Philosophies and stuff(Sociology)! – Storm Kreutzer

In between stuffing my face full of bites of turkey, I delved into the philosophical readings we had for this week. Utterly distracted by my poultry prey, it took me a while to fully comprehend the ideas that it tried to get across, but I came away with some neat facts that I learned.

In learning about the major philosophical systems, I think the one that I loved the wording of the most was pragmatism. “Truth is what works”. In reality, that approach to life is very as-it-stands, and, as the text puts it, rather consequentialist. The idea that the result of actions is how you detemine right from wrong, and truth from falsehood.

Another thing I learned is that, no matter how I seem to try, when it comes to picking-and-choosing aspects of philosophical systems, political systems, education systems, whatever the case: I seem to be incapable of doing anything but remaining “On-the-fence”. I can see both positives and negatives in a lot of these systems. For example:

Conservatism                                                         Progressivism

Pro – Easier to teach, is very cut-and-dry.             Focuses entirely on the student.

Con – Very little adaptability.                         As the text states: “They must know their                                                                                         students well”, referring to the teacher.

 

At first, I was a bit skeptical over why Sociology was a chosen reading – at first, I assumed it was merely knowing where we came from, in order to forge onwards better. And, well, it is, but it’s also so much more. In understanding where we come from, we not only understand our (and humanity’s) past mistakes, but we begin to consider how those mistakes impact our students, which is imperative when we’re considering both how to teach, and how to react.

 

This reading reignited a bit of an old flame, as the instant I saw a reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I was drawn back to high school, first learning about that. For whatever reason, it fascinated me at the time, and I believe that I’ll be looking into that in the future, just to research it more.

In regards to educational systems developing over time, I love the irony with hiring young, “underqualified” individuals, often women, as the text puts it. While not much was expected of these women, they performed astoundingly,  which allowed schooling to move a big step closer to how it is today. This has interested me, primarily in the manner that I wish to look at the sociology of education in other countries. I believe I could learn more that way.

 

I think the question that I have after this is the question proposed by the philosophical text itself. To summarize:

“How should I take the philosophical systems, pick and choose which parts of them I want in my teaching, and how should I implement that?”

I believe that’s something that’ll prove worth it to answer.

First Volunteer Experience…Kinda? Storm Kreutzer

So. I bet you’re reading this thinking of how I’m gonna tell you all about how being a puppeteer is wonderful and great and how I love it so much.

And you’re half right.

See, I haven’t yet gone out to a school for a show. The organization in question, KOTB (Kids on the Block) Regina wanted myself and Anthea to have some experience with handling the puppets and handling the scripts first. So that’s what has generally been going on.

However! There still have been experiences worth talking about. I have had 3 practice sessions thus far, and they’re honestly quite fun. I enjoy manipulating the puppet and utterly embarrassing myself in front of experienced people (feeling harsh judgement the entire time), so it’s honestly been a good experience thus far.

Seriously though, everyone that is there to help us learn how to use the puppets is so helpful and patient. The puppets themselves are interesting creatures: apparently they go for quite a large sum of money to purchase brand-new. At first I was quite apprehensive towards using them, due to the fact that as a college student, a large, unexpected fee is not something I’m exactly keen on paying. However, they’ve all been built to take a beating, so they’ve served well thus far.

Being slow to memorize, I’ve not been too successful at committing the scripts to memory, though I’m hoping that will change soon, as my first show at a school is this coming Thursday. Admittedly it would have been smarter to write this post then, but the point is kind of moot, as I am currently breaking the fourth wall in a blog post telling you about how it would have been smarter to write this blog post at a later date.

But in all seriousness, I have enjoyed the experience thus far, and I expect to be able to say the same and more after my first placement. Have a good day, thanks for reading o7.

 

Development and Cognitive Views: Stuff and Things! -Storm Kreutzer

So! On the readings this week, we’ve been assigned to read all about development of children, through self, social, and moral ways. In addition, how do cognitive views and keeping attention relate to that? Well, that’s what I’m here to explore. And by explore, I mean read.

