On Sunday, I had an idea for a way that students in my class could write reflectively. To be honest, I don't remember the details of the idea (the new school year is approaching fast, and I've been having lots of ideas about stuff like this). However, I vividly remember the thoughts that came next. Almost immediately, I thought "what's going to make a kid keep up with doing this, if it doesn't immediately strike them as useful? How will I be able to make sure it's getting done? If I'm not able to keep track of it, or even to keep doing it, after I start, will it make all my expectations seem less stable and more prone to being abandoned?" 

Now, this litany of doubts often follows the arrival of a new teaching idea in my head. All the doubts and concerns are reasonable, but they aren't particularly useful at that moment. Until Sunday, however, I hadn't given them must thought. 

But on Sunday I was thinking about school during a "restorative yoga" class - which is an hour of lying down in various positions and listening to extremely gentle music. And in this context, I realized that when my new idea got all these questions fired at it, my neck and shoulders actually tensed up. It didn't feel conducive either to developing new ideas, or indeed having a healthy back. 

So I thought about the voice, and realized I could picture it - it looked like Principal Snyder, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I think this is partly because Snyder thinks of teenagers entirely as potential threats to order, who will take any opportunity to game the system. And it's partly because he's constantly tense, and has a notably annoying voice. So I'm trying to take note when my Principal Snyder voice kicks in, and not let it take over my thinking. 

I'll finish this with two lines, this one from Snyder's first episode:

Kids today need discipline. That's an unpopular word these days - discipline. I know Principal Flutie would have said, "Kids need understanding. Kids are human beings." That's the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten. 

You can read Arnie Aprill's write-up of today (with lots of photos) here.

Had I been in charge of Friday, I would have devoted the entire day to preparing for our performance, mostly with unstructured work time and a couple of structured critiques, focused on smoothing out the rough edges. This was not their approach. Instead, we started the day with a discussion of how the week was designed, and why they made the choices they did. Here are the nitty-gritty details (to the extent that I remember them):

Kurt started us off with a brief introduction, and Marimar told us about lunch. Marimar always gave what amounted to mini-lecture about lunch: what we'd be eating, who made it, and how they were connected to the school. During this talk, Kurt said one thing that really blew my mind:

Back when I was working with the Coalition of Essential Schools, we found that "presentations of learning" got pretty boring and repetitive, so we started doing "performances of learning" instead. That's what we're doing today.

Warm-up: passing the invisible object

We all stood in a circle for this. The first person started with an invisible "ball", shaped it into a recognizable object, and passed it to their neighbor, who took it as it was handed to them, then shaped it into something new and passed it along - all silently - until it made its way all the way around the circle.

How the Habla Team designed this year's institute...

This is taken from my notes from the explanation that the team gave, which are frankly a little sketchy. They used the principles of backwards design, beginning with what they wanted us to learn and then coming up with the workshops that would take us in the direction of those goals, but the specific starting point for the Institute when they started planning it last year was 100 Years of Solitude itself, because Gabriel Garcia Marquez had just died. They were also interested in "framing" as a concept, and the Institute was born from those two things. 

The question of "Learning Objectives"

The photo-based reflection

The "applications" reflection

On another of our sheets of paper, we wrote potential applications for what we've done this week in our classrooms. Here's what I wrote:

The last rehearsals

As a big group, we rehearsed a sequence in which each of us said the "I am framed by" sentence that we'd performed in our groups on Tuesday. I didn't feel that invested in my little phrase, and I never got that excited by this sequence, since it took a long time, and it didn't feel to me like in most cases our sentences were the most resonant things we'd come up with during the week. Also, by necessity this was the only component of the entire week that was fully directed by the team, which felt uncomfortable given the facilitative approach and emphasis on "distributed leadership" during the rest of the week. 

Then we got back into our small groups, and I relaxed again. I loved working in our group of five. We added my lion mask to the final vignette and choreographed it (which we hadn't yet done), then ran through it all a couple of times. Then it was lunchtime.

After the fact, Kurt showed us the five-layer structure that had been designed for devising our pieces:

1. Writing
2. Three human sculptures: beginning, middle, end.
3. Narration and movement
4. Masks and props
5. Music

The performance

We were playing music in the performance, and nobody had rehearsed at all - either with each other, or with the groups. This made me really uncomfortable, since I was conscious of how precise our group had been about the words we used, and about creating minimal distraction onstage, and music performed by people who had never seen our performance could potentially seriously shift the balance. But in the event, it was wonderful, and there was a melody that started to build over the final vignette that was beautiful, and added enormously to the piece (I want to say it was a violin melody from Marji, but it may also have been guitar. I was engaged with remembering what I'd written at the time!). 

Also, before the performance the musicians went outside to jam a bit, and just release some tension (so we DID actually play together once before the show), and ended up jamming with Arnoldo improvising lyrics, as the rest of the group came pouring out the door into the yard, because they were coming out for a group photo. It was a magical moment. 

Then, when we all got together for a group photo (we were instructed to be on multiple levels, ("like those old magazine ads for the Sopranos" in Kurt's words). Someone started singing "Lean on Me", I picked it up on sax, and we ended up doing a full-group "Lean on Me" singalong during the group photo. Spirits were high.

