The Many Titles of Educators

It’s been a great week at SXSW 2023! I had a great session presenting, met Hank Green, had knowing what an “ekphrasis” is come in handy in conversation, saw a magic show and discovered parallels between magic and education, reconnected with someone who taught me over half a decade ago, solve puzzles with deaf participants in Japan over Zoom, and just generally speaking had an amazing time connecting and learning from and with other passionate educators.

Now this is going to sound a bit like my last post, but what’s really been sticking with me is how I’ve gotten to learn from so many educators that don’t just come from a teaching background. I’ve learned from coaches, magicians, game makers, neuroscientists, YouTubers, parents turned school founder, social entrepreneurs, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I have also loved learning from and with teachers while at this conference — a science teacher from Atlanta, an ESL teacher from Chicago, a social studies teacher from Arizona, etc. — but that was to be expected.

I would love to see a learning community where these two groups weren’t so siloed (the “teachers” vs everyone else). Both have different values to bring to the table, but I hypothesize the value would increase if they worked in tandem.

What if you had a learning community where everyone was always partnered when facilitating sessions? Just as a quick example:

• A math teacher and a magician
• A science teacher and a coach
• A language teacher and a restaurant owner
• A social studies teacher and a philanthropist
• An english teacher and an architect
• A music teacher and a neuroscientist

The possibilities are limitless.

Associative thinking is such a key part of how our brain learns. I can only imagine what would happen if we thought about our lead learning facilitators with an associative mindset; pairing different expertise to create unique experiences with easy applications to real world challenges. What I imagine though seems pretty great.

Tired of Magicians

I’ve found that as I get older I discover random strong opinions that I didn’t realize were developing over the years. For example, I don’t like magicians.

Today we saw an illusionist’ magic show off-Broadway and as we watched I realized how bored I was, which made me realize how I always get bored at magic shows. It’s kind of unfortunate because I’m impressed to some degree by what magicians do and the time and effort it takes to get good at what they do; however, something about knowing that it’s really all a bunch of logic and mind tricks makes not enjoy the tricks much. I spend more time trying to figure out tricks then I care about the coolness of the tricks; then I get bored.

Honestly, I’d rather a show of someone showing me how they came up with weird illusions because we all know it’s fake anyway and it would be far more impressive in my mind to see the trick and then know how it works. I mean I’ve always thought it would be fun to be around while magicians help make theater and movie tech become really epic; that’s probably the best job a magician could have in my opinion but it involves sharing the secretes to tricks.

I realized also that I’ve been to a lot of professional magic shows which I didn’t think was abnormal until today when I stopped to think about it. Perhaps if I had seen less magic shows in my life I would find them more engaging because they would have more of a unique quality to them.

It’s an odd thing to have such a strong opinion on, but despite not liking magicians, I’m at least grateful for tonight’s illusionist amusing me with myself and my new self-discovery. Learn something new every day, and sometimes it’s about yourself.

We Need More Magic

I’m currently about halfway through my week of adventures in Italy with 7 members of my family, and so far it’s been a world wind of emotions. Yesterday though was particularly interesting because my aunt and I met up with the mom of a friend she made while at an artist retreat in the jungle. We had never met this woman before, and needless to say, it was a very random connection in which we had no idea what to expect, but we had a great time!

We grabbed some gelato and took a pit stops at the local market to get some food, and then we went back to her incredible apartment overlooking the river and ate some lunch while discussing life. It turns out that she is a native English woman who is semi-accidentally became a homeschool teacher who has lived all over the world and only recently moved to Rome. I say semi-accidentally because she started out homeschooling her own children and then, due to happy circumstances and a willingness to take risks and seize opportunities, she started a whole homeschooling meets tutoring business. Kids who speak all sorts of languages will work with her for various amounts of time to help with getting ready for going to English school by exploring Rome and making personalized “classes” relevant to the lives of these children.

She was speaking all sorts of learner-centered language and it was honestly just crazy awesome to me that even though we live on different sides of the world we had such similar opinions and ideas about the education system; there is truly a universal language around transformative education that is developing!

As perhaps one may guess, we had some very interesting conversations about education. Particularly, I loved how we talked about the necessity of incorporating magic and fantasy into education.

Think about it: the world around us is full of magic- things we can’t see or fully explain but know that they exist- like gravity, types of lights, dark matter, etc. Now some things may just not exist, but letting ourselves believe in magic helps to teach us to be imaginative and push the boundaries of what is real and strive to make the impossible possible. Once upon a time airplanes seemed like a magical fantasy, and look at us now exploring what it might look like for humans to live on Mars! We have to teach kids to dream and believe what they can’t see if we truly want them to be innovators and be willing to conceptualize what we believe is true about the world. So why don’t we talk about magic more often in school? Especially beyond elementary school! Plus in my mind it’s such a great way to bridge the gap between humanities and stem courses; reading about magic and discussing what science the magical concepts were based around and then imagined further sounds like a fabulous integrated project.

With this discussion, we talked about a wonder of ours: are we teaching sciences to the wrong age groups? Physics is crazy! Nano-science, space, light and sound, etc, there are so many things that can be kind of hard to imagine existing when we can’t really see them nor do we know everything about how they work, but it’s young children that typically have the greatest bandwidth for believing in the unknown. What if we spent more time exploring big science concepts like dark matter to elementary schoolers, and in high school, we spent more time continuing to foster the ability to imagine, dream, and believe in seemingly crazy possibilities?

Last Night Logic

(If you have ever seen Psych, the title of this post was inspired by “Last Night Gus”, which was one of my favorite episodes. Also, it would be highly helpful to have read my last post, The Magic of Story Telling, before reading this post.)