I think that the first thing that I learned was how rampant eating disorders were for adolescents. According to the text, close to 1% of adolescents become anorexic, which to me makes me think of the following:

If I have a class of 33 students every year, meaning that every 3 years, I’d have a student who was anorexic, which drives home the point that I need to be aware of this, and be able to properly deal with it. It really brings emphasis that you need to be seizing every opportunity where it’s appropriate to talk about health.

The second thing I learned was how much attention a teacher has to pay to the way they present their academic challenges. As an example, you have to properly balance caring for students with having high expectations of them, but you can’t allow yourself to sway to either side. You effectively have to walk a tightrope with teaching, because swaying to either side makes it drastically more difficult to come back to a balance without overshooting to the other side.

Swaying to either side can either leave students with impossible challenges, or with no real challenges whatsoever, neither of which is helpful to the students.

A question I had before this was “How are we supposed to command attention?”, and I had this question because I know personally how difficult it can be to sit still and only pay attention to the person in front of you for a while. After all, I’m a university student, and while that activity isn’t something we can avoid, it never really gets easier. So how do we get students to do it?

The third thing I learned was that commanding attention in a classroom really isn’t as complex as I made it out to be in my head. A couple examples the book gives are:

Don’t give directions during transitional movements. Only give clear and concise directions while standing still. This commands more attention than anotherwise.

 

Coincidentally, that’s also the thing I’m going to be looking into with other sources as well: methods for commanding more attention passively. I believe that using as many sources as I am able would help my development as a teacher, and would also help my student’s development as well. Therefore, even though the resources I have are very well-written, I’ll also look for some alternate opinions, and then try to mix and match my own.

Honestly, one of the most personal issues that this book talks about to me is the idea of self-confidence. Self-concept is, as per the book, “Part of our everyday conversation”. I take this to heart, because everything we say and do is effectively on a pedestal for everyone to see. Learning to accept that is part of growing up, but the way by which we accept that varies. I’d like to learn how to teach acceptance of that in a healthy way.

I think a question that still remains in my mind would be:

How do we deal with our own failure, while still remaining vigilant for others?

I know I’m gonna mess up at some point, and I know everyone is, because that’s part of being a teacher. I think what I’d like is an in-depth way or method of dealing with our own failures as teachers, when they stare us in the face every day.

I guess that’s something that’ll come with experience. Ah well.

 

Am test post yes

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The Final One… YAAAAAAAAS

So. Last part of my learning project.

I wanted to incorporate elements of both pendants I made before, which makes it difficult, because working with silver is difficult when you don’t have proper casting tools.

When you need to work precisely with silver? Forget about it.

That being said, it was design-wise that these incorperations were made. Still though, let’s do a little recap of what’s been done thus far:

First, I made two pendants out of maple wood, and stained them darker. I used lamb leather as a cord, and tied slipknots in them for readjustment of size. One pendant was arrowhead shaped, and the other…was…coffin shaped? I guess?

So. I like how they turned out – the arrowhead one in particular.

Next was my least favorite part. The silver one. And while it’s definitely the most fun to work with, it’s also definitely the most unforgiving.

I cut out a rough shape in wood in order to cast the silver, melting it in a crucible with propane torches. I used the same lamb leather cord with a slipknot that I used for the previous necklaces.

While it’s not terrible, it most definitely could have turned out better. But I digress – onto the fourth and final pendant:

For this one, I wanted to use a darker wood in order to better contrast the bright silver (colour combinations, yo).

My wood of choice was black walnut. A nice, dark colour, it stains brilliantly and is easy to work with. It’s also fairly durable. This is a colour comparison between black walnut and maple.

It’s sorta cool that you can tell how old the wood is based on the age rings. Those round streaks through the wood – the more of them there are, the older the wood is. Based on that, the black walnut is far older, because the rings are so much closer together.

So what I needed to do was cut this down to a rough shape. Unsure of what I wanted my final product to look like, I just started cutting and waited to see where it took me.

A rectangle. That’s where it took me. Good job, me ^_^

Anyways, next was sanding. As usual, this was both the longest and most annoying part of the whole ordeal.

