Learning and Gaming

Learning: Setting Fire to the Imagination; Learning through Gaming and Play

EDUC 401
Philip Bird, 270928
For Dr. Hanan Yaniv

There is something captivating about electronic gaming. I am young enough of a fellow to have caught the beginning edge of gaming's frothy surf. My childhood was a mix of broad sunny prairie, playing Cops and Robbers on bike through the town streets, and beating Ganondorf in The Adventures of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on Nintendo's N64 console, as well as many other games on various platforms. To me, these experiences were a relatively seamless part of the fabric of my childhood, but in retrospect, it has been gaming that has consistently captured my attention.

Ganondorf

There is a powerful word that describes the world of gaming that all educators should pay attention to, in my opinion. This word is immersive; Dictionary.com defines it as, "noting or pertaining to digital technology or images that deeply involve one's senses and may create an altered mental state" (Dictionary.com). The root word, immerse, conjures up the image of plunging into something, deep waters, or more figuratively, a brand new experience. This sense of immersion is deeply native to the world of games.

Broadly, play is the heart of games. It is present just as deeply in electronic formats, as it was in the cross town caper of Cops and Robbers. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff describe the five elements of children's play,

1. Play must be pleasurable and enjoyable.
2. Play must have no extrinsic goals; there is no prescribed learning that must occur.
3. Play is spontaneous and voluntary.
4. Play involves active engagement on the part of the player.
5. Play involves an element of make-believe.

(Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, 2003).

The demands of curriculum often proscribe the second goal. Education often seems not very fun, or involving or anything about what the student is truly interested in. The power of intrinsic motivation is significant - if there is a way that it can be incorporated into the classroom, targeted, focused and unleashed, it would be potent stuff indeed. Omrod et. al describe intrinsic motivation as "the motivation that comes from within the individual, rather than from such outside influences as extrinsic reinforcers… one important factor in intrinsic motivation is high self-efficacy: Students must believe that they have the ability to accomplish the learning task successfully" (Omrod et. al. 2010). This sense of play and the motivation that is part of it comes from an interaction of two parties. Jane McGonigal notes that, "We like people better after we play a game with them, even if they've beaten us badly - and the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goals, they'll stay with the game until it's over" (McGonigal, 2010). Playing with someone requires that value of trust, a sense of boundaries, and a set of goals the players must achieve to win or to accomplish their task. Playing also assumes a level of realistic success

Gamers breathe and live in this sense of play when they are immersed in their game worlds. Jane McGonigal describes the four aspects of gamers: they engage in blissful productivity, they weave a tight social fabric, they embody and convey a sense of urgent optimism, and they search and pursue epic meaning (McGonigal, 2010). These are all positive aspects that often are overlooked when we as adults scrutinize gaming, and the youth playing the games. These are things that are worthy of emulation, that can be harnessed for good, and deployed to further their education.

Some of the environments that gamers find themselves in, including and especially massively multiplayer online (MMO) environments are highly immersive, febrile grounds for learning. Thomas and Brown describe it this way:

Imagine an environment where the participants are building a massive network databases, wikis and websites, and thousands of message forums, creating a large-scale knowledge economy. Imagine an environment where participants constantly measure and evaluate their own performance, even if that requires them to build new tools to do so. Imagine an environment where user interface dashboards are constructed by the users themselves to make sense of the world and their own performance in it. Imagine an environment where evaluation is based on after-action reviews to continually enhance performance; an environment where learning happens on a continuous basis, because the participants are internally motivated to find, share, and filter new information on a near-constant basis.(Thomas and Brown, 2011).

The rest of their article is equally salient. They see these online environments powered by an engine, "the engine that drives learning is a blend of questioning, imagination, and - best of all - play." Play is at the heart of this intensive learning.

