The Beach

Brief recap of what I'm doing here: compiling a self-made resource of short stories to teach in my school, which is a high school in Alberta. That means I'll be making references to the courses (10-1, 10-2, 10AP, etc) as well as to the final standardized exit exam, hereafter referred to as the Diploma, which is made up of a Personal Response task and a Critical Essay task and here is the end of the sentence.

On to the first story!

The Beach by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Translated by Barbara Wright

So, an inauspicious start to this little project, to be honest, because this story was... uh... written.

To be clear, it was written in French, because this is from an anthology called Parallel Texts, where the left page has the story printed in the original French and the right page has the corresponding translated English page.

The story itself has some interesting things in terms of structure, I suppose, but as far as finding short stories to use in the classroom, this one is a little sparse. The entirety of the story simply describes three blond children walking on a beach for a few minutes. I'm not sure why it's important that they are blond, but much is made of the blondness. As they walk to an unnamed destination, one of them hears a bell and then a seagull trots around and then it's over.

I mean, the most likely scenario is that this story is simply beyond my grasp.

Possible Uses: If a teacher were trying to have a model text of making the most of a small moment, this may be a useful study. Or if they really liked stories about anonymous possibly sea-faring blond children.
Would I use it: um, no.
What Grade: If I had to, grade 10? Or very early on in a personal response unit on writing narratives in 30? But does anyone do that? Does anyone have time? But I'd never do this in a -2 class, ever.

Wait, never mind: Ok, on second thought, I actually am going to photocopy this story and give it to a student of mine tomorrow. Not for the glory of the writing or the insights this particular story provides, but because it may prove useful to her to see direct English translations across the page from French. So yeah, forget everything I say, ever.

the field of short stories is moribund

Back to the blog!

I know, I know, blogging is so 2012. All the same, I'm back for the time being, even if no one out there is reading.

Here's the plan: I'm going to try to read a short story a day for however long it takes me to get bored or distracted. Just kidding, I'm already both of those things: I've got two small children and I get about two small hours of sleep night.

I think it would be really nice for new titles to start circulating "out there", but whenever a fellow teacher asks me for short story recommendations, I've got nothing. At least, nothing that I'm super excited about. And that's a real shame, because the truth is that the field of short stories is alive and well, just not in the classroom, or really, not in my classroom. (Another clue is that the most popular post on this blog is the one I wrote on the The Glass Roses, and a lot of the visitors are from students who are looking for answers to their homework. To which I say: see you in class, Michael).

So anyway, I'll read some short stories and post about them here and the rest will be page clicks, which is 2018 for history. If I feel particularly inspired or generous, I may write about how I'd teach it or something along those lines. Or you know, maybe I'll forget all about it and try to resurrect this blog in another 3 years.

And that, my friends, is how you create suspense.

The books I'm going to work through. Optimism!

A post about Macbeth that I think I wrote, but forgot about for a few years

Poor little abandoned blog. Let's just pretend the extended hiatus never happened, shall we?

Ahem. (I had a baby and went on mat leave and changed schools again and took up weaving).

So, I think that English teachers should write the essays they assign. I've felt that way for a while, and this year, being back from maternity leave, I definitely have failed at this ideological resolution, but with the perspective motherhood brings comes the realization that failure is just life.

Discuss. Just kidding, that's what I'll do.

Anyway, I want to start posting things on this blog again, mostly to preserve in digital stone the experiments and ideas of my year back in the saddle. I found this post, which is an old essay that I think I wrote with the intention of publishing but never got around to it. It certainly reads like my attempt at impersonating Camille Paglia's poetic analysis, so there. So I'll post this here as a challenge of sorts to other practicing English teachers: those essays that merit the highest grades- could you write them? Though I admit the essay below is a little on the wordy side (read: someone loves her thesaurus), I think I could write a hundred-percent essay every time. Reading comprehension, well, that's different.

p.s. Did I plagiarize this? If anyone else wrote this, please let me know and I'll take it down or credit you. But I think I wrote it. (Three years ago- before I had a baby and so clearly had too much time on my hands.)

Macbeth's relationship with the state

For King and Country! The battle cry is brief and direct, and so is the meaning: in the hearts and minds of the British people that uttered them, King and Country are firmly and justly tied together. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the word King is amended to Tyrant and the image of country becomes that of a bleeding Christ. Instead of nurturing, right and holy, Macbeth's is unnatural, paradoxical and without sacrament. Macbeth's relationship with the land of Scotland is such that he hurts it, and leaves it changed, both ideologically and geographically. Just as Macbeth turned his back on God when he plunged his dagger into Duncan, so too did he turn his back on Scotland. 

