Learning in Playful Environments

We've been working on poetry in my Grade 8 class. The process is to find a poet we admire, explore how they write and adopt an element of their technique in our own poems. As I worked to model for students I wrote two poems. The one I shared for students to work on with me is called "Medusa". Gwen Harwood's cycle of poems called "1927" gave me inspiration. The other poem I didn't share because I'm a little unsettled by it. The inspiration came from a poem I stumbled across by Stephane Mallarme. Every now and then a poem or a piece of prose will reach off the page and punch you: not just because it's a great poem; also, I think, because it is saying something you are just then ripe to hear. My poem responds to the idea of cutting into the future but the metaphor seemed too raw to use as a model for students. Still, I think it's a poem worth sharing. Here's Mallarme's poem and then my own. And below that is the my poem "Medusa...

Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals by Owain Service My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book has an interesting genealogy: Owain Service and Rory Gallagher are two key members of the Behavioural Insights Team or “Nudge Unit” grown out of the Prime Minister’s office in London and now with offices in Manchester, New York, Singapore and Sydney. According to their website , the BIT has been working since 2010 with the objective of: • making public services more cost-effective and easier for citizens to use; • improving outcomes by introducing a more realistic model of human behaviour to policy; and wherever possible, • enabling people to make ‘better choices for themselves’. Think Small is Service and Gallagher’s attempt to build on the last of these objectives. Drawing together all of their learning about how people think and what helps them succeed, Think Small is a manual for how to effectively set and achieve goals. What I found particularly useful about the book ...

KURT HAHN AND THE HUMANIST TRADITION As relevant today as 50 years ago Published in the UWCSEA magazine Dunia 8th June 2017 Something interesting happens each year when my Grade 6 class are studying the history of Kurt Hahn and the United World College movement. Part of the learning intention is for the students to have a broad understanding of the key events that shaped this history: WWI, The Holocaust, WWII and the dropping of the two atomic bombs. And each year, somewhere in the middle of this learning, some version of this conversation happens: First student: “I think Japan needed more materials to make their army strong.” Second student: “But they shouldn’t have been invading other countries to get what they needed.” First student: “Well it’s kind of the same as what the European countries were doing through colonisation.” Second student: “True, and maybe that’s one of the things we need to know about war—that one group shouldn’t be taking things from another.” The conversation is...

Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin My rating: 5 of 5 stars Think "Hunger Games" meets "The Book Thief" with a touch of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" for good measure. This is a remarkable book that manages to be both compelling and engaging; exciting and thoughtful. Set in 1956 in a world in which WWII was won by Hitler and Japan, the protagonist is a holocaust survivor who, as a result of experiments by a Mengele-like Nazi doctor, can shape-shift into different forms. Her task is to win a round the world motorbike race so that she can dance with Hitler and assassinate him. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it really works and Graudin's treatment of the history is sensitive and inquisitive. I particularly liked his postscript discussion of how and why we might usefully rethink history. If this book doesn't end up as a blockbuster film, I'll eat an article of clothing. View all my reviews

Dark Emu: Black seeds agriculture or accident? by Bruce Pascoe My rating: 5 of 5 stars This Christmas I visited a friend who gave me two precious things: a copy of Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu and an envelope of seeds from the daisy yam, Microsceris Lanceolata, known as “murnong" in the Boonwurrung language. Dark Emu begins by challenging the received historical wisdom about Australian Aboriginal peoples which says that they were hunter-gatherers who lived opportunistically in a kind of harsh subsistence at the hands of nature. Pascoe argues that this description suited early settlers who wanted to see indigenous people as passive and childlike; unable to take responsibility for the land on which they wandered and undeserving of its possession. By contrast, Pascoe shows a very different indigenous relationship to land and nature. Working systematically through early white accounts of contact with Aboriginal people and their land, Pascoe shows how accomplished Aboriginals were a...