Utilizing gaming for learning, for education, is something that does occur in unique classes. During my field observation practicum, I observed a Grade 2 teacher use a simple call and response game through the classroom's Smartboard, to help explore the concept of skip counting in math. Later, she gathered all the students in a circle sitting on the floor to play a game of "Snap!" This simple game was played thusly: a skip counting outcomes was described by the teacher, say by 10s. The children were going around the circle, each person counting up by ones, and every time a person came close to 10 or a multiple of 10, the person would yell "Snap!" This simple game helped reinforce a mathematical concept, and engaged the kids at the same time.

Another classroom, this one in a private school in New York City benefited from gaming in the classroom. Joel Levin, the school's computer teacher created a classroom experiment with Minecraft, a game about exploring, collecting resources and building in blocks similar to Lego. His experiment

"a rousing success. Not only did we have a productive and fun unit, but I would say that this was the best project I have ever done in the classroom. In my 8 years of teaching I have never seen students so excited and engaged. They run up to me in the halls to tell me what they plan to do next class. They draw pictures about the game in art. They sit at the lunch tables and strategize their next building projects. And not only the boys, but girls too" (Levin, 2011)

This kind of engagement isn't something you normally see in schools.

Learning is a vital part of gaming. Gaming creates a kind of learning momentum, a force that propels learners forward, to explore strange new worlds, and seek new vistas. Gaming captivates the imagination, it immerses its user into worlds that they are intrinsically motivated to understand and succeed. These are possibilities that can be applied to education. Education can ride this surf too.


Reference List:

McGonigal, J. (2010). Gaming can make a better world. TED Talks. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

Omrod, JE., Saklofske, DH., Schwean, VI., Andrews, JJW., Shore, BM. (2010). Principles of Educational Psychology. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada.

"Immersive." (n.d.) Retrived November 12th, 2011 from Dictionary.Reference.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/immersi

Thomas, D. & Brown, J.S. (2010). Multiplayer High. Boingboing. Retrieved from: http://boingboing.net/2011/04/28/flux.html

Levin, J. (2011). A Classroom Experiment with Minecraft. The Minecraft Teacher. Retrieved from: http://minecraftteacher.net/post/3922255282/a-classroom-experiment-with-minecraft

Tact and Tactics

This is my video essay for my Education 403 Class on Pragmatics of Teaching,

This World is Configurable: Knowing is Grasping

This is a video essay for my Education 401: Issues in Learning and Teaching class.

It's on our "Knowing" module.

On “Teaching Ethical Know-How in New Literacy Spaces”; Jargon and Substance

EDUC 404 – Individual Group Reflection Paper
Philip Bird
Prepared for Dr. David Watt


Our inquiry group has decided to focus on the use of social networks within school, especially when pertaining to literacy. Due to the relatively new nature of the social network, both as blossoming idea and also as it has infiltrated and embedded itself into the culture of youth (and broader culture for that matter), our group has generally found that much of the literature that describes this phenomenon is simply trying to frame it in older, perhaps cultural, ideas about literacy.

The reading used in my inquiry focus on a paper by Luce-Kapler, Sumara, and Iftody, “Teaching Ethical Know-How in New Literacy Spaces” (2009). After reading this paper, I was initially struck by the defensiveness of the writers towards this new social vehicle. As I expressed in my powerpoint, they take an initial stance of “greatest concern... the propensity with which individual stories can be appropriated and disseminated without regard for the individuals who exist as subject of those stories.” To parse this language – they are concerned with individual stories become social gossip writ large, and available to all. This is a genuine, legitimate and valid concern, but it sets the tone of the paper as generally alarmist, without a substantial solution to a new media reality that new teachers, and their students deal with on a day to day basis. Our group also discussed the example in the paper of the “Star Wars Kid,” (See after this paragraph) as well as cutting analysis from Penny Arcade in the “John Gabriel's Greater Internet F*****d Theory” (Krahulik and Holkins, 2004). We finished up with a discussion on how this paper applies to to the story of Jamey Rodemeyer, a victim of cyberbullying, and his tragic death (Dangerous Minds, 2011).