The opening paradox of the play, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" (Act 1, scene 1, line 12) acquaints the attentive audience with the fundamental paradigm shift that is the basis of the play. In this play, their chanting tells us, what was right is now wrong, what was good is now bad, and what is clear is now murky. This paradox infects everything: Macbeth's integrity, the role of England and the meaning of patriotism, even the most basic action and word may become perverted, or backwards. The presence of pathetic fallacy beginning in Act 2 take this paradigmatic change and brings it into the physical diagesis of the play. Jacobean England was a time when social orders and expectations were clear and immovable, so it is only natural that when Macbeth instigates the perversion of that order by committing the ultimate sacrilege the ground literally shifts beneath their feet: "the earth/ Was feverous and did shake." (Act 2, scene 3, line 65). Unfortunately for Scotland, Macbeth's choices inflict even worse upon the land, and we hear that the Old Man in Act 2 senses right away that whatever is going on with the land is dreadful, strange and unnatural. By Act 4, the damage has escalated to the point where Malcolm shares, "I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;/ It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash/ Is added to her wounds" (Act 4, scene 3, lines 39-41). Scotland is presented to the audience like a bleeding Messiah in a prolonged crucifixion scene, reminiscient of the other "Golgotha" (Act 1, scene 2, line 44) that Macbeth evoked back when he deserved the name "brave Macbeth" (Act 1, scene 2, line 18). The eclipse is another feature that ties the murder of Duncan to the crucifixion of Jesus, and we wonder," Is't night's predominance, or the day's shame,/ That darkness does the face of earth entomb,/ When living light should kiss it?" (Act 2, scene 4, line 9-11). 

Does the blame for Duncan's murder lie solely with Macbeth, the perpetrator of the act, or is his sin like Adam's, and all of humanity (in this case, Scotland) is left to suffer for his choice? It is certainly a frightening prospect that the lack of light in the kingdom may signal the complete control of the powers of darkness, but at this point in the play, the Macbeth's "are yet but young in deed." (Act 3, scene 4, line 144). This religious allusion likening Scotland's suffering to Christ's reinforces this possibility that though Macbeth has turned his back on God, God has not abandoned Scotland. We are not dealing with the vengeful and terse Old Testament God who abruptly threw the sinners out of the garden. Instead, "the heavens, as troubled with man's act,/ Threaten his bloody stage" (Act 2, scene 4, line 6-7), and the threat in this land is not an attack on the people of Scotland. Rather, since Scotland's new king has turned a deaf ear to God, these unnatural movements and sounds that plague the land is perhaps the only way God's will can still be heard. The reign that Macbeth brings to Scotland is so terrible and so damaging that he makes it ideologically impossible to be a patriotic Scot. By the end of Act 3, to be a true Scotsman is to be a traitor to the king, as Lennox voices aloud "that a swift blessing/ May soon return to this our suffering country/ Under a hand accursed! " (Act 3, scene 6, lines 4-10). That Lennox refers to whatever may relieve the country of Macbeth's hand as a "blessing" reveals his understanding (explicit or inuitive) of the taint that the witches have left on Macbeth's rule, since the notion of King and God should be revered as one and the same. The most lasting and physically impressive change that Macbeth's regime brings about in Scotland is the movement of Birnam wood to the foot of Scone. When Macbeth boastfully asks "Who can impress the forest, bid the tree/ Unfix his earth-bound root? " (Act 4, scene 1, lines 96-97), he is in his rights to ask, for even the King has no physical command over the trees and rocks that make up his Kingdom. 

Malcolm, in pursuit of the throne and revenge for his father's death, both of which are rightfully his, is desperate enough to save his country that he commands the English army to hack it to peices: "Let every soldier hew him down a bough" (Act 5, scene 4, line 6). This act, at once cunning and damaging, is another paradoxial example of hurting the country to save it, a paradox made possible only though Macbeth's unnatural reign. Which leads us to what it is that is so unnatural about Macbeth's reign. Nevermind the obvious fact that he was never born to be king, that the "borrowed robes", "fruitless crown and...barren sceptre" were stolen in a violent and bloody act of treason. That Macbeth acted on his ambition and attempted to rise in his station is almost admirable, and the desire for advancement is understandable, if not universal. It's that Macbeth made no attempt to forge the relationship with the country that a king should have, as decreed by God. 