I spent the show itself tense up until our piece, curiously emotionally disengaged as I performed it (which didn't really surprise me - performance is weird), and shocked when people laughed during our piece. I hadn't had a sense of humor about any of it (either the piece itself, or the stories I was relating), so I hadn't been aware it would have that effect. I loved the other pieces, though - they were extraordinary (I have no idea how our piece looked, since I was in front narrating and didn't want to turn around and watch what my fellow performers were doing. There are entire sequences of movements in the third vignette that I've never seen.

Here's a photo from the finale of the performance (I took it from Marji's Facebook post, not sure who took it):

The final "closing the loop" reflection

• I used to think _________, but now I think _________.
• I used to think _________, but now I wonder _________.
• I used to think _________, and I still think _________.

I wasn't crazy about these prompts, for two reasons:

1. They put you in a position of eithertestifying to your personal transformation, or declaring the week to be a failure (because if you still think what you did before, what was the point of the week?)
2. They don't give you a means of indicating what the agent of this change was, which means that the implied end of each sentence is "because of Habla", (as opposed to "because of X workshop", or "because of Y group I was in", or "because of a late-night conversation I had with Z")

I talked to the team about my misgivings afterwards, and I know none of these were intended (I also don't know whether other people felt this way). They were actually designed as a means of avoiding extended testimonials, both in order to keep the final reflection from feeling too evangelical and to make sure that there was time for everyone to speak. I believe this is a structure from Project Zero, and it's still one I might use myself, but I think I'd use it following a single Socratic Seminar (which is low-stakes enough that you could say "I haven't changed my mind" without feeling like a jerk). 

I also (and this is very much a personal thing) feel a general aversion to talking at length about how great a shared experience was, no matter how great it was. This kind of thing makes me think of an exchange in Hemingway's short story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", in which the wealthy Macomber talks to his laconic guide, Wilson, after Macomber has finally had success in killing some animals:

"Do you have that feeling of happiness about what's going to happen?" Macomber asked, still exploring his new wealth.

"You're not supposed to mention it," Wilson said, looking in the other's face. "Much more fashionable to say you're scared. Mind you, you'll be scared too, plenty of times."

But you have a feeling of happiness about action to come?"

"Yes," said Wilson. "There's that. Doesn't do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away. No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much.

The party

This is definitely a part of Habla. At 7:30, prepaid taxis came downtown to pick us up and take us to Marimar and Kurt's house for a party "that will never end". There was food, there was another jam session, there was dancing, and there was lots of conversation. I stayed until about 1 AM, disregarding the fact that I would be catching a taxi to the airport at 5:30. 

The fact that the week ends literally at our hosts' home, with dancing, music, and delicious food, is the perfect way to end a magical week. 

Opening Reflection:

Think back on yesterday...

1. what makes you say "wow"?
2. what do you wonder about?

The Week so Far

Kata showed us a helpful slide that laid out what we'd done every day. It was shown as a cycle, with Day 4 pointing back to Day 1 (in other words, indicating that we will be returning to the themes of Day 1 today).

Day 1 - Navigating by Light

• I could you a tell a story about...
• I can imagine...
• Can you imagine...?

Day 2 - What frames our lives

Day 3 - Framing photos/Framing Macondo

• Finding stories in photos
• Looking at the portraits in 100 Years of Solitude

Day 4 - Portraits and Memory

And so today (Day 5) we are back to navigating by light.

Our first writing exercise - the memory machine

Our second writing exercise - looking at our self-portrait and engaging all our senses

We now listed sensory images evoked by our self-portraits. Here's what I wrote:

We definitely talked about this with a partner, and in talking, I realized that "climbing a tree" works well for me as an analogy for writing. I started thinking about this because I thought about how as you climb, your vision narrows to "my possible routes" - everything becomes either something that you can reach (and will support your weight) or something that can't. Also, it's hard, as you go up, to work out how you're going to get back down. My partner (I'm 90% sure it was Rob) also pointed out that when you're climbing a tree, your perspective on what you can see around you changes with every step. I didn't end up pursuing this idea in my writing, but I really like it. 

Third writing exercise: telling a story

At this point, we used what we'd just written as a jumping-off point for writing a story from our lives (or someone else's life). This drew on everything we've done this week. I called mine "Climbers", and wrote a series of vignettes about climbing. This was inspired by the fact that I knew I wanted my self-portrait to be in a tree, but I didn't know why that felt important until I started writing about it. But once I started writing about climbing, things got very intense very quickly. I was writing about being an older brother, being a son, recovering from heart surgery, and being an uncle. Earlier in the week, Jessica told me "something will break open inside you this week", and I thought "Naaaaaaaah, I don't think so." Turns out she was right. 

We got a "beginning-middle-end" graphic organizer. I completely ignored mine, but there should be a copy of the graphic organizer on Arnie's website

Human Atom and Human Sculptures

After we wrote our first drafts, we wrote an image from our story down onto a notecard and gave it to Kurt. Then we went into the gallery space, and started walking between an outside wall and the center of the room, so that we were naturally all moving in different directions. He had us move with more urgency, and then stand back to back with somebody (calling "stand back to back" very quickly). 

