Diseño, cine, ideas

http://academicearth.org/lectures/how-do-you-find-your-passion-and-pursue-it

LECTURE DESCRIPTION
Instead of thinking about the passion, expalins Komisar, free yourself to think of a portfolio of passions. Marry this portfolio with the opportunities in front of you, he says. Think of it as a quest towards which you are moving in the right direction, he adds.

http://academicearth.org/

Design elements are a foundation for a design, they are the structural underpinnings of a design that are almost unseen. For a good listing of specific elements, check out this site:

Elements of Design    http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/Files/elements.htm
Some of these elements can be pretty abstract; space, balance, etc. Others are more concrete; Line, shape, etc.

It’s interesting to see how students initial react and respond to these elements in their initial projects. Often time, they try to use design elements in a literal sense. They use balance in a design by showing a teeter-totter or show Space by showing a scene set in Outer Space. They’re not necessarily wrong, but their literal-ness sort of misses the point. They are not elements that are meant be represented literally. They are there to add structure to an arrangement, they are used to build a coherent composition.

But they serve another purpose. They help create a lexicon, a language, to express ideas that can be otherwise intangible. How do you critique or analyze a design? Where do you even start? You first start with a gut reaction. How did it make you feel when you first saw it? Love it, hate it, no reaction? What caused that reaction (or lack of)? That’s the hard part. How do you give voice to a rationale that was based on an emotive response? Well, you need to look at the structure of the piece. How were the elements arrange, how was the composition. This is where knowledge of design elements comes in handy. Was it balanced, how was line used, how was color used? Look beyond the surface level of a design and at its structure underneath. When you do, you will see the elements it uses and thus will be able explain your rationale for your critique.
http://www.skemadesigns.com/blog/

Design is problem solving, and that process is applicable to a lot of things. One of the biggest challenges for kids, especially underserved kids, is relevance – [making sure that] they are motivated and engaged and interested in what they’re learning, and that they’re learning from their daily lives. Everything’s design. You can connect it to anything they’re wearing or using, anything they’ve seen in the built environment. Design education connects the dots between what students are learning and what they care about.

Les debo la fuente!

How public education cripples our kids, and why

(Extractos.  Texto completo: http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm#source  )

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?....

....Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. ....

....It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

**  09/2003 Harper's Magazine. Copyright of "Against School" is the property of Harper's Magazine. Its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download intended solely for the use of the individual user. Content provided by EBSCO Publishing.

* John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill," which appeared in the September 2001 issue. You can find his web site here.

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"the starting point is never the design, it's not the end point. It's the manifestation of some set thinking... design isn't the think you go away with. Attitude , principals what your trying to tackle..." Nicolas Roope