Macbeth's time on the throne had nothing to do with Scotland, or its people. During his tortuous reign, Macbeth was fully consumed with one thing: himself. His schemes, his whispered conversations with his wife, focused all on "the golden round", the "throne" and being "safely thus". He abandoned the country when he abandoned his morality, and the country suffers in the same physical way that he did: no sleep becomes no silence, no prayers become no sun. Macbeth's relationship with the land isn't similar to his relationship with God, it is his with relationship with God: severed and abandoned.

The world is a better place for him having been in it

Maybe this is just selfish catharsis, but a student of mine died this morning and I'm writing about it. The feelings will out, I just discovered, dissolving into tears while typing his name in farewell.

Today, I stared at the face of my 3 month old niece while the death of a beautiful 19 year old rattled around in my mind. The sun was shining. He was gone. Spring is here. He is gone. He was ill, and now he is gone.

I can't think of any other reason besides love that leaves me sitting here with tears dripping down my chin. We call students "our kids"- we call them "ours". I think I'm realizing that the term has or had nothing to do with ownership, and everything to do with love, or pride- some kind of attachment or connection. And it works both ways. We are theirs as much as they are ours. When one is lost, so are we.

 I hadn't felt it in sadness before, how all the students would always matter to me, long after they walk out of the classroom for the last time. Always, and not in a small way.

Students are supposed to move on. Why else do we teach them: preparation for the future, right? You'll thank me later. You'll need this later. One day you'll think back to this, and... "Future, future, future."

Teachers remain behind, in space and in time. Locked away in our classrooms, sure, but also in the memories of the students we teach. For many we'll always be wearing that sweater, those glasses, or the haircut that they remember on us. Telling that same joke. I know all about that- it's something I accepted when I became a teacher: the knowledge that for a while I would matter to these people, and after a while, I wouldn't. I'd be a memory, and then only sometimes. That, I'm ready for. I'm ready to be left behind. Being left behind is easy.

Being forced to move on is not. It's that hopeless plea of "don't leave me here". Here becomes anywhere you aren't. I'm still here, and you aren't. I'm going to get older, and you aren't. I'm going to laugh again, one day.

I have a photo of this boy up on the wall behind my desk, a gift, and it will always remain there. That white jacket. The glasses, the hair. That smile.

First Post of 2012 - April Fools! - It's actually an essay!

Roads and Rivers: Navigating the Image and the Real in Pleasantville

In a scene from Pleasantville (1998), a group of young people are gathered in the local soda shop. The subtle five-four rhythm of Take Five plays in the background, though it’s likely that music was added in during the editing process. Actor Tobey Maguire takes a deep breath, pausing slightly before speaking his lines: “There are some places where the road doesn’t go in a circle.” The actors that surround him appear surprised, astonished, intrigued. They lean in closer as Tobey continues: “It just keeps going. It all keeps going. Roads and Rivers.” And so, about 50 minutes into the film, the character David instigates a full-fledged youth revolution propelled by, of all things, classic American Literature.
         The originating image of the 50s sitcom that Pleasantville expresses perhaps never existed; it was projected onto an eager America through TV, but these programs become artifacts unto themselves. The ‘Black and White’ television era is a reference to both its appearing and its appearance: whole, smiling families; full plates of home cooked dinner; a population of obedient and successful (and yes, docile) bodies. But the images in Pleasantville don’t begin there; instead, the film situates itself in the real with David, one half of a set of twins. The image of the real, Baudrillard’s first phase, “the reflection of a profound reality”, is where and when David lives, which we assume from the fashion is the 90s (though, interestingly, these shots are preceded by a title card that reads “Once Upon a Time...”). As Baudrillard might suggest, the real for David truly seems to be a desert: the establishing scene shows him standing alone in front of a vast expanse of concrete that makes up the yard of his high school.

 Once inside the high school, we see lecture after lecture delineating one bleak future after another: Hollywood’s exaggeration of the potential of the 90s. It’s no wonder that David is enamored with the TV show Pleasantville, it serves as a way to mask his inability to interact with females - a twin sister who hates him, a mother who ignores him - these all amount to a feeling of rejection by the Symbolic order of David’s ‘real’ world, and so he turns to the Imaginary, amusing himself by quoting the lines of dialogue of the TV mom while his real mother quibbles over the phone with David’s otherwise absent father. One would imagine that David’s sudden literal immersion into the television show ‘Pleasantville’ would be his dream come true, permission to happily function within his desired Symbolic Order. Instead, David and his twin sister Jennifer are both one phase further removed from the real.