Star Wars Kid:


Our discussion found that popular culture is moving at a pace that the educational system is struggling to keep up to. We found that the reading was inadequate in fully comprehending the nature of an “Ethical Know-How,” in social networks and new media – in fact it only address surface concerns similar to the emergence of any new media – such as concerns with televisions and children in the 60s. The discussion group suggested that a class exploration and discussion of online etiquette and a discussion on what is appropriate or not would fathoms deeper and furlongs further in addressing “Ethical Know-How,” especially in context to cyber-bullying or facebook-drama.

What I found valuable from the reading was the attempt to begin how to set up an ethical system for online behaviour. It asks valuable questions, such as how do we protect and guide our students in this new field of literacy and culture? It suggests an empathetic approach,

“ethics emerge from our empathetic identification with others... a necessary condition for developing an adaptive and responsive (i.e., complicitous) sense of personal consciousness or identity. Deep empathizing requires a dissolving of one's own ego boundaries, understanding that to be more fully oneself, one needs to imagine the mind of another”

(Luce-Kapler, Sumara, & Iftody, 2009)

While this is start, I found that the paper did not go beyond simple empathy, and its relation to Buddhism. The authors later begin a discussion of close reading, which we felt completely sidestepped the original topic. However, they do highlight a serious concern facing students today. For example, in the aforementioned case of Jamey Rodemeyer, his suicide was prompted by cyber-bullying after he came out publicly about his homosexuality on YouTube, in the form of an “It gets better” video – part of an online campaign against GLBT bullying in high schools.



This reading provided great fodder for questions, such as: Why does the article only employ one kind of ethics (namely an Buddhist empathetic approach)? How do you articulate and apply such ethics to online behaviour? Further, how do you teach this to students? Can you give examples? How do you defuse online drama as it bleeds into the classroom? How separate should you as a teacher be to the students? Do you “friend” them on facebook? What are the other uses of social networks? What about the issues of anonymity, pseudonymity, and virtual selves? What about the discussion on privacy, and digital permanence. Or what about digital surveillance and the use of facebook to scout potential employees by employers? We found that the surface was barely scratched, and we were only left with jargon, and little substance on a question that will burn in the minds of teachers in today's digital literacy.



Reference List:

Luce-Kapler, R., Sumara, D. & Iftody, T. (2010). Teaching ethical know-how in new literary spaces. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(7), 536–541.

Star Wars Kid. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6viIBmU

Krahulik, M., & Holkins J. (2004, March 19). Green Blackboards (And Other Anomalies). Penny Arcade. Retrieved from: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

Dangerous Minds ( 2011, September 20). Another Heartbreaking Gay Teen Suicide. Dangerous Minds. Retrieved from: http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/another_heartbreaking_gay_teen_suicide/

Inauguration

"On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

...

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed—why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."

This

Headshot

Fingers tense in sudden excitement
Palms sweaty, a shallow breath
Held in eager anticipation
BOOM Headshot!
A wicked, glorious glee
And a foe defeated, a player pwned
Bloodlust captured, transformed,
Ameliorated
The gritty pixel, a battlefield of bytes
There are new heroes, new laurels
of respect, cred, and cool
And they are but a construct
An achievement is a tick on a screen

A bloody warrior, avatar of grim justice
ripped now from myth and legend, made
Alive to hew at the ephemeral
seething flanks of an imagined enemy
A boyhood imagination's playground
Transmogrified into half-reality
Power lies in the controller, the flick of a
thumbstick, and a thought commands armies
fleets, a KO, a Superbowl victory
The nectar of triumph, a sweet drought
to a thirsty imagination trapped
in a dull and pallid existence
Where there is no war to win
No fight against desperate odds
or a clarion call to courage

Worth

Who am I?

A question that tugs at the bottom of every soul.

What is worth, what is of worth?

We are made in the image of the Creator, blood, dust and bone. We are reflections of a singular and unfathomable will. We are the children of the Word that fell from His lips onto the world.