[procedural note: what I hadn't understood about this technique until I did it, is that because you can stand back-to-back so quickly, and because the desire not to get left out is very high, there really isn't time to seek out a particular person to stand back-to-back with - or at least, that's how it felt for us. But I think that this at least has the potential to be a partner-selecting method that makes finding ANY partner feel more important than finding a specific partner, which is a bit of a classroom holy grail, for me anyway].

Once we were back to back with someone, Kurt read a phrase from one of the notecards, and we had a few seconds to (silently) create a human sculpture (just the two of us) that embodied the phrase he read out. For one of the images, he also had us get into threes. 

Preparing for our final performance

Human Sculptures revisited

After we'd had some time to choose a text for our performance piece, we all got back together as one big group in the gallery space to create human sculptures again - this time for the "beginning" image, "middle" image, and "end" image. At this point I wished I'd actually used that beginning-middle-end graphic organizer, and we weren't able to come up with any shapes that felt very generative. We were actually generally pretty behind at this point in the process. 

More rehearsal time

For the rest of the day, we just rehearsed. I've got one photo from the process, which shows the group striking poses to embody the feeling of being a frustrated two-year-old:

Kurt had advised us to pursue the goal of "distributed leadership" (harking back to the jumping exercise at the beginning of Saturday). It was a useful reminder, because the urge to take control and enact a vision was pretty intense (for me, anyway). 

What was really surprising to me was that I found it pretty much impossible to get through the vignettes I'd written without my voice starting to break into sobs. There is one moment I remember in particular: Kata was "playing" my then five-year-old brother in the first vignette, swinging off the branch of a tree, and falling on her arm and breaking it. She had found a position that put her arm at an alarming angle, and, in telling the story, I turned around to look back at her. It was a shock to turn around and see her - even though the representation was nothing like how I remembered the event, it took me right back to that moment. The group could tell how much I was affected. Of course, this was no guarantee that the audience would be similarly affected, but it still energized the group. 

I went home that night, rewrote each vignette by hand in the Cafe Creme (just down the street from our hacienda, and fantastic), and then typed them up. 

Thursday night: La Palabra at Tapanco Centro Cultural

Alejo invited us all to a special performance of La Palabra, put on by the theatre company he's a part of. The show was to open the next night, so this was basically an open dress rehearsal. The performance takes up the whole cultural center, with different performances in each room. All of them are riffs on Samuel Beckett's short plays, except for Laurel and Hardy and the boxes of light, which is inspired by a scene from a Paul Auster Novel.

Starting with Reflection

We wrote our reflections on another note card (as we did yesterday) and turned them in. Here's the thinking routine we used:

3-2-1

3 applications (ways you can apply what you learned)

2 questions

1 metaphor or analogy

Workshop 1: self-portraits

Cynthia and Ana Paula led this. They started with a slide show of professional models of black-and-white photo portraits, from photographers including Flor Garduño, Luis Rosales Palma, Irving Penn, and Francesca Woodman). As we looked at each photo, they elicited characteristics of the photos from us, and wrote them down on the whiteboard. Cynthia and Ana Paula also took time to give quick, impromptu lecture on things like the rule of thirds. 

There were lots of photos, but they were fascinating - I didn't want it to end!

We formed groups of three. Each person "directed" their own portrait, but the other two were there both to take photographs (on smartphones) and to (literally) offer different perspectives. The only directive was that the photos should be black and white. Cynthia suggested using the "noir' filter on the iPhone, but this was a suggestion.

Side comment: there's a fundamental difference between a "filter" and a "template". Both can make your work look more professional and real, but a template reduces your agency and creative freedom, (I'm thinking especially of those "movie trailer" templates in iMovie) whereas a filter expands your options rather than limiting them.

I knew I wanted to be in a tree for my photo, but that was all I knew. Here are some of the photos that my partners, Claire and Maritza took, that I was considering:

And here's the one that I ultimately chose:

The next day, the facilitators had printed out our portraits and put them on the wall of the gallery space. Here's how it looked:

Workshop 2: collaborative mind map

1. Two students (prompted in advance, neither one dominant in most full-group discussions) read the passage from 100 Years of Solitude in which the villagers become insomniac and start losing their memories. To combat this, they start labelling EVERYTHING.

2. Individually, go through the text and select a word or a phrase of no more than 7-8 words

3. Write the word/phrase in the middle of a blank piece of paper, using a colored marker. 

4. Pass it to the left, add to the conversation, and keep passing (we did this in our own time, not being told by Kurt when to pass).

5. On your new paper you can...

1. respond directly to the word or phrase
2. elaborate on others' ideas
3. ask questions
4. respond to someone else's ideas
5. add a connection to the reading, or the book
6. add a connection to another book, film, etc.
7. Make a connection to your own life

6. When we stop, read all the comments on your paper, and add one comment.

7. Choose a really interesting contribution to yours. Share it with your neighbor. 

Here's a scan of my mind map:

Workshop 3: labelling our world (after Macondo)

This workshop, led by Cynthia, started from the same excerpt as the one we used in Workshop 2, as well as from Ruth Krauss's book of definitions as given by five-year-olds, A Hole is to Dig.

After reading a few of the definitions from A Hole is to Dig, Cynthia demonstrated what she wanted us to do by sticking two neon-colored note cards on the wall. The first said Wall/Pared, and the second said "To lean against."

