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Happy New Year! To welcome in the year, I will write a Friday post about art or teaching. As this is a trial, you can expect something that you might find helpful every Friday until March 27, 2015.

A little backstory

In October of 2014, I started teaching Physical Education. It challenges me daily to think of how kids will best learn new games and how to guide them toward working well together.

I work with an independent school, and the morning starts with a meeting for all the students in which there are announcements and sometimes a presentation. One presentation was by the youngest person to fly around the world. Another was by a young female student who lived in Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the students put on a skit. At the end of each morning meeting, one student comes forward and asks us to think of how we would like to be treated and how we would like to treat others. The Golden Rule. It’s the work of a lifetime.

A great resource

A few years ago, I found an article in the New York Times Magazine called “Building a Better Teacher.” I set it aside, thinking that some day it might be useful. Sure enough, I found myself struggling to hold the attention of a large class outside, so I needed some strategies. Digging up the article, I found reference to Doug Lemov’s work. Through studying common strategies of the best teachers, he assembled a list of teaching tips called, “Teach Like a Champion.” You can get access to a short version (12 pages as opposed to >500) here:

“Teach Like a Champion” by Doug Lemov

I wish I’d known about these teaching tips resource sooner. I’ve found some of the techniques — like cold calling, and 100 Percent — to be extremely helpful, and hope you will too.

Today, my group heard African music coming from the old city. We were in Annecy, France and the old city is medieval. Annecy is also called Little Venice because of the canals. We turned our heads to see strange heads bobbing down the old stone street. Strange limbed ten foot tall Africans with the gold necklaces that extend necks were dancing down the streets. We could see immediately they were puppets. Looking closer, we could see how they were constructed. Human beings on stilts wore masks and powered the limbs of the dancing figures with sticks.

We were compelled to follow. But, after a few minutes of watching, as we drifted off to the side to get around the crowd, we noticed we were at a glassblowing shop.

The glassblower told me not to take any more pictures, it was forbidden. I apologized and we started talking. He noticed we were interested, began to speak a bit about his craft. There are five at his level in the world, he said.

He certainly looked like a captain, if not of a boat, then of his craft. Or perhaps the most interesting man in the world, in the XX ads. He was dressed in a white suit, with a white beard and a discerning face. Yet, also at times a kind expression seemed to arise naturally from the roundness of his nose and face and hospitality at inviting us into his shop, in our shorts and with our backpacks. Not once did he warn us verbally to watch ourselves.

He pulled down from the shelf a piece of glass that was improbable. It contained a painting made of glass.

How on earth had they managed to get so many tones though, so seamlessly integrated?

The secret was layers. The glass had been made like so many layers of candy coating. Then, afterwards, the glass was polished through to the proper depth to achieve the proper color.

Before we left, and as I was relaying what he had told me to the students, he came outside to speak with us again. I mentioned a bauble of glass I’d seen with mossy worlds inside. At this he motioned me back in the shop and shared an amazing work: a glass reptile englobed in glass. Out of respect for his trade (glassblowers carry secrets), I will not divulge more, except to say that it was amazing.

Now of course, in writing we use layers all the time. Having all the necessary layers present, and digging to the right layer in the right place and time in the story is what makes writing art.

Photograph of a photograph of Thomas Hart Benton by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

There is a place in St. Louis, Missouri called the City Museum. It is an awesome and magical place, an embodied love song continuously created out of the work of what must be hundreds of creative minds and hands.

The “museum” truly has a life of its own. It has a circulatory system composed of wood and metal tubes with intent, marveling, or laughing visitors who move through them. It has a reproductive system as well, sending forth the people who are inspired by it like so many seeds.

If you are able to make the pilgrimage here from anywhere in the world, do it.

Infinity flies

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