On Monday, September 8th, the Tribes Project's final performance took place, in the Commons of High Tech High Chula Vista.

For our finale, students joined the stage saying "I belong to the tribe of ______". At the end, after I hit the cajón three times, the whole group said "We belong to the tribe of the new generation" (a phrase suggested by a student, and generally agreed on by the group - I think I was the only one who associates it with Pepsi). 

I like the dynamic of everyone streaming onstage, but one thing we never got right was the pace - a few people would trickle onstage, then EVERYBODY else came on at once, all talking. Getting a slow build (the "drizzle to rainstorm" effect) would have taken more rehearsal. And the final shouted phrase punctuated the show effectively, but I don't think anyone understood what they were saying. Maybe if we'd used a phrase that we'd introduced at the start of the show, and continued to return to at different times, the phrase would have been recognizable enough for the audience to understand it. Here are photos from the finale:

Games we played:

Wave of Clapping - started by doing "the wave", and then changed it to clapping. People volunteered to start it. Worked well, sense of achievement

Name and gesture - following Tim B's lead, I'm having six people do their name and a gesture, with the whole group repeating it, then having one other person do all six names and gestures.

Holding up arm and being quiet - an attention-getter rather than a game, but I've started occasionally timing it and telling the group how quickly we got quiet. 

I had students walk across the circle while I counted down from 10 - this is a good way to quickly shuffle a group, I discovered. 

Thoughts and questions

On the value, or lack thereof, of critique structures

This is an ongoing personal issue for me - I find that I design structures that I believe will lead to more valuable critique, and then don't feel like I have the wherewithal to enforce those structures once everyone starts working. Suddenly everyone is doing their own thing, and whatever I put up on the board and read out is (as far as I can tell) being ignored.

For the record, I provided sentence structures in order to help kids to give specific and valuable critique to each other. Here's what they were: 

“I love how you make __ sound when you say __”

“Why do you make __ sound when you say __?”

“Could you try doing __ when you say __?”

My sense is that nobody was using these - it would have been interesting to do an exit card in which I asked about whether students used them, and (if so) whether they were helpful or (if not) why not. 

Now, partly this is the condition of working with the full team, as we were doing today - with 56 kids in groups of four, all at different points in their rehearsals and all with incrementally different levels of investment in the work at hand, even if everyone's trying to do a great job and being strategic about what they do, not everyone needs the same thing in order to improve their work. Now, one issue here is that when a group has the freedom to decide what they need most (which, in my experience, is something students really value - and something I personally have always really valued), they have the freedom to make a bad choice about what they need most. By this I don't mean that they can choose to slack off, which is a different issue, but that they may eschew a strategy that would be beneficial for them in favor of one that is less beneficial. There is an opportunity for learning to take place here (evaluating the results of the strategy they chose against other possible strategies, and deciding to make a different choice in the future) but in my experience, within an hour of working on a project in a group, there are too many variables and moments of small choices to be able to parse out where things went wrong, or, even more complicated, where things went less optimally than they could have. 

The other issue, which is much easier to remedy than the first, is that I was giving students brief instructions and sending them off to carry them out (or not) independently. One of the thing Ron Berger makes very clear in the brilliant "critique" chapter of Leaders of their own Learning is that effective critique requires a lot of heavily teacher-directed critique.

Thoughts and questions about our first performance

We performed our Mango Street vignettes today. A few thoughts:

• I want to work explicitly on volume and expression in speaking (fortunately I got some good looking books about this at the National Theatre). 
• Hearing entire groups speaking lines together was generally very effective. It makes me interested in "scoring" more readings for different combinations of voices reading specific words and lines simultaneously, so it isn't just "one voice" or "all voices"
• The sounds that students made with physical objects tended to the literal (imitating sounds from the world, rather than creating something musical based on evoking feelings) but their choices of who read which lines tended to be more musical, less informed by "boys should read lines by boys" thinking. 
• There were moments when people were laughing to cover discomfort. This is likely to happen a lot this year. I want to figure out a good way into delving into why this laughter happens, and what it tells us about what is worthwhile to explore, and how to get deeper into it?

