Weeknote 49/2023
“It’s simple. To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool. By fool, to be clear, I don’t mean a stupid, unthinking person, but one with the spirit of the medieval fool, the court jester, the carefree fool in the tarot deck who bears the awesome number zero, signifying the fertile void from which all creation springs, the state of emptiness that allows new things to come into being. Consider for a moment the learnings in life you’ve forfeited because your parents, your peers, your school, your society, have not allowed you to be playful, free, and foolish in the learning process.”
Verbs
Writing: Pause, on the blog
The workshop last week in Berlin prompted lots of interesting and exciting ideas and thoughts. It will take me a while to work through them all, but one of them found additional inspiration this week when I read an old interview with the animator, director, and visionary film maker Hayao Mizazaki. On the blog I wrote about the way he uses ma in his films - moments of reflection, pauses, breathing spaces - and how this can and should inform the way we design and deliver learning experiences. I’ve long championed the idea that educators should be looking for teaching inspiration everywhere, and this was a great way to connect with a really important idea in learning design.
Watching: The Little Drummer Girl, BBC iPlayer
This feels oddly timely, despite the fact that it was released in 2018, as the complex and deeply interwoven tensions between Israel and Palestine have now reached a point of forthright conflict. Taking this as a drama, and a work of fiction, there’s some exceptional performances from all of the cast, but especially Florence Pugh, Alexander Skarsgård, and Michael Shannon. Whilst the show doesn’t shy away from engaging with the nature of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, it does leave things appropriately undetermined and nuanced. Throughout, you are left with the feeling that there is evidently good and bad on both sides and that these often reside in one and the same place, even one and the same person. It’s an engaging and quite powerful piece of classic Le Carré and carried off with immaculate design, cinematography, and direction.
Laughing: Short films by Tim Key
I’ve been a huge Tim Key fan for years and years, and have been fortunate enough to see him live a number of times. Our poetry shelf in the living room has a good few of his books, decks of cards, and other bits and pieces, and there’s a collection of his prints in a cupboard, too, waiting to find a home one day. Of course, he’s a talented, hilarious, and unique voice in poetry, and a brilliant, pugnacious, and even alarming stand-up comedian but he’s also got some decent acting chops, too. Key’s filmography has some impressive entries but something I love is seeing him in some of the wonderful short films that he’s done from time to time. Awkward Coffee sees Key paired opposite Laura Marling as part of the brilliant Random Acts series on YouTube by Channel 4. I also love Wonderdate - though I’ve no idea what this short film was made for. It seems to pack more comedy, wit, and brilliant into 15 minutes than many feature films do in 90.
Bewildering: The music of Michiru Aoyama
Michiru Aoyama writes, produces, and releases a new album of music every day. Every single day. He gets up, he makes music for the whole day, he parcels it up, and he releases it as an album at the end of the day. Every. Single. Day. And this bewilders may. It’s extraordinary. I’m always obsessed with people who, through choice or necessity, work on the same thing or same kind of thing over and over and over again. In part, I think, because I rarely do - that’s not the sort of work I do - and I would find it incredibly difficult. But that repetition, iteration, and honing of skills and understanding is still completely awe inspiring as far as I’m concerned. There must be kinds of learning that emerge from such a process and experience that just cannot develop and evolve in any other way.
Words
Teddy laying in the sun in Anja’s office.
There were lots of ideas prompted by my time at the workshop in Berlin last week and I’m beginning to filter those through into blog posts and, possibly, even some other kinds of content forms in the future. This week I put a small blog post together on the idea of pauses, inspired by an interview I read with Hayao Miyazaki and conversations with participants in Berlin. The concepts of “slow-education”, the role of emulation and modelling in teaching, and how we need to focus more on the phenomenological - the actual experience - of teaching and learning are all things I want to spend a lot more time thinking and writing about and exploring in some way or other. I’m especially interested in how this relates to training teachers, observing and assessing teachers, and designing learning experiences and curricula.
Besides all of that, most of this week has been taken up by all the sorts of day to day and domestic things that need handling from time to time. In particular, we’ve had trouble with leaks and water damage coming from further up in the building that has meant lots of people poking around and tutting knowingly, large holes being knocked in walls, endless repairs, plastering, painting, and furniture replacing. All a bit of a headache, and it’s turned my office into a temporary walk in wardrobe which has limited the kinds of work I can be doing, but it seems like we’re getting on top of things. I was very lucky to be able to go to Berlin, somewhat in the middle of all of that chaos, and things be handled amazingly by my wife and father-in-law. It’s hard, in any case, to be of much use when everything’s happening in another language, but even more so when you’re desperately packing for a work trip at the same time.
In addition to this, Teddy (featured reclining magnificently in the sun, above) has been unwell. It’s quite stressful when this happens as you can’t really get any feedback from him as to what’s up. He’s oddly reticent whenever I ask him even pretty simple questions, which isn’t much help. It’s not totally clear what the issue is - something about B vitamins and digestion, it seems - but we’ve got a treatment plan from our vets and he seems to already be feeling much better. In the next days we should have a better picture of the issue and, we hope, how to get everything sorted out.
Next week we’re heading to Switzerland for 4 or 5 days for a bit of a winter break and then, shortly after that, I’ll be off to the UK for the usual Christmas festivities. I have quite the line-up through the winter season every year with my wife’s family’s slava (saint’s day) on December 19th, followed by Christmas in the UK, then New Year, and then Christmas here in Serbia on January 7th. It will feel like I’m on some kind of tinsel and mulled wine fuelled world tour.