We took six notecards each, and went all over the building, labelling objects and providing their definitions, in the style of A Hole is to Dig. We were encouraged both to label objects with definitions, and add definitions to already-labelled objects. 

After we'd really gone to town, we did a brief gallery walk, writing down objects and definitions we really liked. 

Here are a couple photos of our labels:

At this point, we came back to the tables, and in groups, we shared our definitions and used the words we'd written down to create a new text on a big sheet of paper (with the rule that we couldn't add words, but we could rearrange them).

Dinner: at Lo Que Hay

Dinner needs a special mention: a four-course vegan meal next to a swimming pool, all cooked in an outdoor kitchen: soup, tacos, a tamale with some kind of avocado sauce, and piña colada sorbet, plus all the jamaica we could drink (and I really pushed the limits on that). Here's a photo Tere took of the kitchen:

You can read Arnie Aprill's write-up of these workshops (with lots of photos) here. 

Kurt led this workshop. He began by finding out how many of us had read 100 Years of Solitude "within the last six months", assuring us that it hadn't been a requirement and it would be fine if we hadn't. Then he reminded us that invariably, if we expect people to have read at home, some of them won't have done it, and suggested the following exercise as a means of all entering a text together:

1. Everyone gets a slip of paper with 1-3 sentences of text written on it (these turned out to all be excerpts from the same passage from 100 Years of Solitude (a description of how Úrsula realized she was going blind and concealed her blindness, but that wasn't clear to us initially.

2. Get in a circle

3. Become an "expert" in your text (this just meant reading over it a few times and making sure you had an interpretation and a "wondering". Obviously, the depth of understanding would vary wildly between people who had read the full book recently and people who hadn't!

4. Count off 1-2-1-2

5. "Ones" step forward into the circle, then turn to face a two - you now have two concentric circles, as in "paseo" and "speed dating"

6. Read your excerpt to your partner, say what you know/think and what you're wondering. Then, your partner does the same. 

7. Exchange slips of paper - you are now an expert in your partner's excerpt

9. Outer circle moves one to the right

10. Read your partner's excerpt to your new partner,  say what you know/think and what you're wondering. Then, your partner does the same (You are providing your own interpretation and wondering about the excerpt, not repeating your partner's).

11. Repeat 4-5 times (as a teacher, you'll have a feel for how this is going and when to stop)

This flowed smoothly into the next bit, but I'm isolating it because the concentric circles took place outside and then we went inside. Also, I think this would stand alone very well as a method for entering text as a group. I loved the elegance of this structure - as you move from partner to partner, we literally develop a shared (but incomplete) understanding of the text, which (for us at least) grew a powerful motivation to read the full text. I finished reading 100 Years of Solitude only a week ago and I still wanted to re-read the passage because I heard excerpts that reminded me of details I'd forgotten, but didn't fully explain those details. For example, I read one line about Úrsula bumping into Amaranta and getting upset because Amaranta wasn't sitting where she normally did, and another about Úrsula now being able to tell where Amaranta was sitting by the date, but couldn't remember why she was able to develop that skill.

12. The group reads the story together. We all had copies of the story in our binders already, one in English and one in Spanish. We read in English. Kurt's initial concept was for everyone to read the line they were holding, but this seemed not to work so we just had people spontaneously read one sentence each. We had the option to read our own line, but we could also read when the spirit moved us. I read my own line because I felt (not that it mattered to anyone else) more comfortable cutting someone off if I was reading a line that I felt ownership of (and I in fact,  totally started reading that line at the same time as someone else and cut them off). 

13. Choose a line from the text and frame it using sharpie - we were instructed to use a straight edge to do this, so the lines would all be straight. We were told these were going to become part of an art piece, but the piece hasn't been made yet.

14. Find a partner you haven't worked with yet, and take their hand 

15. With your partner, discuss the text using the "See Think Wonder" protocol

Had a fascinating conversation challenging the idea of Úrsula as "strong" being an essentially conservative take on her position, which relies on her being "in the home" and very much partakes of the "feminine mystique." In the words of my interlocutor, "If we saw Úrsula outside the home, her loss of power in other spaces would create space for social critique that's missing in the book."

16. Write one of your wonderings on the text with a colored marker

17. Give the page to the "curator", who will be putting it on display with everyone else's

Lunch Time (pork pibil tacos, nopales salad, frijoles, watermelon juice, homemade lime jellies for dessert)

During lunch, choose a passage from the cordel (a string hung between trees outside, with texts hanging from it by clothespins.

• Every text on the cordel is a passage rich in description of a character from 100 Years of Solitude. I chose the passage about "The Catalonian"

18. Read the passage you chose, and frame a line with a sharpie

19. Find someone else who read the same passage as you and do a "walk-stop-talk-walk" (this just means walk around and chat). My partner and I went outside, which was a great move. We talked about language, words, war, and the different intellectual landscapes of Mexico and the USA.

20. Back inside, write a question next to your "framed" line with a colored marker (like you did in step 16)

21. As a group (with facilitator scribing on a whiteboard) make a list of techniques that Garcia Marquez uses in order to make portraits of his characters

Some ideas we came up with:

• characters often identified by a single trait that is "iconic and elemental" - Mauricio's butterflies, Rebeca eating dirt...
• The "temporal zoom" (many years later, he would...). The most obvious example of this is the book's first line. 
• "Like a carousel" - minor characters suddenly move into focus, are the center of the book for a few pages, and then move back out. 

