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Our job is to love people. When it hurts. When it’s awkward. When it’s uncool and embarrassing. Our job is to stand together, to carry the burdens of one another and to meet each other in our questions.

Jamie Tworkowksi (via thelovejournals)

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Movement Telephone_the art assignment I tried to capture the movements of the parts of a wooden mechanical clock. This is the third video I recorded The original video is here https://youtu.be/QJ_tt9Cdxh4

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But my bones knew something wonderful       about the darkness –

Mary Oliver, House of Light (via wordsnquotes)

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My Power Outlet For this week’s art assignment “make a thing”, I decided to make my personalized power outlet, which can charge four things that gave me energy in life: the ever changing beauty of nature, good poetry, writing down my thoughts, and spending time with my family/being a child. With a busy and stressful college life, I may not be able to “charge” these things everyday like I do for my phone and laptop, but this outlet reminds me that there are so much more to life than digital gadgets and screens.

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For this week's art assignment, "embarrassing object", I drew three things that always make me feel embarrassed ever since middle school: sand bucket, scissors, and extremely short hair bangs. These things are associated with one of my horrible memories when I was in eighth grade. At that time I had long hair and liked to keep my hair bang very long (because I thought my face was too big and I wanted to cover part of it, and also I thought somehow long hair and hair bang would look nice and people wouldn't always notice I had braces, which I already felt embarrassed about). However, my mom got extremely angry that I my hair bang covered my one of my eyes all the time and so she took the sand bucket and literally put it on my head and did a "bowl cut"--what was left was short, straight bangs above my two thick eyebrows. I was horrified when that happened (I never saw my mom that furious and at the same time was shocked by what she just did to me), cried myself to sleep, and felt so embarrassed when I was at school that I always kept my head down and avoided talking to people as much as possible...it took months for my hair to grow back, and ever since then, I felt a sense of unease and embarrassment whenever I see very short hair bang, sand bucket, and scissors (when they are not held by professional hairstylists).

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The Art Assignment: Fake Flyer

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Constructed Landscape For this art assignment, I used a miniature that I made for a loved one and added a mountain background that I drew. I call this landscape "home". Although growing up in a city, I've always felt close to nature. I enjoy hiking a lot, and feel especially peaceful whenever I'm surrounded by mountains. To me, the vastness and stillness of mountains are always the illuminating powers that tell us something about the relationship between the world and humans as well as the nature of and "solutions" to our suffering. The "home" I built in my heart looks like this one in the picture, where I grow old with and in nature, living in a small house with my loved ones and a garden that I can grow beautiful plants, and most ideally Totoro will visit us once in a while;)

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Body in Place While many students often go to Wilson hall for classes during the day, Wilson hall in the evening is a beautiful and quiet place on campus that not many people notice. Sitting on the front porch of this building and looking up at the night sky always helps me calm down and take a moment to just enjoy the silence and stillness, giving me some time to be with myself after a busy day. (Tonight's Wilson hall has a different view though, lighted up for the family weekend.)

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cassette

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For this week’s art assignment, “measuring an aspect of your personal or cultural history”, I used clips to represent a time of my “linguistic history”—I tried to quantify the effort I put into learning English when I was a middle schooler. My middle school is known for its education of English as a foreign language, and when I first got to sixth grade, our English teacher made us listen to the recordings of our English textbook Side by Side on cassette tapes and read/repeat the texts sentence after sentence. To improve our pronunciation and “sense of the English language”, we had to do this for 40 minutes every day after school, and this “cassette time” lasted for two years. In this art assignment, I used 360 clips to represent the time I spent reading after the cassette tapes: each clip represents 40 minutes of time. The calculation is 5(days)x4(weeks)x9(months of school)x2(years)=360(clips), which equals 14,400 minutes of echo reading. I used the 360 clips to reproduce as closely as possible the image of the cassette tape that I used when I was 12 years old. Clearly, the time and effort I spent on learning English far exceeded the time I spent on just repeating my middle-school textbooks, but to actually see the long chain of clips representing only a small amount of my language learning effort is already quite surprising! I thought this is an interesting attempt to quantify abstract things such as how much time you have to invest in learning a new thing or mastering a new skill.

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Yes it’s a kind of reinforcement system, the “tokens” are symbols that can be exchanged after the activity for the children’s reinforcers.

Shiyu Wang #educ2140Q6

What are some things you would do next if Casey were a student in your classroom?

According to the observations, there are several occasions when the teacher seemed to ask Casey to do the appropriate behaviors but did not follow up after the child’s action (such as telling Casey to hang the lunchbox but did not respond after Casey failed to aim the hook and the lunchbox fell down, or telling Casey to put the books back but did not follow up and acknowledge what Casey did). If I were Casey’s teacher, I would focus more on acknowledging and complimenting her appropriate behaviors by saying explicitly what she did right, and pay more attention to what Casey does after I give her instructions. As for academic curriculum, I would pay more attention on matching the letter sounds with the letter pronunciations (such as “what sound does b make?”). I would use small group instructions and choose some children who have acquired more knowledge of letter sounds to engage in the group activity with Casey so that she would have chances to engage in observational learning. I would probably use a token economy at first to increase motivations to learn, but later on embed letter sound games during transition periods to do a recap of what the children have learnt.

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I like music,” she said slowly, “because when I hear it, I…I lose myself within myself, if that makes sense. I become empty and full at once, and I can feel the whole earth rolling around me. When I play I’m not…for once, I’m not destroying I’m creating.

Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass (via 4dele)