Regardless, a few hours later, I emerged from my garage triumphant, holding aloft a wonderful piece of sanded wood.

So you remember the next step. Drilling! Yaaaaay!

…except my uncle took our drill to work on stuff. How. Rude.

So my dad decided to be amazing – he took one of his father’s old handheld drills. This thing was actually crazy. 

Crazy drill in hand, I bore a hole straight through the wood. It turned out very nicely. Looks like the old drill still has it ^_^

So. My next mission, as you may well remember, is staining the wood to give it a richer colour.

I knew black walnut was a wood meant to take on a nice and rich dark colour, so I used the same stain that I used on the maple.

The result was… satisfying. Of course, I had to hang it up to dry before I could really appreciate the final product.

Now comes the tricky part. See, as I said before, I’m really incapable of doing complex things with silver without spending an exuberant amount of money. Thusly, I decided to take the wooden part to the hands of a jewelry store, and they put a ring on it. I guess they were fans of Beyonce.

In addition to putting on a ring, they also gave me a metal cord to hang it through, in order to properly get the colour contrast right. All-in-all, while I’m sad I didn’t get to do it myself, I’m quite pleased with the results.

So…yeah. Final product.

I’m pleased with the result, like I said. Black walnut stains to a gorgeous colour, and it looks good contrasted with the silver.

I’ve enjoyed being able to screw around with jewelry and sorta shape things to how I see fit. I like the creative freedom of that. I think that’s why I liked working with the wood as opposed to silver: you have more freedom, since it’s easier to work with.

That said – as always, open to any criticisms. Love you all – have a great summer break ^_^

Contributions to learning and stuff

So the end of an era. And by era I mean semester. And by semester, I mean WOOO BABY WE’RE DONE YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

*ahem*

This post is dedicated to how I have commited myself to contributing towards the learning of other people. Here’s the thing, though – it’s really hard to adjust.

If people come to me for help, I can very easily and happily help them with stuff. However, putting myself out there first…that’s where it gets tricky. All those thoughts run through your head

“What if they don’t want the help and get offended?”

“What if I say something stupid?”

“What if? What if? What if?”

It’s for sure difficult to discern where and how the assistance should begin, and where and how it should end. When you throw yourself out for assistance before it might be needed, you risk offence, you risk acting like a fool. Especially on a social media platform – everyone can see what you’re posting, and everyone can and will fact check you. That’s been proven time and time again.

That said, I did try. Mostly on Twitter, as again, commenting on other people’s blogs is just something I was afraid of doing. It gets to the point where I think to myself:

“You need to say something more meaningful than just: Good job! You’re doing great!”

However, I think I’ve learned over this semester that while those words can sound empty, sometimes they’re all a person needs to help motivate them.

Anyways – enough of that. Here’s some of my Twitter posts:

https://twitter.com/strumkreutz/status/828998302817398788

https://twitter.com/strumkreutz/status/829164926342094848

https://twitter.com/strumkreutz/status/849463391634812929

And while they’re not in great numbers, here are some comments I’ve made on others blogs:

https://twitter.com/strumkreutz/status/829165457949077504

http://prntscr.com/evt2il

http://prntscr.com/evt2lg

I won’t deny that it’s hard to adjust to actively making comments on others. I know I could have done it more, but it’s truly a scary thing. It’s not something that I expected to be scary, it just sort of.. is.

That being said – this was a fantastic semester. I learned so many new things, and I got to be a goof around every beautiful person in my class and nobody cared. Anyone who can deal with me is a top-notch person in my book ^_^

Was good learning with everyone. I hope to see you all again ❤

Stage 2 of 3 – The plot thickens. As does the material.

SO. Here we are for the second time around. Next weekend this is gonna culminate in a giant explosive ball of awesomeness. Or it’ll suck. Who knows?

My first attempt at jewelry went fairly well, if I do say so. You can check that out here, if you feel so inclined.

But anyways, for my second attempt at making a piece, I decided to make use of silver as my material rather than wood. Since this is just a start, I largely wanted to make something similar to what I did in the first place, with wood. Just a nice, simple piece, hung by a leather cord, with a knot tied to make the cord and pendant parallel.