It occurred to me as we did this that an interesting (albeit kind of crass) exercise would be to design a logo/icon/brand for each character.

Then we paused for a quick game:

1. Each table appoints a leader
2. Everybody stands up
3. Leader makes a sound and gesture.
4. The table repeats the sound and gesture.
5. The room repeats the sound and gesture.
6. Each table does this

And then everyone sets back down. 

Now, the final work of the day:

Patricia and Cynthia led this. We went back through the list of "things that I'm from" from yesterday, circling or starring things from the lists that could be visually interesting. We were told we'll be creating self-portraits tomorrow. 

Cynthia and a small group of volunteers then modeled masks they'd made earlier. Then, we were turned loose with construction paper, paper-cutting knives, scissors, sharpies, and string. 

For the rest of the afternoon, we designed and created masks (or paper jewelry, or whatever else we wanted to make). I became utterly absorbed in my paper-cutting, like Colonel Aurelian Buendía and his golden fish in 100 Years of Solitude. Here's what I made:

The lion is inspired by an incident when I was about eight years old and my family wen to Disney World. Though I don't remember this being an issue, my health was declining precipitously and I'd soon be flying to Birmingham, Alabama, for major heart surgery (major enough that my cardiologist recommended against doing it near home in Washington, DC. Anyway, I was desperate to go on Autopia, Disney's "racetrack", and to drive my own car. It turned out that I could only reach the pedal by lying on my back, and that the cars used actual gasoline, so the fumes were intense. Three-quarters of the way around the track, I couldn't keep going, and an attendant rescued me, driving my car back to the start. I got out of the car, took a few wobbly steps, and dropped to the ground, my eyes rolling back into my head. I lost consciousness for long enough to terrify my parents. When I came to, my dad was carrying me and shouting for help. 

I remember what I saw while I was unconscious: everything was black, except for a lion that I could see in profile, facing right, in the lower left-hand corner of my field of vision. 

How we started: reflection

Unlike previous days, the room had about seven round tables in it. We sat around the tables, wherever we wanted. 

We started today with a half an hour of reflection. Kurt gave us a "connect-extend-challenge" structure, and told us to use it or ignore it, whichever felt best to us. We wrote our reflection on a small piece of stiff paper, and were told that these will all be displayed, and that all our reflections will be bound together in a book that we will take home with us. Here's a bit more about the connect-extend-challenge structure:

Connect: How are yesterday's ideas, experience, and information connected to what you already know?

Extend: What new ideas did you get that extended or pushed your thinking in new directions?

Challenge: What is still challenging for you to get your mind around? What questions, wonderings, puzzles do you still have?

1. Connecting the practices we did to learning theory
2. Sharing an anecdote from a particular exercise that illustrates a point
3. Sharing a personal challenge that you're working on
4. Connecting our experience to the experience of your students

1. It will turn into a tangible product (a booklet)
2. We have a prompt that we can use or not use, as we see fit
3. Time to write alone
4. Building community through sharing out

This morning, it occurred to me that whenever somebody in our group gets confused, or misinterprets instructions, or gets tense, or resists what's going on, they are giving a gift to the rest of the group - because those responses will be the ones that are most prevalent among our students when we do this work with them. And whenever I get confused or tense, or misinterpret instructions, I'm giving a gift to my colleagues.

You can read Arnie Aprill's write-up of today (with lots of photos) here.

The bats were still flying over the pool when we went outside at 6:30 to do a workout this morning. 

We spent most of today in a workshop led by Patricia Sobral, Professor of Portuguese at Brown University. 

We began by going around the circle saying our name, and "something people can't tell by looking at you." This time, I finally remembered to write down everybody's name in the location where they were sitting on my paper, which was exceptionally helpful. 

Then, Patricia took us out of the air conditioning and into the gallery, and had us get in a circle and hold hands. It was human knot time. 

For the first knot, everybody was told to go underneath somebody's arm. Once we were all entangled, we were told to ask anybody who was know near us "Where are you from?" 

Once we unravelled ourselves, she had us let go of one person's hand, then take the hand of somebody else across the circle, thereby re-knotting. Now, we asked people near us "who are you from?"

For the final knot, we held hands around the circle as we had at the start, but this time we were instructed to go under two different sets of arms in order to tangle ourselves up. This time, we asked people around us "What are you from?" 

Once we'd untangled ourselves, we quickly debriefed about what we'd noticed about the experience. This was very unstructured, and people volunteered to speak, as generally happens at Habla. I'd definitely give time to pair-share if I were doing this with students. 

After the knot, we walked through the space, initially without interacting with anybody, then "greeting people with our eyes" as we passed them. After a bit, Patricia said "You're late - you slept through your alarm and you know no matter what you're going to be late" - we sped up, hunched our shoulders, the whole atmosphere of the space changed as we charged through it. Then she said "You're walking along the beach, you don't have anywhere you need to be, it's sunny, you're taking a long stroll, life couldn't be better." People slowed, stretched, swiveled, and sighed contentedly as they walked. Then she said "It's 3 AM, you're walking home alone from a party, and you probably shouldn't have taken this route. You can hear footsteps behind you, you're willing yourself not to turn around. Then you can't help yourself, you turn around, but all you see is a silhouette." We sped up, taking tight, clenched, steps. Then she said "You're going to a party. It doesn't matter when you get there, it's a Mexican or Brazilian party, it starts when you get there, and it never ends. You're with your friends, you're so excited about tonight." 