There is something inherently of value in us, of us, that we radiate. It is in what we are, it is in the unlimited potential of the DNA in our cells, we are the many, we are the variegated, and we are the host of possibilities. There is something of His eternity in the incredible manifold paths that the complexities of biology offer us.

And that is merely in our form, our shape, our dust. And He showed fit to give us something more. He gave us His breath, the animus, the soul, the ability to choose. He gave us choice. He gave us the capability of understanding.

A question then follows, regarding understanding. We ask, especially to the literal translation: If Eve knew, truly knew the fullest consequences of her actions, would she have bit into that apple? Would she have enslaved us, a world, to thousands upon thousands of years of pain and suffering? Would the mother of us all condemn us in a moment, for the sake of knowledge? And yet, to push the literal translation, even her limited understanding of a choice between God and self would mean that she knew of good and evil.

Regardless, there is something rotten at the core of us all. There is a malignity to us, and it colors every decision that we make. We are bent, and everything we do is thrown askew. Yet, I ask, are we broken, in the fullest sense of the word? Are we incapable of understanding altogether, that we are totally and absolutely lost? Would being this broken not even allow us to be capable of self-reflection? Would we not even know how broken we are, unable to answer the question to why we mess everything up?

Do we mess everything up?

A man called Tolkien said once, “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.”

But. But: Are we not the reflection of a God that is perfect? Are we not the refractors of a pure Light? Is there not something in us that calls to Him? Is there not something in all of us that recognizes we are the vessels of His Light, His greatness? Is there not some worth in that?

We see through a mirror darkly.

So: the problem. We can’t, being the instruments of our own destruction, engineer a way out that destruction. If we see sin as death, in and out of this mortal coil, a death in the little sense during our life, and a death after we pass, then we’re f*cked. It takes something to straighten us. It takes something to repair this “broken” soul.

It takes something like Jesus. For God so loved the world. Notice the language. Notice what it says. He LOVED the world. He saw worth in it. He saw something worthy of redemption. He saw something that needed to come back to Him.

It is true that we cannot manufacture this worthiness by anything we do, for in the end it falls short of its mark, it bends in its skewed flight, it misses the target. It is not complete, it is not perfect. But that we do, that we know, that we try, that very fact is from what we inherently are, the image of God. We seek after His face even though we cannot give the very search its words. We look for transcendence; we look for that purpose, engage in that passion that will deliver us to something better. Worth comes then, when we are our truest selves, an independent agent of the Will of God, spun into the world. We see this, in the image of who Jesus is, and what he’d done. The greatest thing a man can do is lay his life down for his friends, a free act of volition, not some prescribed fate. Our worth is immeasurable, for God took an immeasurably worthy Son and had him die for us. Our price has been the death of the Son of God.

Let us hold to the value of this worth, with humility and gratitude. For we are bought, purchased with a coin of infinite value.

Autumn, Interior and Exterior

This sums up how I feel nowadays, in a much more sublime fashion than I can craft at the moment. Go Go PB Shelley

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.

V


Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

A Youth Worker's Manifesto pt. II

These are our youth. They should not be treated the way they are. They deserve our assistance. They deserve our time. They deserve our love. They deserve not to be abandoned or rejected, for who they are or what has happened to them. They deserve to be seen as people, and people of worth.

You want to fight crime and poverty in our city? It's easy. Frighteningly so. You look after the kids that are in greatest danger of becoming the next generation of criminals. You don't subject them to a system that dehumanizes them, and shuffles them, like a worn pack of poker cards, drawn at random.

These are the kids that will sell your son pot. These are the kids that get into the adult entertainment industry because it's easy money, and nobody's told them the consequences of those actions. These are the kids that will steal bikes to sell for drugs. These are the kids that are enticed into gangs because that is the closest thing to family they've ever had.

You want to stop vandalism? You want to stop theft and drug crimes? You want to stop drive by shootings? You want to stop seeing that guy under the bridge, or the guy that asks for your change outside the liquor store? Stop them from becoming that man or woman. It's easy. Frighteningly so.

