Terry Halliday: “In 2008 or 2009, at an early stage of an extensive research program on criminal defense lawyers in China, I was asked a surprising question. Fu Hualing, an academic authority on China’s rights advocacy and defense lawyers, asked: Did I know that a disproportionate number of China’s leading rights lawyers were Christians? He guessed about 40 percent.”
The Urban Sketchers website is really cool. This drawing is by Ilaria Petrussa.
Here’s another one.
Eleanor Doughty’s urban plein air sketches are wonderful.
I had never heard of takkyu-bin but it sounds great. At least in Japan. Can’t imagine it working reliably in the U.S. or Europe.
I wrote 5600 words today so I decided to reward myself with the Queen of Cocktails.
a silent adventure
Whenever people speak in L’Avventura I find their talk intrusive. I imagine a Phantom Edit of the movie that removes all the scenes in which people speak, and in which all sounds are replaced by one of Eno’s ambient compositions, so I could then contemplate the evocative images without distraction.
A letter from François Truffaut to Jean Renoir, telling the old master how much The Rules of the Game meant to him. Truffaut had lovely handwriting, I think, and made use of it in The Wild Child, where we see him, as Dr. Itard, writing in a journal about Victor’s progress, or lack thereof.
Truffaut wrote thousands and thousands of letters; he seems to have found it easier to speak his mind, and heart, in letters than in either phone calls or face-to-face meetings. Had he lived in the Age of Email I am certain that he would have continued to communicate by handwriting.
I wrote a post on being the best (kind of) teacher I can be.
gardening strategies
I love this by John Holt, transcribed by my buddy Austin Kleon:
You learn to teach by teaching. I never had any educational training, luckily. I say “luckily” because I went into the classroom knowing that I didn’t know anything, and therefore realizing that if I wanted to learn something, I’d better keep my eyes and ears open and think about what I was seeing and hearing. The only way you learn about teaching is to do it and to see which of your inputs into this environment produce helpful results and which don’t, and maybe to talk about your problems with other teachers and say, “How are you making out?”
I would just add one point: What you can do might be something different than what another teacher can do.
Many years ago, I was asked to observe the teaching of one of my colleagues, Christina Bieber Lake. I walked into her classroom, saw 32 students, and thought Hmmm, I wonder how she’s going to handle this. I thought that because I knew that Christina strongly preferred leading discussions to lecturing, and how do you manage a discussion with that many people in the room?
The answer was: Easily. The conversation flowed both smoothly and energetically, and in the one-hour-plus-change that I sat in the back of the room, 27 of the 32 students spoke up — without prompting. I think my jaw literally dropped. My first thought was: I want to teach that way.
But upon some reflection I had a second thought: I don’t think I can teach that way. I realized that just don’t have the skills, or, maybe more accurately, the feel for the thing. Now, to be sure, I knew I could be better at leading discussions. But I wasn’t going to be a better teacher by trying to imitate Christina, even if I could learn from her.
I often think of something Bob Dylan once said:
I’d like to drive a race car on the Indianapolis track. I’d like to kick a field goal in an NFL football game. I’d like to be able to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball. But you have to know your place. There might be some things that are beyond your talents. Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.
Mandy Brown: “Are you a writer or a talker? That is, when you need to think about something, do you generally reach for something to write with, or look for someone to talk to?” I am an extreme writer — but I recognize the wisdom in this advice:
Talkers need to recognize that not everyone loves to think out loud, and that giving space for writing is part of what it means to make use of the best brains around you. Writers need to remember that writing isn‘t some perfected ideal of thinking and that making space for the messy, chaotic, and improvisational work of talking things out is often exactly what a team needs to create change. Whichever mode you prefer, it’s not feasible to abstain from the other; doing good, collaborative work requires that you practice both modes.
Brunch!