I went about this by using a small kiln, with two propane torches on the sides. It was a kit I ordered off of Amazon. It served me quite well, all things considered.

Starting off this magical journey of melting metal, as well as ordering the kiln, I ordered some casting silver. Essentially, it’s tiny little balls of silver, hence where it gets the name “grain”. So I had the material and the way to melt it. So, how was I going to be able to cast it?

See, that’s where this gets a little silly. Based on general research (specifically this video here), I figured that I’d be able to use wood as a mold. To be honest, however, I really didn’t have a ton of options for being able to cut, glue, carve, etc. So what I ended up doing was taking a dremel tool and cutting out a shape for the silver to mold to. It, ah, was a rather crude way of doing things, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of options.

 

So, after polishing things up, making sure the mold was decent, I went for it. Silver liquefies at 961.8 °C, so I had to leave it in the kiln for a while. You can see here – the grain is still in a fully solid form, and the crucible is still it’s native black colour.

So. You gotta leave it, right? I stood by, idly watching away, growing older and older by the minute. Of course, it didn’t actually take that long to melt – I just hate waiting. After giving it around 10 minutes in direct heat, I decided to give pouring it a go.

 

Thanks again Dad for the stellar camerawork, and for making fun of me for my pouring skills. Personally, I just think he’s jealous. Not many could pour with the deftness that I possess. Or something like that, anyways.

So the silver… actually turned out not too bad. The wood, unfortunately, suffered a darker fate, being burnt beyond repair. The sacrifices it made shall not be in vain. So – my fallen wooden comrade not forgotten, I turned my attention to the silver itself. Like I said – it turned out not too bad.

So – my fallen wooden comrade not forgotten, I turned my attention to the silver itself. Like I said – it turned out not too bad.

 

 

It’s a fairly good piece of metal. The flaky bits on the top of it are the melted slag from the silver. All they required was some grinding. And cooling. That silver was HOT.

The process was arduous and long. From burning my hands sanding it (yes, through gloves) all the way to drilling a hole through it for the cord, it sure took a long time. Whaddya know, silver is harder to sand than wood. Go figure.

But yeah. The finished product, with and without the cord:

 

All in all? I’m…okay with how this turned out. Yeah, there was no shortage of effort put into it, but I feel like when I work with wood, I’m able to mold it more how I want. Metal is pretty unforgiving in that aspect.

So, that said, next weekend, I’ll be finishing this up. Not this pendant – it’s done – I mean, the final project I’ll do. Since I tend to gravitate towards pendants, and seeing as how I’ve done wood and silver thus far, I’m thinking a combination would be cool. A main body of good, decorated with silver. That said, any thoughts are welcome. Have a good day, and thanks for reading ^_^

 

An Airplane in the way, and what coding could do.

My title is apt, I promise you.

SO. A project on Scratch. Zero creative juices. And a dream.

These are the things young Storm set out with in order to create something of incredibly non-worth. Some would say his goal was to create something so utterly worthless that it would transcend the Rules of Nature and become something that could truly only appreciated on another plane of existence.

Something that could only be appreciate for how worthless it was.

So… I created this. A pure Mahvel of coding genius if I do say so myself.

Okay, but in fairness, Scratch is pretty cool for learning. Giving you access to basic coding processes without having to learn HTML is an excellent middle ground. I’d personally recommend it for an introductory step, perhaps at a late elementary-early middle school level. Prior to that, coding really isn’t that necessary of a process to learn, in my opinion.

However, Scratch carries with it the downfall of being simple and accessible – it loses real value once you’ve spent a few hours. It has a very finite limit of things you can do on it to learn. Granted, you can do some really cool stuff, but you can do cool things with any limited tool.

