Bird Droppings April 12, 2011
Is your imagination out of focus?

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Years ago I saw this quote and as I was watching my own young children with Lego blocks as they were growing up and then seeing a pile of Lego blocks change in their hands to cars and houses and castles and dinosaurs it truly hit home. I have used Lego at times as a tool to get the thinking process going with students. I usually would start by placing a pile of blocks on a table and saying, ok be creative. It is amazing what transpires it seems that sometimes the little kid comes out and in others a vast out pouring of creativity and imagination as blocks are placed together to create castles, cars and monsters. Teachers and adults often have a more difficult time getting started on this exercise. We tend to want to start with a red block or a square block and spend our time sorting through the pile rather than just creating.

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Lewis Carroll

I was sitting here thinking about Foxfire after reading several reflections from students in a former graduate class I had help teach at Piedmont College. Most teaching techniques require memory of items those things that are the content of the course and this is where and how you are assessed as a teacher and or student. Sadly it is not on how you use or can use that information in the real world around you. Years ago John Dewey focused on experience and how we use our experiences in education. The object was building on past experience and supplementing with current information and new material. I recall several years ago teaching Biology in summer school. Vocabulary is crucial as it is in any of the science classes in today’s world of testing. In many of the sciences the words are literally changing daily. In the most high school science books there are about three hundred vocabulary words. In preparing for today’s testing environment step one is know those words. Surprisingly if you know the vocabulary that will give you answers to seventy four percent of the questions on final exam for example in Biology.
Now the more difficult part is giving context to those words and bringing life to a Biology class which just happens to be the study of life. I used daily pre-quizzes and post-quizzes on vocabulary that last summer I taught Biology. Then I intermingled experiments and even outdoor activities tying it all together. An example is taxonomy which is a key word. I had a salamander and a lizard side by side for observation and research and this exercise we would do can have students remembering the differences between amphibians and reptiles for a lifetime. Once a teacher commented and said that is a great idea but they did not have access to lizards and salamanders. I asked, that teacher why not as I was holding a leopard gecko (a lizard). Amazingly that teacher never once asked to borrow my gecko or salamander. It is a great idea but it needs implementing.

“The man who has no imagination has no wings.” Muhammad Ali
I recall the mystique of Ali in his prime watching news releases and his fights so many years ago. I enjoyed listening to the banter with his good friend and featured commentator Howard Cosell back and forth it wasn’t for several years that it came out Cosell and Ali were very close friends.

“My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It’s the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz. You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond ‘Z’ and start poking around! “Theodor Geisel

A few years back Stan Bernstein of “The Bernstein Bears” fame passed away. Over 200 books were written and illustrated by Stan and Jan, husband and wife, a children’s book team effort for real. However as I read the review of Stan’s death the story mentioned that their first book was published with a Children’s book editor at Random House Theodor Geisel who a few years later would be more so know as Dr. Seuss.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Michelangelo

As legends go it is said Michelangelo would wander the quarries for days searching for blocks of marble not with a vision in mind of what he wanted to carve but looking for images within the blocks. The famous block of stone that became the statue of David and a single piece that would become his most famous and his only signed piece “The Pieta” took many days to for the great master sculptor to see.

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” George S. Patton

I was thinking what if everyone did think alike in a war situation you would know immediately what the enemy was doing or on a football field immediately what the offense was doing so in effect there would be no winners and no losers and a rather drab game.

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” Edgar Allan Poe

It was a few years ago I met over the phone a fellow who believed himself to be the incarnation of Edgar Allan Poe. It was most interesting as he looked the part as well. He too was a poet and writer of sorts but his income came from his gift as he called it. He was an idiot savant and could instantly compose a poem using your name as an acronym with each letter of you name starting the line of a poem and the poem then describing your personality. This was most weird to watch I have a video somewhere showing him being interviewed at Tufts University by the psychology department in amazement. However he always needed a starting point a sort of a mental kick start.

“People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.” William Butler Yeats

“Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.” Jessamyn West

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain

So often we only think of artists writers and such as having imagination and yet we tend to stifle it in children by ridding the world of imaginary friends and wanting only reality as it may be, to be where and how children see and do. Let’s take away the Legos and only allow TV and video games.

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau would walk for days through his world seeing and meeting people learning daily about life and humanity and his beloved nature.

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” Carl Sagan

Without imagination we would still be working on a flat map of the world concerned about sailing off and doing it without the use of light bulbs and Microsoft word and hybrid cars and plastics and polymers and so many things

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” Pablo Picasso

Several of the great artists are studied in psychology as you can see in their work their slips from reality – Van Gogh as he rapidly dissipated into his own world – but in turn in his art we see how he thought as Picasso says.

“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.” Francis Bacon

Sir Francis Bacon was not to far remove from the day when everyone thought the earth was flat and if you could see no land well do not go there for you will sail off the edge. I wonder what was over the edge. Each day we so often try and stay cozy in our box of our own reality and much like sailing over the edge there is so much outside the box. I remember one of the greatest toys of all time is those giant cardboard refrigerator boxes. They had so much more room to play in. But while we are content to do often with a bigger box, it is still a box until our imagination makes it into a castle or car. We sort of live in a world where we are much like hermit crabs when we outgrow our box we look for a bigger one still keeping the sanctity of the box. Now serious individuals are much like the hermit crab that carries along stinging sea anemones on its shell and when it outgrows a shell it moves but then moves the anemones as well. Those stinging anemones are to keep predators away and new ideas. If you need a box use a transparent one and or permeable membrane so you can see and hear and feel what really is there and for today please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts.
namaste
bird