These kids are not animals. These kids are not monsters. They are like us, but a with a crappy hand of cards. They've had less to start with. They've had more to fight through than most of us can ever imagine. They are resilient beyond what you give them credit for. They have inner resources that beggar me.

Our church shares this burden of our society. Jesus calls us to look after the least of these. Jesus calls after us to look after the children of our neighborhood, of our city, of our province. It is not always some starving child across an ocean that he's calling us to look after. It is not always some face on the tv that stares blankly into the camera. It is the child that is in the rough part of town. The kind that you drive past on the way home and are thankful you don't live there. It is the child of the mom that's in the woman's shelter, who isn't going to school, who doesn't know what home is. This is not to say that the people across the ocean don't deserve our help. They do. But they aren't hungry as a result of our choices. The kid down the block is. He's hungry because dad can't make it past minimum wage, and has a drinking problem that soaks up all the money that should go to food. He can't make minimum wage because we have a government that doesn't support our poor. We have that government because we voted it in, or failed to vote to begin with. THAT is a result of our choice. We ARE our brother's keeper, and we've steadfastly ignored him.

We been comfortable in our cars and SUVs, walking the +15s, and it's time for us to consider the teen that's sleeping under the bridge, a block or two away. It's time for us to consider that the teen that is the same age of your own teen, and you were once the same age as well.

They should be in homes that care and love for them. They should be in foster homes where there isn't abuse, or a lack of compassion and love. They should be in foster homes that aren't overburdened. If they can't get in, they should be in grouphomes that have the staff, the time, and the space for them. They should be in a home where there is consistent people around, with fewer kids per staff, with a house mom and a house dad.

You hear about Focus on the Family, why don't we focus on our family growing larger, opening our hearts to include those that have been excluded. Why don't we consider, as a part of our society that seems to support family values, the notion that family should count for all people, not just the ones in polo t-shirts that sip lattes on the way to another church service in the car that cost more than these kids can even imagine. Why don't we think about loving the people who are unloved, the ones that are hard to love and easy to ignore, forget, and dismiss. We are called to love the least of these. We are called to love the unlovable. We are called to touch the untouchables. They do not exist a continent away, they exist a block or two away. They do not demand your attention the way your radio does, they do not demand your attention like prime time tv does, because they have not been given the voice, and its time we listen to it. Listen! Compassion is what Jesus was about! Compassion is letting go of our privilege and opening our eyes and hearts to those around us. Get involved in street ministry, give money to the poor. Don't ignore the dude that asks for a little bit of change. Feed him lunch instead. Find out who fosters in your church and support them with everything you got. Foster kids yourselves, consider adoption. There are so many kids that want homes, and we have families, with family values in abundance. You want to make a change in society, change this world around you? You want to stop this slide into apparent degradation? Make room in your heart for those that society has spit on, stepped on, and walked on by. Are we willing to be the Samaritan, heretical and rough around the edges? Or are we going to simply push the status quo and just walk on by, deaf to the cry of a society in pain?

Listen!

A Youth Worker's Manifesto pt. I

There is a problem in this city. It is not with the roads. It is not with the buses. It is not with unemployment. It is with how we treat our youth and the people that take care of them. The youth of which I speak are the kids that are in your schools, in your rec centres, in your starbucks and in your youth groups. They are the youth that are in the system, but whether we see them or not, they are in our lives. They have been ripped from their homes by forces that they don't fully comprehend. They have been shaped by choices that are not their own. They have been made into people they are not entirely by their own will.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that society ate, chewed and spat out, left to their own devices. They are the youth that get into gangs. They are the youth that have access to drugs. They are the youth that sleep on our streets. They are the youth that have gone missing. They are our invisibles, well on the way to becoming invisible.

These are our youth.

