Day 7? at SI

Day 7? at SI I may have forgotten which day it is…but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I have found that Loosing track of time is usually preferred throughout my life. Kimo (Kim’s demo) Free write: What makes a hero? Joseph Campbell

(lol, blogspot said that was the small size...) tells us that it is chosen death of an old self and rebirth as someone new that is the hero’s journey. I think that he is smart in realizing what we write about in literature, but his definition of hero is slightly different than mine. To me, a hero must be a bit more. I think that about sums it up—they have to be something special, someone that appeals to us both in a moral sense and in an egocentric sense. To be a hero, they must earn, or deserve it, through trials or through exhibiting super-human (above normal) ethical wisdom. An ethic that gets people out of their minds and self-absorption, and truly inspires on a level that is above cognition and spiritual in aesthetic. Heroes to me: Dumbledore- not necessarily Harry Potter, he’s too reluctant. Sir Thomas Moore, my Grandmother Gene I was given a picture of Capitan America: Captain America is kinda lame. People create temporary heroes based on what they need in their life at that moment, but these do not always last. The image of a person I would describe as a hero is permanently soldered into our hearts and minds, and is not forgettable or remove able in any way. This is the difference between what gets us through the day and what gets us beyond the day—getting through the day is not a heroic feat, walking into fire is a heroic feat. Past my hero rant, my writing group ran into some snags during an assignment we had to pull from a text and create symbols of the story that it told. The short story we had was leading us into teaching by culture acceptance. However, the writer of the piece had written a book which one of our members had read, and thus for her the story this piece told was much different and in a broader context of language. The lack of sleep and general emotionality of our group helped contribute to a gaff of communication. This is turn upset and confused our productivity on the particular assignment, and in fact, became bigger than the actual assignment. Our group was having an internal discussion about acceptance and understanding which occasionally externalized. We had to reorganize our thoughts and expand in order to see what was going on as individuals, and then we could all feel it together. After such a day it was a great time for my presentation. I knew it would be a nice break from intense group work, and a good time to not only let go of demands by allowing ourselves to write badly, but also to get into ourselves as individuals. I was quite nervous offering up my demonstration to twenty or so more experienced teachers, and especially sense I had never before taught the lesson I was giving, but it had very few snags. It was amazingly tough to judge time length- another one of those things that comes with experience and feedback. Once our second classmate was halfway through her purposely ‘bad’ writing, and almost everyone was having a good laugh, I breathed a sigh of relief. My presentation wasn’t going to be a disaster! It was actually going to fit in nicely with what we needed at the time. If there has been something to sum up the conference so far, I think that it could possibly be the phrase “What we needed at the time,” because everything has seemed to come and go with a purpose, an abundant serendipity.