This went straight into a game in which when she told us to freeze, two people made roof with their hands together, and one person stood between them. The people making the roof said words to the effect of "My roof is made of ______" (for example, 'compassion' - the idea is that should be what you use to shelter others), while the person "under" the roof said "I am sheltered by _____". 

After a few rounds of this, we debriefed. I found it much easier to be a roof than to seek shelter - partly this can be explained by how I tend to interact with others, and my general unwillingness to be "looked after", but it was also a question of math: more people are needed to shelter than to seek shelter. Also, choosing to seek shelter means you risk not finding any.

Patricia then handed out "viewfinders" (a piece of black construction paper with a rectangle cut out of the middle). We used these to frame a shot somewhere in the room, and then to share our shot with another person. I found it immensely satisfying to look at the space through my viewfinder, zooming in and out by moving it closer to or further away from my face. 

At this point, we went back into the air conditioned room - it was time to write. On a "fresh page" of our notebooks (Patricia was very specific about this) we made a list in response to a prompt. Then we talked to the person next to us about what we'd written, then on another fresh page we responded to another prompt, then discussed it with the OTHER person next to us, then another prompt, then found someone new to discuss it with, then the same for  a fourth prompt. Here are the four prompts:

1. Who are the people who frame your life?
2. What are the places that frame your life?
3. What are the objects that frame your life?
4. What are the memories that frame your life?

We drew a square on a new sheet of paper, writing one item from each list on the inside of each side of the square (our "frame"). 

Then we had two more prompts (again, we wrote, then shared with somebody new):

1. How do other people frame you?
2. What would you like to have in your frame that is not in your frame yet?

After this, we wrote down and shared "two wows and two wonders" about the morning, then went for lunch.

After lunch we added a "way other people frame us" below our square, and "something we'd like  in our frame" below our square, on the paper we'd already started. 

We shared our square with yet another new person, taking much more time for this discussion than we had for any others. 

At this point, we wrote. We were given twenty minutes to write freely about what we had put in (and out) of our frame, writing about all six items, with the goal of finding one strong line about each. 

We walked around the room sharing our "golden lines" with other people, with Patricia telling us which line we should share (based on the order of the prompts). We were told not to respond or give any feedback, in fact to give no more acknowledgement than a nod. I liked this a lot - it was fast and clean, and meant that we all got to hear lots of different takes on how to respond. 

Now it was time to devise a performance: Patricia counted us off, one through six. I ended up in group 5 (consisting of six people), which mean we were performing our lines for "How do other people frame you?" We read our own lines aloud, then wrote them down on strips of paper and went around the group with each member rearranging them and reading them all aloud together (this particular "thinking routine" was our own strategy, not something prescribed by Patricia). As we were doing this, Patricia came around and told us to keep gestures minimal for our performance, but to try to memorize our line and be ready to perform. We went out to the gallery space, and all the groups performed their pieces, then (of course) we debriefed. 

And if you're curious, here's the line I performed: "I figure out what I want to say by talking."

It was getting near the end of the day at this point, when I remembered we had a second workshop, this one led by arts educator Cynthia. She gave each of us a packet containing eight styrofoam balls of various sizes, and ten bamboo skewers. We were to create a freestanding structure, which we would then combine with another, then our pair would connect it to another pair's, then our four to another four, and then we would connect all of them together, creating a sculptural metaphor for community. Here are some photos from that process:

I'm writing this on Sunday. We went to Uxmal, and it was incredible. Here are some photos:

I just took my evening dip in the pool, and while I was floating on my back, bats were flying all over the patio, coming within a foot of my face. It was really cool, until it was too unsettling (about 45 seconds). Once I stood up in the water, they dispersed. I tried floating again to coax them back, but I'd broken the spell.

Now back to yesterday's workshop, "The Sound of Light". 

After we finished the “building conversations” thinking routine, we returned to the air conditioned room and re-formed the groups in which we had composed our soundscapes. W were all given a passage from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story “Light is Like Water”. Our initial assignment was develop a “clear reading” of the passage - this, Kurt explained, meant presenting the reading “straight” so that it was comprehensible to the audience. So, dividing up the lines between readers was within our scope - movement, singing lines, and other fancy stuff was not. Before we went off to prepare our script, Kurt reminded us to seek “distributed leadership” (I think that’s what he called it anyway), reminding us of the “jumping at the same time” exercise at the beginning of the workshop, where on the best jumps everyone thought someone else was the leader. 

Our group went outside and, in the shade, divided up the text. In the time we had (only about ten minutes) our reading went from the plan “everyone just read one sentence and this thing will run itself” to “OK she reads the first paragraph, these three sentences are split in two, everyone reads a different section of the final sentence, and we’ll all say the final three words in unison.” Had we been given another ten minutes, we probably would have been subdividing specific words between readers. When you distribute leadership in a group of people who don’t know each other well, nobody wants to say no, so complexity increases exponentially as idea heaps on top of idea. It reminds me of what the Innovation Unit used to say about public services’ tendency to get bloated: nobody wants to decommission anything, so innovations and new institutions pile on top of each other.