All-in-all, I liked it. It’s not particularly challenging, nor is it very intrusive. Scratch is a nice calm ride in learning how to code ^_^

Virtual Reality – Gaming isn’t the only thing it could be good for

Virtual Reality (VR) has been a fairly interesting subject during the last few years, as it’s only begun to develop in earnest. It began with the Oculus Rift, and then Sony and HTC threw their hats in after seeing how much traction Oculus got on Kickstarter. Oculus had a fantastic Kickstarter campaign, raising, through 9 522 backers, $2 437 429 dollars. Soon after, Sony came in with the Playstation VR, and HTC soon after with the HTC Vive.

Suffice to say, VR is a rapidly expanding market with gamers. But what about educators?

One VR device that seems to be tailoring itself more to businesses is the Microsoft Hololens. The Hololens is less about gaming and fun, and more about replicating the experience that has been seen is so many movies thus far. You know when you’re watching a movie, and there are holograms everywhere, like in Iron Man or the Avengers? That’s what Microsoft is trying to replicate.

As seen in this short video (taken from the homepage of the Hololens), the Hololens is much more about professional use, and could see huge value in giving more realistic examples to people. Using a device like this, you could give opportunities to practice something like…say, a surgery. You could use the Hololens to replicate performing surgery on someone. The applications of a device like this are incredible.

In the classroom, a Hololens could be used extensively to give more realistic examples of practices. I, personally, am the kind of person who has a hard time picking something up, but when I’ve got it down, I’m usually good from then on. The Hololens could be used to practice activities before actually doing them, and that, I think, is one of the more practical applications.

Of course, this is only speculation up until now. Virtual Reality has come a long way, but it needs to keep going before it’s really picked up. Once it gets there, though, I believe it’s a technology that can be used by everyone, not just educators.

A bit late, but it happens. My thoughts on Carol Todd in the class.

It was kind of a surreal experience when I first found out that she was going to be with us. I kept thinking “woah, like, that Carol Todd?”. Regardless, I appreciated the opportunity to listen and talk with her quite a bit. I think she’s able to provide good insights on the situation that, otherwise, might not have been brought to light.

I believe that, as long as you’re not forcing your opinion unto someone else, then it’s okay to have that opinion. This extends wide in what it can mean, from talking about sexuality, religion, or the more unfortunately poignant topic, suicide. So I asked Carol: “Some people are of the opinion that suicide is a selfish act. What is your take on that, and furthermore, those who believe that?”. Paraphrased for the sake of cleanliness.

Carol did not seem opposed to that line of thinking; rather, she more or less responded with an opinion that somewhat echoes my own. Opinion is just that: opinion. So long as it’s kept to yourself, it doesn’t do anybody harm. And furthermore, the opinion that suicide is a selfish act is not a particularly unbelievable one. Life gets better 99% of the time, and that 1% is reserved for situations such as terminal illness. However, my writing is only reflective of what I have experienced in life so far. Being that I’m only 18, I’m sorely lacking for experience, and I appreciate argument or other opinions, as a matter of fact I rather like argument. Just so long as it’s done in a respectful fashion.

An interesting question was posed to me by our professor straight after – Katia Hildebrandt asked me “What if somebody is considering suicide because of a mental illness?”. My gut response was “oh that’s a hell of a question”. Once I took a bit of time to think it through, however, I find my general opinion to be as such:

Yes, mental illness is as serious as physical illness. I think of this as fact, rather then opinion. The two topics should be treated with equal care and seriousness. However, there remains one key point: mental illness is generally not terminal. When I say this, I refer to depression, social anxiety, or other illnesses that cause an individual to… have difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, so to speak. While they are serious indeed, they are not terminal illnesses, and I believe that to be the key point.

Now, I have no idea how I’d behave if I discovered I had a mental illness such as… schizophrenia, for example. Bi-polar disorder. These are illnesses that I don’t know how I’d react to having them, because as far as I know, they are not illnesses that simply get better. Now, while you could define that as terminal, Wikipedia would say otherwise, saying that while yes, part of a terminal illness is that it cannot be cured, the other key part is that it is “reasonably expected to result in the death of the patient within a short period of time”.

Regardless of how I’d behave having an illness like that, all I know is what I am. That’s all any of us know. And in knowing who we are, we can treat others with due respect. That, is my opinion.