November 22

The SAN Script – the week of November 23 – 27

Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky

Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nicole Krauss’s Beautiful Letter to Van Gogh on Fear, Bravery, and How to Break the Loop of Our Destructive Patterns

Brain Pickings

nicolekrauss_vangogh3

That triumphant transcendence of the pattern is what novelist Nicole Kraussexplores in an exquisite response to Vincent van Gogh’s 1884 letter to his brother about fear and risk-taking. Her piece is part of an exhibition by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in which twenty-three contemporary artists and writers respond to the letters of Van Gogh in paintings, sculptures, letters, poems, photographs, and videos.

Krauss writes:

Dear Vincent,

You write about fear: Fear of the blank canvas, but also, on a larger scale, of the “infinitely meaningless, discouraging blank side” that life itself always turns toward us, and which can only be countered when a person “steps in and does something,” when he “breaks” or “violates.”

It’s extraordinary that I should have been given your letter now, because it is exactly that act of breaking that has been on my mind this last year, and which I feel has everything to do with how I want to make art, and how I want to live.

It’s a strange thing about the human mind that, despite its capacity and its abundant freedom, its default is to function in a repeating pattern. It watches the moon and the planets, the days and seasons, the cycle of life and death all going around in an endless loop, and unconsciously, believing itself to be nature, the mind echoes these cycles. Its thoughts go in loops, repeating patterns established so long ago we often can’t remember their origin, or why they ever made sense to us. And even when these loops fail over and over again to bring us to a desirable place, even while they entrap us, and make us feel anciently tired of ourselves, and we sense that sticking to their well-worn path means we’ll miss contact with the truth every single time, we still find it nearly impossible to resist them. We call these patterns of thought our “nature” and resign ourselves to being governed by them as if they are the result of a force outside of us, the way that the seas are governed — rather absurdly, when one thinks about it — by a distant and otherwise irrelevant moon.

And yet it is unquestionably within our power to break the loop; to “violate” what presents itself as our nature by choosing to think — and to see, and act — in a different way. It may require enormous effort and focus. And yet for the most part it isn’t laziness that stops us from breaking these loops, it’s fear. In a sense, one could say that fear is the otherwise irrelevant moon that we allow to govern the far larger nature of our minds.

And so before we can arrive at the act of breaking, we first have to confront our fear. The fear that the blank canvas and the blank side of life reflects back to us, which is so paralyzing, as you put it, and seems to tell us that we can’t do anything.” It’s an abstract fear, though it finds a way to take on endless shapes. Today it may be the fear of failure, but tomorrow it will be the fear of what others will think of us, and at a different time it will be fear of discovering that the worst things we suspect about ourselves are true. My lover says that the fear, which seems always to be there when one wakes up in the morning, and which he feels in the hollow between his ribs (above his stomach and below his heart) comes from the “other world,” a phrase that always brings tears to his eyes, and by which he means the awareness of our finitude, our lack of the infinite and eternal. I think he’s right, but I would also add to that that fear, being anticipatory, is always without knowledge. It is a mental calculation based on the future unknown. And yet the experience of fear is the experience of being in the grip of a sensation that seems to possess an unassailable conviction in itself. To be afraid that the plane will crash is, in a sense, to assume that the plane will crash. And yet even if we could scrape away the many forms our fear takes and get to the underlying source-our mortality, our division from the infinite — we would still discover that our fear is not based on actual knowledge, unlike the part of us that chooses to be free. Bravery is always more intelligent than fear, since it is built on the foundation of what one knows about oneself: the knowledge of one’s strength and capacity, of one’s passion. You implied as much in your letter: “However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that,” you wrote. “He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that, in short, breaks, “violates.”

And so we find ourselves, once again, in front of the blank canvas. The blank canvas, which reflects both our fear and our opportunity to break it. In Jewish mysticism, the empty space — the Chalal Panui, in Hebrew — has tremendous importance, because it was the necessary pre-condition for God’s creation of the world. How did the Ein Sof — the being without end, as God is called in Kabbalah — create something finite within what is already infinite? And how can we explain the paradox of God’s simultaneous presence and absence in the world? And the answer to this, according to the Kabbalah, is that when it arose in God’s will to create the world, He first had to withdraw Himself, leaving a void. To create the world, God first had to create an empty space.

And so we might say: The first act of creation is not a mark, it is the nullification of the infinity that exists before the first mark. To make a mark is to remember that we are finite. It is to break, or violate, the illusion that we are nature that goes around in a loop forever. But it is also a confirmation of our knowledge and freedom, which is all we have in this world.

Sincerely,

Nicole Krauss

 

St. Anthony This Week

Monday, November 23

School Wide Waste Audit- first one for 2015-2016

SLP Theresa Patenaude in to work with kindergarten student

Squirmies

Tuesday, November 24

Looking At Pictures Gr. 5/6, Gr. 2, Gr. 1

Dorothy Stanyar, volunteer, in Mrs. Rupnik’s class PM only

Orkidstra Today

Table Tennis today!