We came back in with our “clear reading”, happy with it, intimately familiar with the text, but not wildly attached to our arrangement (well, I wasn’t - I can’t speak for the rest of our group). Kurt now revealed that this was only a “first draft”, and we wouldn’t be performing it. Instead, we would be choosing from the same collection of found objects that we’d used to make our soundscape based on the “text” of the noises we heard outside, and performing the reading with sounds. To model this, Kurt and Dario performed the opening of 100 Year of Solitude together, with Kurt reading and Dario playing percussion. Before we rushed to get objects and compose our piece, Dario discouraged literalism. “Don’t just make a ringing noise if a phone rings in the text,” he said. “That’s sound effects - and that’s not what this is about.” This was a surprising redirection to me, since I’d felt like that was exactly what our previous soundscape had been about (thought, in fairness, when we’d composed that I’d ended up blowing over the lip of a beer bottle on the theory that it would sound like a mechanical drone - it sounded nothing like a mechanical drone, especially since I can’t circular breathe (a didgeridoo would have been perfect) but we kept it in our piece anyway). 

So we went back outside. By this point our papers were covered in contradictory marks as we re-conceived the piece with me starting it in the voice of a 1940s newsreader with one group member hitting knives against a cardboard box to mimic the typewriter keys (or is it a telegraph) that we somehow all associated with 1940s newsreaders (kind of literal, I know…). Then as soon as we reached a bit talking about light, another voice took over reading, slowing down and opening up. The piece was initially totally improvisational, but a couple group members (rightly) pushed us all to tighten up our plan. We ended up with every word clear and accounted for, with, as one member noted approvingly, “lots of open space in the sound effects.” At this point, we were disciplined and comfortable enough as a group to start our “drafts” with lots of instruments going, and remove elements as we refined. This was in absolute contrast to the “clear reading”, in which ideas had piled on top of each other with none being rejected, except by the default rejection of neglect. Looking back on it, in less than an hour we’d matured enormously as a group. 

Each small group performed their passage for the entire group, each performance was wonderful and utterly distinct. A fabulous workshop.  

You can read Arnie Aprill's write-up of this workshop (with lots of photos) here.

Then I walked around the city...

After the "Sound of Light" workshop, we had a few free hours before the "official" opening of the institute in the evening. I went out to lunch with some of my fellow-instituters, and then walked back to our hacienda, stopping by the Dante bookstore on the way to buy a book of local maps, then to Cafe Latte to buy ground coffee (it was shut, but the owner let me in anyway, and ground me a delicious blend of beans that stood us in good stead all week).

Here are photos from my walk:

OK, now there's a LOT to write about, and it's 12:37 PM (I just got back from Rosas y Xocolate's rooftop bar, where I briefly sat in with a jazz trio, so the evening got late).

The day started at Rosas y Xocolate too, because it's just down the street from us and they did a great breakfast (I had poached eggs and fried bananas with curry sauce). 

After breakfast, we caught a cab to Habla.

Workshop 1: The Sound of Light (11:00-2:00) (led by Dario and Kurt)

You can read Arnie Aprill's write-up of this workshop (with lots of photos) here.

We started by going into the gallery space and standing in a circle. 

Everybody walked to a different spot in the circle (silently) while Kurt counted to ten, then again while he counted to seven. Between place, changing, Kurt asked us to check the circle and make sure that it was maintaining its shape and not flattening out on particular sides. 

Next (still in a circle) Kurt had us all jump "as high as you can" at the same time, without speaking to each other. He told us to be still for a little bit before we jumped. After the jump, he asked everyone to point to "who started it". Ideally, we would all be pointing in different directions. We jumped a few times - sometimes there was one clear leader (though they didn't necessarily realize they had instigate the jump), other times we really were pointing all over the place. When it worked really well, everyone was beginning to tense up to jump, and one person's tension went infinitesimally towards a crouch, which triggered several others to crouch more, and then we all went. 

Then it was "bumper cars". We counted off by twos (still in a circle). "Twos" shut their eyes and  crossed their arms in front of them, elbows jutting out protectively from the chest. Their task was to walk across the circle, eyes shut, to a different spot. Ones kept their eyes open. Their job was to gently shift the Twos so that they didn't crash into each other, and so that they ended up in the perimeter of the circle, facing the center, at a different spot. Nobody was assigned a partner, we were all expected to look after everyone. After doing this, Kurt asked people what they were feeling, and got some responses.

This led to us pairing off with someone new, again with one person shutting their eyes. The other person led them around the room by  pushing gently at the center of the back (between the shoulder blades), or touching either shoulder blade. Somewhat counterintuitively (to my mind, anyway), when Kurt and Dario modeled this, touching the left shoulder meant that the "led" person shifted their shoulder back into the hand, thereby turning left (I would've thought the hand on the left shoulder was a "push" onto that shoulder, so it would actually make you turn right). Finally, if you took your hands off the person entirely, they needed to stop. We no longer had a goal for our journey, we were just encouraged to explore the space. Once both partners had been led, we did it again - this time with the freedom to lead however we wanted, within reason - by the hand, by the elbow, by both hands, so the leading took on an element of dance. In the final variation, we led our partner for a while, then indicated in some way that we were leaving, and left them standing alone, for someone else to pick up and lead. Kurt described the loneliness of an elderly architect who had been "left" for a long time when they did the workshop at Brown ten years ago, and reminded us to make sure everyone was looked after, and no-one was left. 

