I took a partial "tech-free" day today. My husband, younger daughter, her friend, and I went to the Venetian Pool , probably my favorite place in Dade County. You can see why I like it in this video I took while waiting for the pool to open today. We put our phones in a locker and then dove in. Floating in that cold spring water, looking up at a sky framed with palm trees was a slice of paradise! It was refreshing to see so many people talking, playing, and swimming without being connected at least for a few hours.
Here is a link to my pinterest board on Street Painting . This has been my hobby since I returned to the States in 2006, and it is exactly the kind of art I like: ephemeral and social. When it rains during a festival, whether it is while I'm painting or overnight between painting days, I am not so excited about the temporal nature of chalk on pavement. However, on the Monday after the festival weekend, I have no problem with cars, bikes, and pedestrians, human and animal, passing over my paintings. In terms of being social, chalk artists paint on blocked off streets during festival weekends; people walk up, ask questions, comment on the design or colors, and talk about life in general. I have met some very interesting beings: tourists from overseas, local immigrants who are happy to find a Spanish-speaker to answer their questions, children, and lots of dogs. I love dogs! I have always been interested in Pinterest, but I had never tried it until this week. I love having the abi...
One of my responsibilities in my new job is to help students identify and adjust to American culture. Our director identified independence, self-sufficiency, the American Dream, and equality/diversity as the key values we need to introduce first...via a mass-market movie. We have been going back and forth about what to show: something Disney like High School Musical or Lemonade Mouth, something more like The Duff or Mean Girls or Edge of Seventeen (all nixed for various reasons you might imagine when thinking about parents!). I think we've settled on Spiderman: Homecoming. That said, I had to get moving on the values lesson and also on the two summer reading books each grade level had been assigned but no one has read. I needed a compelling video to illustrate these values and link them first to teenagers, so I re-purposed classmate Tyrone Sandaal's link to a New York Times video of NYC kids, which he used for his shared knowledge project on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Clos...
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