Wednesday, November 25

Notre Dame visiting St. Anthony – 2:00 PM

Wastefree Wednesday 

Thursday, November 26

Alina Carranco, Neurocognitive Science Student at Carleton, volunteers in Mrs. Rupnik’s class (AM)

Looking At Pictures Gr. 3/4

Paul away 11:30 – 1:30 HUB Presentation

BROWN BAG LUNCH: ASPHALT TO OASIS

Thursday, November 26th, 2015, 12:00 – 1:00pm – FREE for members & $10 for guests – RSVP required, click here to register

with Andrew Harvey

In 1999 St. Anthony won the National Ugliest Schoolyard Competition. With that dubious distinction as a motivator, the school went on to depave and green almost half of the grounds. In 2015 the school did additional work to make the area as green and inviting a learning space as possible. Come hear about all about the school’s past, present and future greening initiatives!

Andrew is a HUBber, Brown Bag Lunch Enthusiast, a Landscape Architect, and School Grounds Design Consultant.

Paul McGuire is principal at St. Anthony School in Ottawa’s Little Italy.

Recycle Day at St. Anthony Catholic School- PLEASE recycle today!

Orkidstra Today

UGM at Centurion Center at 170 Colonnade Road for OECTA members

School Council – 6:30 PM

Friday, November 27 

Kindness Project- Session One with Mrs. Rupnik and Lindsey Barr

Pizza Day

Birthday Celebration today for November birthdays

free techEdmodo new

15 Things Teachers & Students Can Do With Edmodo

Last week the Wall Street Journal had an article announcing that Edmodo had received a $15 million venture capital investment from the founder of LinkedIn and a former VP ofFacebook. That article gave me the idea for this post of fifteen things teachers and students can do with Edmodo.

For those not familiar with Edmodo, in a nutshell it is a microblogging system designed specifically for teachers and students. Using Edmodo teachers can create a microblogging network for their classes. Edmodo allows teachers to create a group specifically for their students and exclude those not invited to the group. Edmodo provides teachers with a place to post assignment reminders, build an event calendar, and post messages to the group. Just as with any good microblogging service users can share links, videos, and images.

Here are fifteen things teachers and students can do with Edmodo.
1. Post assignments for students. Edmodo allows teachers to attach files to assignment announcements. If there is a file your students need in order to complete an assignment, they can access it at the same place they view the announcement. Less clicking is good.

2. Create digital libraries. Students and teachers can create digital libraries for housing their important files. No need to keep track of USB drives because you can access your files from any Internet-connected computer.

3. Post messages on the “wall.” This allows students to ask questions of each other and their teacher. Teachers, of course, can post messages for all students to read.

4. Create learning groups. Teachers can create groups of their students according to the courses they teach or create groups of students who are supposed to be working together.

5.  Post polls for students. Use the polls to gather informal feedback on a question like, “do you feel prepared for next week’s quiz?”

6. Post a quiz for students to take. You can attach links and files to each question and answer choice. This allows you to post a document and ask students to read and respond to it. Quizzes can be in multiple choice, true/ false, fill in the blank, or short answer form. You can allow students to see their scores immediately or you can disable that option.

7. Connect with other teachers. Join discussion groups to share ideas about lesson plans, teaching strategies, and project development. Discuss tools and content that you use. In some cases you can find webinars like this one from Buck Institute for Education about project based learning.

8. Create a calendar of events and assignments.

9. Access Edmodo through the free Android and iPhone apps.

10. Turn in assignments. Students can upload assignments for their teachers to view and grade. Teachers can annotate the assignments directly in Edmodo.

11. Create parent accounts. Teachers can create parent accounts. Parent accounts allow parents to see their children’s assignments and grades. Teachers can also send alerts to parents about school events, missed assignments, and other important messages through Edmodo.

12. Generate printable class rosters. If you’re going to have a substitute teacher in your classroom who needs a printed roster, you can print one from your Edmodo account.

13. Embed Wallwisher into your Edmodo wall to host a brainstorming session.

14. Embed videos, images, and audio clips into your wall to spark a class discussion online.

15. Use the Google Chrome extension or browser bookmarklet to quickly add content to your Edmodo library. Anytime you find something on the web, click the Edmodo extension or bookmarklet to save it in your Edmodo library.

Do you use Edmodo? What’s your favorite feature?

Here are your codes:

Grade Level Group Code
Elementary (PK-5) mq9xis
Middle School (6-8) 2pgkrt
High School (9-12) qjncx6

Additional information for you from Friday:

Here are the links/information that I needed to send you to complete today’s workshop:
  • Your final assignment for the program is to complete a reflection of the Ambassador program through a Transformation Story.
    • Take a minute to access the file: https://discovery.box.com/AmbStory
      • Edit the District Name & Your Name
      • Begin filling in your thoughts about the program.
      • Please e-mail this to me when you are done
  • help number: 1-800-323-9084 
  • when you get booted out what password do you use? This is a glitch right now and Discovery is working on it. Your old usernames and passwords – even the ones I gave you in September don’t work right now
  • Discovery asks that you fill in a survey now that you are true Ambassadors here is the link to the survey

Thank-you for all the work you have done on Discovery and the other programs we have focussed on this year – you are all amazing!

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Posted November 22, 2015 by mcguirp in category SAN This Week

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