020423 #treefrog PART OF THE PROBLEM IS THE ADVERSARIAL NATURE OF “DO SOMETHING TO PROVE YOU LEARNED SOMETHING” ITS EDUCATION AS A CRASS MARTIAL ARTS STEREOTYPE, NOT ACTUAL EXPLORATION NOR EVEN REALLY TRAINING IN ANY COHERENT SENSE. if learning can be forced, its not the kinds of learnings we say we are supposed to be teaching. the only kind of learning you can force on someone is visceral, combative, chaotic, or tragic https://twitter.com/pardoguerra/status/1582011995313737728 > A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can't just work well, it has to fail well. IF YOU ENGAGE WITH YOUR STUDENTS, you will happen upon opportunities to be who you’re meant to be with them I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT TEACHING, I just want to be a teacher 021123 what makes THe Handmaids Tale so effective is how *claustrophobic* it reads on technique: there's good "that's good" recognizable, and there's good "huh" not always recognizable. i strive for the latter; and by strive i mean throw myself into the current any chance i get (or whenever i can get up the nerve), and love the water and hope it takes me somewhere delicious 021323 birds (geese) many of them flying over decay, ruins, construction, change parade, people who disappear the moment the shutter clicks old dumb sharp open computers that were good for writing papers, the joy of unassuming text math, logic, programming natural sciences art and color theory music and performance martial arts forensics or social engagement, rhetoric a trade or craft 021323 the banging of the line of x's across the page, the exquisite scritch of the perfectly accidental angle of nib against paper--these are my cookie dough. squinting, evaluating, revising, calling it a name, cajoling a final product, in a category god forbid, this is the reluctant acquiescence of going on and making actual cookies. i was drawn to the kitchen by the dough. physicality. i am a dew drop on a rose petal, i am a droplet of the sun, i am a fervent animal whose bodily motion is pure mechanical music. love me while i am alive, for also i am a fire 021423 shit. jason’s just not a good principal for this school with this staff. he can’t hear anything that doesn’t conform with his “every kid is a struggling angel” mentality. Actually, every kid IS a struggling angel, that’s the educational system we’re simultaneously railing against and perpetuating. But he seems to think being aggressively “nice” is the way to help everyone succeed in it. He’s operating in a fantasy land that ultimately ends up being insulting and cruel to those who may be just as humanistically oriented as he is but who are trying to get their jobs done in THIS world that we are working in at the present moment. I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m just saying he’s in some kind of denial about the situation on the ground. 4t560214.823 i want to learn to perceive more in photographic, graphic, and pedagogical situations. i want to grow new neurons (as well as synapses i guess? not to mention gum tissue and heart). i want to learn to let emptiness fill my sails (again). i'm learning how to do it with food and drink--next: money and information https://www.bythom.com/technique/improving-the-photographer/blame-the-equipment.html and when thom hogan asks “Is it really the gear you’re using, or is it something else?” i’m like yes, that is such a necessary and deceptively obvious and important question to repeatedly ask ourselves, but more importantly (for me), is all the ways it’s about so much more than “photography.” It’s about the reasons i live in fear, limit myself, or sell myself short. it’s about beautiful, serene, piercing, terrifying, restorative, fundamental, powerful, humble emptiness. https://www.bythom.com/technique/improving-the-photographer/learning-from-others-sports.html “. . . but it was the moment he was looking for . . .” —that’s it isn’t it. photos are moments. not necessarily captured , that seems so combative and jealous and cruel. how about conjured or celebrated or discovered or illuminated or . . . loved? 022623 errata: jason’s not actually “bad at being a principal”; he’s constrained by the role his coincidental promotion has put him into. the “disruption” conversation in the second half of the meeting the other day: this is where he shines, this is where he is *not* bad at being a principal, it makes sense that this role was easier for him to inhabit and illuminate when rick was in charge and he could mostly just be this guy