When first thrust into the world of the television show it becomes clear how David is now even more fully invested in living in the Imaginary, David wants to “play along” and demands that his rebellious sister do the same. David seems to take comfort in the Imaginary order of Pleasantville: here he is taken care of, he is part of a whole family, he is a successful and accepted member of the world. But this is also the second phase of the image, which “masks and denatures a profound reality”. Accordingly, Jennifer, despite experiencing what David does, is severely alienated by these events. In a somewhat tragic turn, the Symbolic norms of a mother cooking a hot breakfast and complimenting her outfit are deeply distressing to her. And, as she explores the world further, she simultaneously moves away from the Imaginary order she had set up for herself in the ‘real’ world. In that world, Jennifer cut class to smoke in the yard and hook up with boys. In Pleasantville, when confronted with a geography lesson that is summed up in two streets, Main and Elm, she raises her hand. And, after she is rejoined with the idea that “the end of Main street is just the beginning again,” she desperately seeks to find her way out of the hyper real prison, and ends up in a library. There, she discovers that the books are all blank. The price of pleasantness is lack of knowledge, a motif that the film plays with through various allusions to the biblical Adam and Eve. Jennifer’s desperation even drives her to attempts at destruction, but she’s still thwarted: though she’s somehow managed to find a lighter, nothing burns.
     Of course, it is David who disrupts his own illusion, causing a basketball to miss the net when he attempts to defer a date between his sister and the captain of the basketball team. This is where the image of reality begins to move into its third phase, where the image “masks the absence of a profound reality.” This too is the part of the film that challenges all the characters’ notions of the Symbolic order by introducing glimpses of the Real, and leaving those characters and objects changed. The initial upset, which David unwittingly began by ruining the perfect basketballs, is taken up by Jennifer, whose dalliance with Skip prompts a rose bush to spontaneously bloom in red- Real red. Sex is also the means through which Jennifer and David’s TV Mom traverses her own reality. A symbol of chastity in Pleasantville is the parent’s double beds: a reference to the lack of intimacy that the term pleasant carries with it. In a perversion of the ‘sex talk’, mother and daughter sit at the kitchen table beside the wholesome symbol of milk and cookies and it’s Jennifer who carefully informs her mother how to “enjoy yourself... without Dad.” And Betty does so, in a scene that is extremely uncomfortable to watch with a classroom full of seventeen year-olds. It’s Betty’s first experience with pleasure that brings her and those in the town closer to the Real than ever before in the film; as she orgasms, the world of Pleasantville responds, and the tree on the front lawn bursts into flames. Things do burn in Pleasantville after all: literally, figuratively. Again, it’s David who tries to put out the flames and dampen whatever they represent, but he manages to continue to subvert the town, now symbolically echoing Jennifer’s lessons by showing the hapless firefighters how to use their own equipment.

By the time the image has made its fourth revolution, “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever”; in Pleasantville, this imagining makes the implausible plausible and makes meaningful allusion out of the ridiculous. The changes in the town manifest in a thunderstorm, and all but David and Jennifer flinch and recoil in fear from the thunder and rainfall. The kids especially, are afraid of the rain at first, eyeing it dubiously as they ask if it is “real rain?” And it’s not real rain, though by then, David has forgotten that. The town divides. Signs pop up in shop windows that read “no coloreds”. Angry citizens gather around Mr. Johnson’s nude of Betty, which is exhibitioned on the soda shop window and eventually destroy it. The ridiculous hyper reality of this violence is underscored in the filming, as a high angle creates the image of a group of dissidents converging on a giant ice cream cone.  As the tension escalates, the traditionalist citizens, who previously had no knowledge of fire, burn books. Finally, the most organized attempt to quell the reading revolution begun by the “changists” of the town results in the creation of “The Pleasantville Code of Conduct” which include such provisions as “there will be no preparation for inclement weather” and “No bed frame or mattress may be sold measuring more than 38 inches wide.” When David reads this edict aloud, there is a marked difference between Jennifer’s reaction and that of the other colored youth gathered in the soda shop. She smirks, fully aware of the foolishness of a government sanction of bed frames, where her Pleasantville friends are not.