In retrospect, this feels like the point when the "warm-up" ended, and the workshop-specific work began, but that wasn't clear at the time. In any case, we returned to the circle and people talked about how they felt and what they noticed, both when being led and when leading. After that, we sat wherever we wanted and Dario led what I'd call a "listening meditation", listening first to our breath, then what was near to us, then to the entire room, then to everything outside, then back to the room, to what was near us, and to our breath. My mind was crammed with thoughts (among others, wondering how I was going to keep track of all the exercises we'd done and reflect on them) and I didn't feel like I ever really started listening. 

After chatting to a partner about our listening (or lack thereof), we returned to a circle, counted off by twos again, and the twos sat in a smaller concentric circle, while the ones stayed further out. Everyone shut their eyes, and the twos created an improvised sound piece by making whatever sound we wanted when Kurt tapped us once on the head, changing the sound when he tapped us once again, and then going silent when he tapped us twice. After that "conducted" piece, we did it again - this time with no "conducting". We were told to provide some silence, then start our piece. We could make any noise we wanted, change it at will, and stop it when the time seemed right. All the pieces we improvised were magical. 

At this point, we returned to the air-conditioned but acoustically problematic room, made groups of four or five (self-selected), then went outside to listen. Kurt told us when to start and when to stop listening, and gave us time to jot down what we heard in our notebooks. This was our first "text", (Kurt's word). In our groups, we used a collection of objects to recreate the soundscape we had just heard. We performed out composition for two other groups, who also performed theirs for us. 

Before we composed our piece, Kurt reminded us of the "jumping at the same time" game, and encouraged us to seek distributed leadership in our team. When we were composing our piece, I was reminded of the painful aspect of collaboration - especially with strangers - as I would see an idea begin to flower and then die of neglect in the general tumult of ideas, variously directed enthusiasms, and the critical work of projecting goodwill to the people we'll be spending the next week working with. The withering of neglected ideas is an inevitable byproduct of collaboration, but I always find it hard. I also find that I (increasingly consciously) decide where collaborations fit on a continuum of priority, between "make something really good" and "have a positive experience in a group". This act of triage has helped me to relax a lot in collaborations, and be a less obnoxious group member, because I'm able to tell myself things like "Hey, in this context we do not need to produce the platonic ideal of a pipe-cleaner animal circus," and relax into having a good time. And the work always ends up being good, and better for me having relinquished my role as self-appointed arbiter of quality. Although I also nearly always feel a sense of "why didn't I think to do that" competitiveness when I see the work that other groups produced.

What I'm trying to say is that I have developed a relaxed attitude to group work through force of will, which I suppose means I don't have a relaxed attitude to group work. 

The other interesting thing I was reminded about, working in the group, is that groups are nearly always composed of some people who prefer to carefully map out what they want to do before they do it, and people who want to do it and then figure out what they liked and didn't like about it. I tend to want to do whatever we're planning to do (my general attitude is that it's never to early for a first draft) and then discuss what we did. Lots of people, I've noticed, really don't want to "do the thing until they have a clear sense of what they want to do. I haven't heard this difference of approach acknowledged in groups before. I'd like to bring it up.

After that, we did our first "serious" reflection, a 3-2-1

Here's what I wrote:

Three thoughts

1. I want to make sure I remember these games
2. The games were purposeless, and as such, depended on our goodwill
3. There are some very dominant voices in the group - I'm curious to see how this dynamic develops over the week.

Two questions:

1. What additional steps would Kurt and Dario have included in the warm-ups if we weren't as receptive, mutually trusting, and/or as skilled at these kinds of physical games?
2. How far will goodwill and expectations get me with teenagers, weighed against their (justifiable) fear of losing face? What if we do something like the improvised soundscapes, and the first time we do it it isn't magical? If that happens, why would students want to give it a second try?

One analogy:

1. The process that we went through - of making yourself vulnerable, disconnecting from speech (and thereby rationality), and putting blind trust into other people - is the same process that indoctrinates people into cults. 

After a short break, our next text was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story, "Light is Like Water", from Strange Pilgrims. I read it in Spanish. I'm going to try to read everything in Spanish. It's a novel experience to read something that takes me our entire allotted time to read, and that I then only partially understood. It had a remarkably minimal impact on my ability to take part in the conversation, which took place in a trio and followed the "building conversation" protocol in which each of us spoke for a minute, with each minute building on what was said in the previous minute, then for three minutes we spoke together (with the only direction being that we not merely rehash what was said in the first three minutes). Full disclosure: after the discussion, I skimmed the English version of the short story. 

I should mention that the 3-2-1 and “building conversations” protocols, which I described in the previous post, come from Harvard’s Project Zero.

I should also mention that Kurt uses the term “thinking routines” instead of “protocols”. I’m going to try it. 

OK, it's 1:30. I will continue this tomorrow...