They are the youth whose mothers passed on their crack addiction when they were born. They are the youth that were abused when they were babies. They are the youth that were left for days without food due to neglect. They are the youth whose faces are bruised by yet another of mom's boyfriends. They are the youth who were born with FAS. They are the youth that were ignored. They are the youth that were beaten without cause. They are the youth that were beaten for any cause.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that are strung out in an alley. They are the youth that break into houses to find something they can pawn so they can score another hit. They are the youth whose boyfriend left them with nothing more than a pregnancy. They are the youth that listened to the wrong man online and disappeared. They are the youth that cut. They are the youth that want to end their lives. They are the youth that can't control their anger, for a reason that they can't explain, because Daddy kept on hitting him when he was little and wouldn't stop crying.

These are our youth.

And we own them more than what we can ever give them.

We house them in grouphomes and foster homes and lock down recovery clinics. We commit them as patients of a hospital of societal illness, slaves to an impersonal system of beds and numbers. We house them with grouphomes that are understaffed and underpaid, with drywall full of holes, cracking lino, and burned out staff. We house them with foster parents and brothers and sisters, who opened their hearts to take yet another risk, another burden on the shoulders of the burdened. We give them case workers who are overworked. We house them in places that are ripe for tempers to fray, with easy access to others for drugs and gang inductions. We house them in the ghettos of our city. We house them without regard. We tell them that this is only temporary. We tell them this until they turn 18.

These are our youth.

We give them staff that are underpaid and told to care for them, and if they can, love them. We give them staff that are paid a pittance and train them in how to stop a kid from trying to kill themselves, how to restrain a kid that’s lost control of their temper. We give them staff that pull 48 hour shifts because there wasn’t anybody else to call. We give them staff that are paid less then someone working at the local Timmy’s. We give the staff six kids with different schedules, doctors, counselors, parole officers, support workers, social workers, teaching assistants, psychiatrists, addiction counselors, and ask them to juggle it all. We give them staff that are the anvil to the hammer that the world has beat into these kids. We give them staff that deal with the behaviors and the memories of the abuse suffered at a previous home. We give them staff that are asked to risk life and limb to some of the kids that are severely unbalanced. We give them staff that are expected to bind the horrific emotional wounds that abandonment causes. We give them staff that can’t work regular hours because it’s shift work, and doesn’t pay enough to hold down as a job. We give them a staff that cares, and then burn them out. We give them a staff that sees these kids for who they really are, youth who actually matter, and then fail to pay a competitive wage.

These are our youth. And these are our youth workers.

And we’ve forgotten about them.

Coffee

The black grind, the black rind

Dark as coal, Dark as kohl

Sinful and bitter as a cynic suckled on the

Fruit of a burnt scorched earth

The smell, the smell, oh gods, the smell,

A siren, a siren, and I give in.

My mouth, My mouth, the oil seeps in

A Styxian ambrosia

Ghetto Farm Kid

I'm a ghetto farm kid, trapped amid the bustle and noise

Of an urbanity, the hard press of humanity

where I have no choice but to breathe its gasoline fumes,

so different than the smell of diesel,

Wheat, and the hard honest sweat that you get

when your sweeping a bin, or pitching the hay in

On a hot heavy day

I was never meant to be a farmer, to my parents dismay

My course lay instead, in literature, fantasy, the books I had read

They inspired me, widened me, and taught

My mind to ignore the simplicity what lay around

Sowing the ground, the beautiful haunting sound of

A chinook wind, or the sight of hawks hunting in the fields

where the harvest is coming in

And the row of combines marching in the lines

Of swath on a land like quilted cloth

With swatches of green and gold, a pageantry

As old as Cain, who was the first to put hand to the plough

look up at the sky and curse it for its lack of rain

I wanted something more than the duties of the farm chore,

I swore, I would travel, experience more

than the vista of a plain Albertan plain.

I wanted to imbibe the foreign sights and sounds of something other than my tribe

Learn the tongue from the young of another place, chase down and face the

Desire to flee my own space, hearth and home

My feet were itchy, you see?