Her chuckle indicates her rejection of these newly imposed Symbolic rules, where the earnest attentiveness of the other youth ground their placement in Lacan’s Imaginary. In terms of Baudrillard, it's the hyper real. David learns from something in which he has basically no stake - he is never really threatened, not physically or intellectually- though the characters around him are. His own approach to the real comes in the form of violence, when he punches a boy who is threatening Betty, but why does he defend her? Even though David is moving farther and farther away from his true existence, his action without thought – defending and protecting his TV mother – brings him closer to the Real than he has ever been before. And after the conflict of the town has neatly resolved, the town is fully colored, the borders come down and the roads unloop themselves and stretch out into the unknown. Pleasantville has become its own simulacra.

In a most satisfying twist, David then decides to return to his real world, and it’s Jennifer who   stays behind. She seems to finally acknowledge the value of the rules she flaunted for so long, both in terms of school and in terms of the Imaginary order of Pleasantville. In this sense, Jennifer created the simulacra in which she could thrive. When she says to her brother “I did the slut thing,” she’s both rejecting her previous (performative) Imaginary expression and embracing the Symbolic rules of this new world. After questioning, changing and scoffing at the orders of both her real world and this Pleasantville world, she decides to pursue an Academic career, and armed with the knowledge of the two worlds she’s inhabited; it is an act of freedom, not an act of prolonging her subjugation. David’s return to his real world shows his readiness to seek out the Real in his original circumstances, and he is immediately confronted with the opportunity to connect with his ‘real’ mother. Interestingly, he also returns with a physical symbol of the world he left, the letterman’s jacket at once symbolizing his social acceptance and the validity of the simulacra of Pleasantville to part with physical parts of itself, blurring the lines between those two iterations of the Real.  
But that’s not where the movie ends. In its closing moments the film reveals itself and what its true conclusions are: Pleasantville, now fully realized, goes on without its savior or destroyer. It’s ambiguity that has awakened this place to its own reality, and it’s a celebration of this ambiguity that closes the film. We are back in Pleasantville. We see Joan Allen, who plays Betty, seated on a bench beside William H. Macy, who plays her husband George. “Do you know what’s going to happen next?” She wonders aloud. The camera pans over to a close up of William’s face. “No, I don’t.” he replies. They both laugh as the camera pans back to Joan, still laughing, then back again. William H. Macy has been replaced by Jeff Daniels, who adds, “I guess I don’t either.” What phase of image are we watching now, where one character seems to become another? Or perhaps this is no longer part of the narrative, and we are simply watching actors speaking to one another? This is the final expression of Pleasantville as its own complete Real image, not only does it now offer the Betty character an unexpected Real possibility, but that the viewer should be taken aback by this visual inconsistency from a world where objects and people spontaneously change color is remarkable. In both worlds: Pleasantville, David’s and finally, in our own, the roads and rivers flow on into the unknown as the soundtrack plays: “Nothing’s gonna change my world.”

Works Consulted

"Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations - I. The Precession of Simulacra Translated by Sheila Faria   Glaser." Jean Baudrillard. Web. 15 Mar. 2012. <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-i-the-precession-of-simulacra/>.

Hey Man, Slow Down

To begin, a lyrically related song from the 90s to set the mood:

More than ever, the feeling I’ve been fighting this year has been the nagging voice that urges me to “go faster! Teach faster!" Sometimes I can't seem to shake that feeling: "We’re running of out time! We’re not going to finish!”

I’ve heard that voice probably my entire life (yes, speaking figuratively; this is not an exposé on the voices I hear in my head)- or at least the message, likely from the actions of my own teachers as I made my way through school, and sure enough, their instructions to me gradually became my instructions to myself.  That voice really took over once I started teaching, and along with it came those familiar feelings of frenzy, panic, flailing, and finally, drowning.

A familiar metaphor, right? Treading water, drowning in marking, wading through whatever. But this year I’ve gotten into the incredibly annoying habit of questioning everything, and the question I’m asking now is “Drowning in what”? Learning? Wow, what a tragedy. Teaching? That doesn’t make any sense. And after thinking about it for a while I realised I was like a character in a classic movie gag: flailing and panicking, yelling “Save me! I don’t know how to swim!” when I’m actually thrashing around in a foot of water.