And a few questions:

• What's the most powerful way to pick up Mango Street from here, and what do we want kids to get from reading it (or re-reading it?)
• How will kids feel like they're getting better and better at things they want to get better and better at, and how will they feel like they're being "pushed"?
• "pushed" feels like a verb that takes us into an unhelpful metaphor, in which the teacher is a driver of progress against the student's will, but I'm having trouble thinking of a better one. 
• What could we have done to increase personal investment in each vignette? To make students feel more like the words they are saying MATTER and connect to (or meaningfully contrast with) their own experience of their world?
• How can students feel like they're taking part in a project that is a big deal?

Finally, some more photos:

No promises on how long I'll be able to maintain this for...

You can see our plan for today here, and the slides we made here. It was based on my first day at Habla, which you can read about here.

This post isn't going to make a lot of sense without looking at the plan, but here it goes:

Periods 1-2

My "prep" period is first period, and my teaching partner, Yoli's  (teaches Spanish) is second period, which meant that today, we could start the day by teaching each class together, but with 29 kids in the room together rather than 56. We started with circle games. Walking across the circle while a teacher counted down from 10 was functional, but, done with kids rather than adults, was missing the element of fun. I added "rubber chicken" to raise the energy (it was all I could think of on the fly). 

I then tried "jumping at the same time with no leader". This was fascinating - the first group just couldn't do it at all. With a new group, the risk of jumping so profoundly outweighed the risk of not jumping, that very few students were willing to try it at all. I dropped it when we worked with the second group. Something to try later in the year, maybe. 

With the first group, we then did "blind walking across the circle", which was chaotic, and not especially gentle. Talking explicitly about gentleness would be a good addition next time we do this. This is difficult, awkward territory for teenagers, especially for a lot of young men. 

The second group eventually decided to assign a helper to every person walking blind. This was (as you'd expect) very successful. What was missing even then was silence, which is not  a huge priority (especially on the first day of school) but which would be nice to have. One issue I noted, which has resonance in other aspects of school, is that a pair would walk across the circle, get into their spot on the other side, congratulate each other on a job well done and start talking - while other people were still moving through the space. 

Yoli introduced "jumping and high-fiving" in pairs, slapping as many high-fives as possible while airborne (with both hands, so I guess they were high-tens). This was the most successful warm-up game we did. Really raised the energy, and made me realize all the games I was leading were a bit austere and severe. 

This left me with a few questions: the one that's really occupying me right now is this: how do I stay on the right side of the line between routines feeling ingrained, and feeling stale?

Period 3

We had the group together for the first time. We started the period with a deep listening exercise - kids got quiet for this (for the most part), listened intently, and talked about what they heard. 

Then we tried doing the vocal improvisations (like what Dario did). I hadn't wanted to do this in the full group (we were planning to do it during periods 1 and 2 but there wasn't time), and it didn't work, for a number of reasons: 

1. There were about 27 performers, and I just couldn't get around them fast enough.
2. Most people didn't have and extensive rhythmic vocabulary (at least in this context), so everyone was generally hammering out quarter notes together.
3. Making vocal sounds is a big risk in a large group of people, so most people were going for clapping and stomping, which stops being interesting very quickly, unless you're really tight with it.

I got five volunteers who performed for the whole group, and it worked much more smoothly in a group of five. Then we split everyone into fives, and up until lunch, they worked on crafting beats together. 

I didn't call them "beats". If I had, the exercise would have probably been stronger. When one group performed their beat for me, I freestyled a short rhyme over it. Then we had another group perform for everyone (in fact, the original group of volunteers, who'd got very into developing their beat). Their beat was solid and complex, but when I heard it I realized that they were really putting themselves on the line and might ultimately regret it, so in front of everyone, I did another freestyle over their beat - which I hope lent it credibility rather than overshadowing it. 

Periods 4-6

This was after advisory and lunch. We launched Write Club - I realized my enthusiasm for the concept waned a little since last year, so I need to figure out how I feel about it. One kid rather brilliantly noted that the first rule of Write Club (which I was making them write, as I always have) was "Write what you care about", and asked "so should we write what we care about, or write this?"

I dug up the Fight Club and "Robot Club" (from Spaced) clips I showed last year, which I hadn't planned to show, when I realized that the way I was presenting Write Club didn't have any mystique, and it really needs mystique at the start. 

Then we wrote Hopes and Fears, and I introduced Human Atom in order to shuffle people up and make groups of four to share hopes and fears. There were too many people for the atom to work very well, but it was easy to identify issues with it, and I think we'll be able to fine-tune it in individual classes. 

After this, we introduced the day's big task: to arrange a chapter from The House on Mango Street to read together as a group of four - first arranged as a "clear reading", and then with sounds made by objects found around the classroom.

This was so awesome: we divided kids into groups randomly, which I imagined being a problem, but wasn't. They were attentive to the text as they read, and (after Yoli and I modeled it) seemed to understand how to divide the text for reading without any further help. 

After they'd worked on the "clear reading", Yoli and I performed our chapter again, this time with her reading and me providing sound accompaniment. Then the groups went to town on sound effects.

At a certain point, most groups decided they were "done" and people started milling about and hanging around.

I paused the full group (I'd done some "getting quiet" practice - this will be good to keep doing all week). Then I said "A lot of groups are telling me they're done. What if I told you that you're going to perform for the entire ninth grade in a few minutes?" Someone immediately shouted "WHAAAAAT?!" "You're not," I said, "but you all sounded a lot less "done" when I said that just now." 

The groups paired up with other groups and performed their pieces for each other. I encouraged everyone to focus on giving specific feedback about things they liked. This will be something to continue to develop.

It was cool to see so much attentive close-reading. I'm excited to see and hear the performances tomorrow!

Here are some photos from devising the readings:

Saturday (Part 1, Part 2)

“The Sound of Light”

Circle games (jumping, trust walking)

Listening meditation

Group vocal improvisation

Going outside and listening

Using found objects to recreate a soundscape (in a group)

3-2-1 reflection

Reading “Light is Like Water”

Building Conversation Protocol

Back to “soundscape” groups: create a “clear reading” of an assigned passage from “Light is Like Water”

Watch/listen to model of “reading with sounds” by Kurt & Dario

In Soundscape Groups: revise our reading, add sounds.

Perform readings for the group

“The Faun on the Bus”

Excerpt from Living to Tell the Tale and brief lecture on magical realism from Marimar

In groups of 6: “I could tell you about” [maybe good to take notes on this…]

In pairs: “I want to hear about…”, “I can imagine…”

Back in the FULL group: “Can you imagine…”

Monday 

Circle game: Your name & something people can’t tell by looking at you

Human knot

Walking through the space

Roofs and shelter

Framing images

People/places/objects/memories that frame my life

Free write

Sharing “golden lines”

“How we are framed” performance

Skewers & Styrofoam Balls

Tuesday (Part 1, Part 2)

Workshop 1: Framing a photo and Editing a Story

Workshop 2: Working with 100 Years of Solitude

Reading fragments of a text in a circle

Group reads the who’ll passage out loud, together

Choose a line from the text and frame it with a sharpie

Discuss with a partner using “See Think Wonder”

Write “wondering” in a different color on the paper, and give to a curator.

Lunch

Read a passage that creates a “portrait” of a character (choose one from the cordel)

Find someone who read the same passage and do a walk-stop-talk-walk

Frame a line, write a question next to it

As a full group, make a list of techniques the author uses to make portraits of characters

Quick game: sound and gesture

Workshop 3: Creating masks based on the things and people that frame us

Wednesday:

Reflection: 

• 3 applications
• 2 questions
• 1 metaphor or analogy

Workshop 1: Taking self-portrait photographs

Workshop 2: Collaborative Mind Map

Workshop 3: Labelling our world (Like in Macondo)

Thursday: 

Opening reflection:

• What makes you say “wow”?
• What do you wonder about?

Game: trading walks

Kata takes us through the week so far, and how each day built on the last

Writing: 

• the “memory machine”
• Looking at our self-portrait and engaging all our senses
• Telling a story based on what we’ve been writing

Human atom

Human sculptures

Rehearsal

Friday:

Warm-up: passing the invisible object

The facilitators share how they designed this year’s institute

Group reflection based on photos taken during the week

Reflecting about potential applications for what we’ve done.

Final rehearsals

Performance

Closing the loop with a final reflection

I can't believe I forgot to write this game down, and I now can't remember when we played it, but it was good. 

Players line up facing each other (it's good if it's not 100% clear who your "partner" will be). 

Start at either end of the two lines. The two "end" people each choose a walk, and walk towards each other. When their paths cross, each person takes the other person's walk, and finishes walking to the other line doing their walk. Go down the lines until everyone has changed places. 

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