The view from my window at the family home in Mascalucia, Sicily. Imagine this outside your window each morning.
From my Instagram Feed
@gogojosephw loves to cook, so sometimes I wake up to scenes like this — a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
I’ll have to limit myself to one a day — which will be difficult — but a tasty treat while stuck isolating.
From my Instagram Feed
While New York’s Museum of Modern Art is closed to the public right now, its virtual doors are open in the form of a few free classes from the museum.
MoMA is offering nine free classes through Coursera:
- Fashion as Design
- In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Paining
- What is Contemporary Art?
- Art & Ideas: Teaching with Themes
- Art & Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom
- Seeing Through Photographs
- Art & Activity: Interactive Strategies for Engaging with Art
- Modern Art & Ideas
- Sheying (taught in Chinese)
Classes take anywhere from 12 to 38 hours to complete and can be done at whatever speed you’d like.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
I was chatting with a long time friend today on our private Discord server and he was telling us how he was about to start teaching his first remote class for his Junior High students. This man is one of the best educators I know. He is knowledgeable not only in technology, his educational topics of specialization but also in education itself.
It surprised me a bit when he confessed he was feeling very nervous about his first class. Again, this person is someone I consider an educator’s educator, but as with all of us, doubt can creep in at the oddest times.
Partly this is because we all consistently under-acknowledge and undervalue our own knowledge and skills. It seems to be a universal trait of human nature. Sure, there are the narcissistic and arrogant among us, but I believe the majority of us carry doubts and fears about our own abilities and in most cases these doubts and fears are baseless.
How do I know this? It is because I suffer in the same, human, way as everyone else. We always need to look for a trusted external source to tell us the truth about our own knowledge and skills. These are the friends who know when to tell us we are full of sh*t and know when we are not giving ourselves enough credit. It is here we find the truth which we can find so hard to see ourselves.
So, yes, it can be a little scary, a little stressful, even a bit panic-inducing but trust me, you’ve got this. You know how to do this and you know how to do it well. Will there be hiccups? Sure! Not every day in the classroom runs as smoothly as you might wish, but in the end, you (and your students) will be fine. You will get through this, together, and learn much along the way.
In fact, you might even find your skills growing with new innovations that you have been wanting to try but didn’t have space or time. Being forced into remote teaching might be the best thing for education in decades. Sometimes we need extraordinary circumstances — and the freedom to address those circumstances — to really grow in our profession, no matter what it might be.
Again, you’ve got this. I know because I know you. I can see the person you can’t always see in yourself.
What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments!
To help teachers and students learning from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Netflix is making a handful of documentaries available for free on its Netflix US YouTube channel. At the moment, there are 10 documentary films and series available, including 13th, Babies, Chasing Coral, Knock Down the House and Our Planet. Each comes with educational resources, like discussion questions, ways to take action and more info. Netflix says it plans to add Q&As with some of the project creators soon.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
To make your shut-in days (weeks and months) a little bit more entertaining and fun, WotC has set up a “Stay at Home, Play at Home” section of their Dungeons & Dragons website. There you can find tons of free online tools to assist you in your games: how to play materials, free basic rules, campaigns, encounters, and even activities and coloring books for younger kids. They also have a resource section for ways to play D&D remotely.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
This is one of our Recipes in Rotation — items we make on a monthly (or so) basis. I used pre-made gnocchi for this yesterday, b often make fresh gnocchi when making this for friends. Gnocchi is one of the easiest pastas to make and can give you the confidence to make different pastas— Douglas
Gnocchi alla Ciociaria
Ingredients
Instructions
Place the whole potatoes in a saucepan with water to cover. Bring to a boil and cook at a low boil until they are soft, about 45 minutes. While still warm, peel the potatoes and pass them through a vegetable mill onto a clean pasta board.
The pasta sauce will take just about as long to cook as the gnocchi takes to make, so get the sauce started and bubbling away and then make the gnocchi.
For sauce…
In a 12 to 14-inch skillet, heat the olive oil over high heat until almost smoking. Add the pancetta, garlic, onion, celery, carrot, parsley and the sausage meat and cook over high heat until sausage and vegetables are browned. Add the red wine, let it evaporate, then add the tomatoes and the pepper flakes. Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper and lower heat to a simmer. Let cook for 45 minutes.
For gnocchi…
Make a well in the center of the potatoes and sprinkle all over with the flour. Break the egg into the center of the well, add the salt, and, using a fork, stir into the flour and potatoes as if you were making pasta. Once the egg is mixed in, bring the dough together, kneading gently until a ball is formed. Knead gently another 4 minutes, until ball is dry to the touch.
Divide the dough into 2 large balls. Roll each ball into 3/4 inch-diameter ropes and cut the ropes into 1-inch-long pieces. Flick the pieces off of a fork or along the concave side of a cheese grater to score the sides. Drop the dough pieces into the boiling water and cook until they float to the surface, about 1 minute.
Once the sauce is thickened to the proper consistency, cook the gnocchi f in the boiling water until they float aggressively. Drain the gnocchi and add to the simmering sauce. Toss very gently over heat 30 seconds to coat, then divide evenly among 4 warmed pasta bowls. Top with freshly grated pecorino and serve.
Sooner or later, we all encounter the plays of William Shakespeare: whether on the page, the stage, or—maybe most frequently these days—the screen. Over four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare is still very much relevant, not only as the most recognizable name in English literature, but also perhaps as its most famous storyteller, even if we don’t recognize his hand in modern adaptations that barely resemble their originals.
But if we can turn Shakespeare’s plays into other kinds of entertainment that don’t require us to read footnotes or sit flummoxed in the audience while actors make archaic jokes, why should we read Shakespeare at all? He can be profoundly difficult to understand, an issue even his first audiences encountered, since he stuffed his speeches not only with hundreds of loan words, but hundreds of his own coinages as well.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