I scratched that itch, and set them free on a plane trip to Germany

I lived in Berlin, away from my kin, in an city so new and fresh

To my eyes, there was no disguise-ing my newfound love and care

For this city of the Bear

It had an atmosphere, you veritably sense it in the air,

In the clothes that my peers would wear, the mohawk hair

Or the red handkerchief slung round the neck

hung like a flag ready at the beck

And call of a protest at the Berlin Wall

Which had its fall not too long ago at all

You could feel the history in this city,

Sketched underneath the skin of the graffiti tag

Feel it as you touched bullet holes in the Reichstag

From a World War where they exchanged

One dictator for years of cold slow conflict that raged

In this city divided between East and West

You can see it echoed in eyes, hear it in the chest

Of a people who are charged with: Lest WE forget

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Arbeit Macht Frei

You can see it echoed in the eyes

The memories of a people who let the Jews die

But there was a willingness to engage, from the people my age,

In questions political, rhetorical, and cultural,

There was a thirst for debate, a desire to create

A dialogue of mind and thought, a language fraught with

The willingness to encompass more than the limits of

of theology, nationality, and blind ideology

They taught me that it was ok to open my mind

to find conversation late at night in a coffee shop

Open far past the hour of closing

and well on the way to first light

I met the Prof, a man with salt and pepper hair,

Grizzled but with a statesman air,

He used to be an Anglican priest, ordained,

But found he was chained to the bedside

Of the old, and sought to find inside a faith that had died

So he came back to teach English to the senior high,

And to me, this English speaking guy,

A irony I saw and met with a grin, wry

He challenged my concepts, the hardened precepts

of a narrow neo-conservatism, airtight faith, trapped in the chasm

Of propaganda, and as he saw it - Indoctrination,

Opening the mind from the culture I lived in

I had to make the point, No... I'm not an American

So you see, it was trip whose taste left me thirsty

For really good coffee and a company that delights

In the verbal spar, the conversation that ranges wide and far

From the plebeian woes of a city that has no personality

as far as personality goes

It was a good trip for this ghetto farm kid

More Incoming

So, lest I forget my promise to post regularly, I've been writing poetry, that most maligned of art forms, and have a store of creative non-fiction that I've been working on over the summer. I'm in the middle of tranfering things over to my new mini-notebook (whose name is Sapphire, it's blue you see) from my old laptop (known as Sven) that I'm selling, and Brutus (my desktop tower of Doom, whose monitor is known as Svetlana).

I've got a manifesto to share, a exploratory meandering on the notion of worth as a Christian, and beat poetry as well.

It Feels Like Coming Home

I'm in English this year at the University, I'm returning to my first love, after a long absence.

It was that old familiar sensation that came back that surprised me. You know, the one that you associate with going back to school, cheesewagons, stale lunch bread, excitement and anxiety all at once.

It was nostalgic, no, it is like living through nostalgia. I'm in English this year, and it's like experiencing my first year all over again. I'm reminded of this as I walk into the first english class of the day, and the teacher is abstract random, like a certain boss I had over summer. I'm reminded of this by the characters that walk in, there's a girl with make up like a geisha, another that is epically Goth, a guy with wire rim glasses who wants to be a author, another, a student from Iceland. You can smell the subculture.

I keep expecting the smell of ozone stress and slight panic I felt all of last year when I was taking the sciences. Instead, I have readings in subjects I find fascinating, instead of nigh incomprehensible. Metaphor is my territory again, no longer am I wandering in the strange land of nucleic acids, Lewis structures and elimination reactions. Some parts of today felt like walking through a waking dream, waiting for me to wake up and realize that I'm on a path I'd turned away from.

I have poetry class next. Oh sweet simile, rapturous rhyme and rhythm!

Yeah, I'm a geek.

Six Months From Now...

Six months from now, I’ll be doing English papers on Shakespeare, and taking courses in Greek mythology, ethics, logic and religion.

Six months from now, I’ll be supporting myself by working part time.

Six months from now I’ll be learning how to draw better.