I stopped. I thought. I pondered. I wondered.

I stopped. Last night I was kind of writing on the spot in a sense. Before posting, I had read it over, but I didn’t really process and “imagine all of the little behind the scenes things happening”. Therefore, when I was going to bed I stopped for a moment.

I then thought about my post. Last Night Logic suggested that movies take away some of the magic of stories because they are always the same each time. I then thought, “Aren’t books the same way though?” Books also are always the same each time you read them. You may notice new things each time you reread a book (if you reread books, I don’t usually), but the words are the same.

I then pondered this for a little. (I was having difficulties getting to sleep last night, and this wasn’t helping. “The sky was awake, so I was awake, so I had to think!”) “Did I really mean what I said?” No. Not completely at least. It is called “movie magic” for a reason, isn’t it? And books are often better then movies, and I have read some pretty magical books.

That’s when I wondered: maybe movies don’t take away some of the magic, maybe movies just have a different type of magic, and books too. I like to believe magic is everywhere in everything. (If you made this into a syllogism this would also prove that math is magic because it is everywhere and in everything; thus, “math magic”.) Because there is something incredible about movies and books, and they wouldn’t be possible if the story was always different. However, I also think the classic story telling by word of mouth is also magical and that is partially because it is always a slightly different story.

And that is where I ended. (Where I fell asleep in this case, and once I woke up it was no longer tonight logic, it was officially last night logic.)

I ended with the conclusion that people like different things because it is all about what type of magic you prefer most.

Now I feel bad because this post is mainly about a first realization, and I didn’t get to the point where I figured out what these different magics are. However, I hope to eventually. This will go on the list on blogs that need to be done, but need more time to be developed. (There is an actual list by the way.)

It has to do with one of my theories that I call The Full Circle Theory. This is the idea that thoughts don’t usually happen all at once, and there isn’t a beginning or an end. (In some cases it may even be an infinity sign.) You often have a thought, then later your brain realizes why you had the thought and then has a new thought after that.

This is likely the last post for a few weeks, as I have said, but I am planning on writing down what I would blog so that I can go back and post them. (Hopefully.) The funny thing is that my last post has a lot to do with my after thoughts of my post form the night before.

The Magic of Story Telling

(Pictures still aren’t working. 😦 )

Today I saw The Little Mermaid at the Fox, and it was pretty great. (Even if Sebastian and Ursula stole the show.)

The show itself had some pretty innovative aspects to it which I found really neat and interesting. The characters would “swim” by being suspended from wires, and their “tails” had long flowy sheets that connected to their hands. Under the Sea was by far the best musical number. There were a bunch of dancers dressed in elaborate, exotic costumes, and some people were manipulating huge puppets with schools of fish and gigantic jelly fish. To switch from sea to land, they would have characters swim with wires up to the top and then disappear and a double would appear back on the stage in a land setting. (Eventually the scene would set up and the double would switch out again.)

As an actress, I can sometimes get nick-picky with performances (my aunts are even more intense about it though). Sometimes that is because of the acting. (Like I said, Sebastian and Ursula stole the show, but Arial and Eric didn’t appeal to me very much.) Other times I will notice things happening and be able to tell how they were pulling off the illusion. And occasionally I will just get slightly irritated because they didn’t quite follow the story. (The Little Mermaid is one of my favorite Disney movies, possibly 2nd favorite, or tied with Tangled and Frozen, (I’ve been avoiding picking), so seeing this as a musical was a big deal for me.)

I’ve seen the movie so many times that it doesn’t feel right when it is changed. This goes for a lot of things; once something has been done the same way for a large number of times it feels wrong when it isn’t the exact same way. For me Capon (my trip in West Virginia) and Christmas come to mind. For my family, these are like sacred cows; they don’t change from year to year. Sure there may be slight differences, but the general concept remains the same.

However, I’ve come to realize that stories aren’t, and maybe shouldn’t, be like that. Stories get passed on from generation to generation, and every time you hear it, the story is a little different.

I wondered today, maybe that is why I love the theater so much. You can see the same production a million times, but each time will be slightly different. Stories are affected by variables. They are subject to the environment around them. Some times the storyteller might not be in the best mood, or maybe the timing isn’t just right, or maybe the storyteller is full of energy more than ever before and the characters work brilliantly with one another.

The stage version of The Little Mermaid was not the same as the movie. There were new songs, characters were developed more and some less, and the ending was completely different. But that is how these storytellers told their story.

Some of my fellow troop members and I (I saw this with my Girl Scout Troop) discussed what we liked and didn’t like about this new story, and some of the things we noticed about the production. My troop leader then said that since she is older and hasn’t seen it a million times, she didn’t have to pick it apart and thus ruin the magic of it.

I don’t think the magic was ruined. I personally love knowing how they do what they do because to me it becomes more magical to know how much work is put into the show, and then I can judge how well they pull it off as well. It is really fascinating. Knowing gives you the ability to imagine all of the little behind the scenes things happening, and it allows you to appreciate all of it.

Storytelling is magical because you will get a new story every time. But I do wonder, with movies the story stays the same every time. I originally said how it bugged me to see the story changed, but if it hadn’t been a movie first, I wouldn’t know any better.

So no, I don’t think that me picking apart and examining the production made it loose some of the magic, but perhaps, just maybe, it being a movie, done the same way every time, did.

(I just thought I would point out that I didn’t know what I was going to write about exactly today, but I knew it would be about The Little Mermaid. I was also on a time crunch since we got back late; therefore, I decided to just start typing. So this post actually evolved and developed while I was writing it. (To some extent.) The more I typed, the more I realized and observed, and you may be able to tell from my writing itself, so I thought I would explain why.)