So, back to the voices. This semester I had the pleasure of reading Rosenblatt’s Making Meaning with texts, (pdf of Chapter 5 available here) and a line that’s stuck with me was “we need to resist the pressures from without and from within ourselves that lead to such empty results." What a pleasure to have such a reasonable and erudite voice in there with the others.

Perhaps I'm fortunate that I don't feel a lot of outside pressure to push through or past or over the subject I'm teaching. Fortunate, or numb. Either way, I don't feel it as strongly from the outside as I ever have from the inside. That's where this pressure is coming from- for whatever reason, I'd adopted the stance that no matter what or how I was teaching, I could be doing it faster.

What is that? Is it the year plans I make for myself, invariably tying a major work to a season or month, annually pretending that school isn't full of planned and unplanned changes in schedule? Is it the curriculum that I've misread, interpreting every single student experience or ability as something I need to program ahead of time? (There it is again- ahead of time- maybe time is what I think I'm drowning in. How Doctor Who of me). Maybe there's a more general phenomenon to blame: microwaves, or instant coffee, or .34222 second Google searches. 

The thing is, I'm only interested in the cause if it helps me to figure out a solution, and blame is not the way to do it. Looking at my students, and looking at the experiences I’ve had teaching for the last 8 years, I’m finally making peace with my inner ‘go faster’. I don't want to get faster, I want to get better. And no, they aren't automatically exclusive. But neither are they the same.

 I'm not drowning. I'm fine. Finally, after teaching under this self imposed bogeyman pressure I’m finally asking why. And the silence that follows is telling.

This wasn't the clip I was looking for at first, but in a way, it's exactly the clip I was looking for.

EdCamp Edmonton

photo by Heather Laturnas (@hlaturnas)

A few weeks ago, I challenged a few other edcamp Edmonton co-organizers to blog about the edcamp experience, so it's high time I meet my own expectations, don't you think?

One day, I forget when exactly, it occurred to me that in Alberta we have a lot of active, interesting and involved educators. I'd name them, but then I'd forget someone and it would be #FF all over again. (winky face) So, it began with a simple tweet that I can't really be bothered to go retrieve that basically asked "Why Edmonton didn't yet have an edcamp set up?" Once a few local and interested educators replied, we were good to go.

After two meetings in person, we remembered that it was 2011 and started meeting via Google+, and I'm glad we did. It was nice to take advantage of those tools and learn as we went. Hangouts remain the sole thing I've used Google+ for, but then again, I had a twitter account for a year before I started using it for education, so who knows what will happen.

Organizers kind of came and went as the planning progressed, which is an observation, not a criticism. As a person who is really into coming up with ideas and less interested in finishing them, I truly understand that things come up: trips, responsibilities, sick family, the whole pesky teaching thing. It's all life.

To those organizers who did stick it out: you know who you are, and you also know the password to the website, so go add your name to the list already!

Do I feel the day was a success? Yes, I really do. We had over one hundred registrations (though half as many attendees, and we're on it); we had 12 concurrent sessions; we had environment minded prizes (gas cards for 2 farthest carpools travelled); we had participants from Medicine Hat, from Millwoods, and from Michigan; I love alliterative sentences; we even ended up with an amazing Google Doc.

Truly, the best word that sums up how I feel about the event and every one and thing surrounding it is gratitude. I'm grateful to the following websites for being the beacons in the darkness they turned out to be:

http://edcamp.wikispaces.com

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/about-edcamp-unconference-history


I'm incredibly grateful to my parents, who graciously donated their time and sandwich making skills to our lunch.

Photo taken by Heather Laturnas (@hlaturnas)

I'm grateful for all the those individuals who contributed, either via Twitter or in a Hangout or in person, or stepped up on the day of the event to present, share, speak and listen.

I'm grateful to the Educational Technology Council of Alberta and the Alberta Social Studies Council for donating the funds to cover food and prizes.

And I'm grateful to the staff of Lillian Osborne High School, the first building I've ever truly loved. I'll never get over you, LO. You and your flying buttresses.

Here's the thing about the edcamp organizational experience: it was really, really easy. Why? Because it's easy to do what you love. Because the day is so focused on collaboration and spontaneous conversation, the planning is rather minimal. And also because the group of educators that offered their help and resources were so awesome, everything pretty much fell into place. Things fell into place so easily, in fact, that I think we're going to do it all over again:

EdCamp Edmonton - Saturday April 14th, 2012 - Still looking for a theme

Oh, one last thing: someone forgot their travel mug in the library: