of an obsession.

At the weekend, rattling knives and forks in a tray of cutlery in my kitchen, I discovered that I could make a pretty fair approximation of the clatter and tinkle of glass breaking this way - especially if I used a small glass bottle to rattle the knives, giving the right 'glassy' note for the initial impact. Finding a way for my students to create a breaking glass noise, without the mess and waste and danger of actually breaking glass, has been a preoccupation of the last week or two!

Yesterday I found on the floor a strip of plastic backing from the index stickers we use in the Library. I picked it up to put it in a bin, but when I heard the scrunch it made when I rubbed it gently between my fingers, I put it in my pocket instead, thinking, "This would be great for a crackling log fire noise!"

And tonight I was just passed by an old lady on a bicycle, one of our cleaners, I think. It was a battered and ancient bicycle, and it emitted a loud, rhythmic rusty wheeze as it trundled along - I swear it sounded just like the honking of a goose. I wanted to run after it with a microphone...

As I say, this is a dangerously obsessive topic!

Thought for the week

"You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed."

Getting things in the wrong order

Our hard-working headmaster has become fond (perhaps a little over-fond) in our first few months of operation of invoking the image of what we are seeking to accomplish here as "building a plane after it's taken off".

It may have become a rather over-used cliché this past decade or so, particularly in the business world (indeed, it appears to have first arisen in Silicon Valley), but.... it is an undeniably potent - and often all too painfully apposite - metaphor.

Given the very tight time schedule within which we have had to try to plan for, and build, and staff this school, to furnish and equip it, to frame its policies and devise a curriculum for it... well, it's no surprise that a lot of these essential preliminaries are still ongoing - even as we become consumed with the day-to-day responsibilities of looking after our students and trying to create valuable educational experiences for them.

It's not the way one would ever choose to do things, in an ideal world.... but it is oddly exhilarating!

I discover that one of the first - and certainly most striking - illustrations of the analogy appeared way back at the start of the Noughties, in this TV commercial for EDS (Electronic Data Systems, a business services subsidiary of Hewlett Packard).

Thought for the week

"Nothing that really matters can be measured; it can only be felt."

Dancing statues!

Last week I found myself with about 35 browser tabs open on different - tenuously interlinked - pages of BrainPickings. That darn site always seems to do that to me - drop in for five minutes, struggle to tear myself away hours later!

One of these most recent discoveries of mine on there was this, a charming little film from animator Nina Paley, constructed using ancient artifacts she photographed in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.