Six months from now, I’ll have an active blog, instead of month-long dead spaces.

Six months from now, I’ll be taking care of myself, doing what I love to do: which is writing and learning about the literature that has defined our culture, its beauty and depth.

Six months from now, I’ll be in the same place physically, but older, more mature, more joyous than right now.

In six months, I’ll be happy to make supper regularly with my roommate

In six months, my money (not anybody else’s!) will be budgeted to the dollar.

In six months, I’ll be seeing more plays than I’ve seen in the last three years

Sometime in six months, I’ll be playing video games, socially, healthily, and without guilt.

In six months, I’d have been a leader at camp, and an active part of that community.

In six months, I’ll be a catch.

In six months, I’ll be running 10k without stopping.

In six months, I’ll be closer to God, and to reality.

Six months from now, I’ll be fit, and able to beat my roommate in squash, like I once did.

Sometime in six months, I’ll either know how to blow glass, make glass sculptures, or learn how to work a forge.

In six months, my imagination will be expanded.

In six months I will be able to (and will) handle more responsibility.

Six months from now, my heart will not cry out in pain from hopes and dreams deferred.

Six months from now, I’ll be walking a path that I’ve should have walked three years ago.

The Pipe: Worldline

The idea of a timestamp is a curious one. It locks in a word, a phrase, a sentence typed into the temporal ether. You chat, you text, write an email, or a letter, and those words, those ideas suddenly have a place, in all four dimensions. It is no longer floating free. It becomes concrete, solid. Real.

I came across the idea of a worldline, and it struck me as poetic. You could say Einstein, who came up with the notion, was the poet of physics, and indeed the way he interacted with science was with an artist's genius. It goes like this: a worldline is the sequential path of something through both time and space, from the moment it is created to the moment of it's non-existence. A worldline is the string that binds us to place in this universe, as we know and see and perceive it. Invisible to the naked eye, but as real as the touch of the keyboard beneath my fingertips.

When we are gone, when we no longer exist, our worldines ended in this place, that string remains. A record of ourselves is left behind in some form or fashion. In the gametic DNA that we pass on, in our letters, or in some book. We weave together, one string ravelling into another.

A ship's worldline is it's log. It must contain the date and the position, and you can see the course that it charted through the brine and spray. This is my log, as small and insignificant as it is. This is where I can stamp my mark and say: Phil was here.

Spring

Time passes and hope springs eternal
Leaves bud, ready to burst
There's a feeling in this cold, near-spring air
That brings back memories of summer's fragrance
And the promise of verdant warm days
The cusp of change approaches
And summer threatens to spill over
Heralding its journey with the bird's call
And sweet southern winds
That lie around one's neck
Like hearth-warmed mantle

A little something pastoral to change the mood, eh?

Mirage

Ah Love, I languish at the thought of thee
The ghost of your embrace haunts me
For I have never known your touch
Instead Your spectre follows me
And mocks me
Are you dead?
Or is the whisper I hear
But an echo on the wind,
A moment's idle imagination
Or the distant discourse of lovers
In some hidden glen
The like I have not known or seen
Or felt the soft crush of grass
And Your voice murmuring in my ear
Such like is not mine to have or share

Mix this with two parts angst and one part loneliness. Much inspired by Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther."

Compulsion

Desire's voice drives nails
Of madness into my head
That yearns only for rest
From this fearful enchanted slumber
To wake from this unholy consciousness
It does not stop, pushing me further
Into the valley of its longing
Like water spilling over the cliff
Of suicidal sickened love
It's empty whispers tell me tales
Of satisfaction and gratified wishes
Of hypnotizing dreams and fantasie
That one can wake to
Desire's mirage leads me
Stumbling to false oasis'
In this desert of my life
Thirsty for the springs of companionship
Its whispers turn to sand and dust
Widening the hollow inside my chest
And withering away the face of reason
Till I turn away from its chapped
And blistered visage
Into the wide maw of the howling gale