RERC screening of "High School" (October 10th, 2009)

October 10, 2009 Nicole’s place

Documentary Film: High School

Attending: Nicole, Ben, Monique, David, Amber, Malcolm, Gabriel and Deanna

Watched the documentary High School (1968) by Frederick Wiseman.

The 1960s technology of hand-held 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders allowed documentary filmmakers to operate relatively unobtrusively to tell stories. Wiseman was an early practitioner of “direct cinema.”

High School was captured at Northeast High School, a large middle class, mostly white, school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As an examination of how an educational institution works to transmit the dominant social values of a community, it is as relevant today as it was more than forty years ago. When High School was released, the relationship Wiseman had with school administrators deteriorated. To avoid a lawsuit the film was banned in Philadelphia.

Wiseman followed up High School 25 years later with High School II (1994) at a very different institution, the alternative school Central Park East Secondary School in Harlem, New York. This is the school that RERC discussed at an earlier meeting.

Alternative School Presentation and a Book Report (November 1st 2009)

Much happened at today's meeting. 


Amber introduced the collective to a unique tutoring concept that started at 826 Valencia in San Francisco and Malcolm presented on a book hot off the MIT Press called Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century.
 

I. 826 Valencia


Dave Eggers from McSweeney’s magazine wanted to create a tutoring space where youth saw writers in action. Used streetfront of their office space.  The literary journal is using the same space; kids see professionals at work. Retail component, required by zoning, a very playful pirate-supply shop. Other 826s springing up in other cities have retail spaces in the front -- a spy shop, a superhero shop -- and tutoring in the back. See his talk on TED. 




II. Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century - MIT Press

Malcolm presented the book (hot off the MIT Press) called Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century. He was reviewing it for BorderCrossings, so he took serious notes and liked the idea of some double duty, i.e., presenting to our RERCiness as well as reviewing it. Since it has a lot of essays, conversations and questionnaires, it may take two RERC meetings.

RERC on "The Art of Memory" (September 2009)

Ben delivered a book report on Frances Yates's The Art of Memory.
Members practiced the list they learned last month. Most people remembered most or all of the list.

The book turned out to be less exciting that we had hoped.  Yates was primarily interested in the transmission of particular Greek and Roman texts on memorization through the ages.  We had hoped to find more information on the practice of the arts of memory.  There was some tantalizing information about the use of the arts in Medieval Occult circles and new forms of knowledge/power being created by the architectural construction of mnemonic knowledge, but not much.

RERC research on memory (August 2009)

Malcolm and Ben hosted a workshop on the topic of Memory in which we memorized a list of 32 unrelated words.  From the first meeting of RERC we wanted to look at alternative and historical educational practices and thought that memory might provide a good example of a skill and technique we no longer learn or even use. 

Malcolm presented a method described in Frances Yates's classic on the topic, The Art of Memory, called the architecture of memory.  It is described as the preferred technique of orators in the Greek Polis and Roman Senate, at a time when speeches were a central component of public and political life.  The method requires that a person memorize the layout of a building and is able to visualize walking through it's rooms.  In each room the person defines specific places where the signs or symbols of the object or idea that was to be remembered could be placed.  Once the objects or ideas were placed in their rooms the person merely had to walk through the rooms to find the objects that had been placed there.

The members of RERC who chose to use this technique mostly used their childhood homes or another building that was intimately familiar to them.

Ben presented a method described as a linking mechanism that used visualization to combine two works in a single memory, instead of remembering each word individually.  For example, instead of remembering bee and New York separately you would visualize a bee flying down 5th Avenue.

As it turned out, both methods depended heavily on the visual sense.  According to Yates and other scholars, it is the most powerful sense and thus is most effective for the purpose of memorization.

Most of us were able to remember the list after several hours of conversation and even months later we could recall large sections of it.

RERC planning meeting in Gabe's garden (July 15th 2009)

Speaker series: Velvet and Jonah (June 20th 2009)

Velvet and Jonah Schien joined us today.

They are both educators and have unique experience in alternative education.

Velvet is currently hired to teach at the Dufferin Grove Alternative School which is to open in September 2009.

Jonah grew up and taught at The School House, an alternative school run out of his family's home.

We learned a lot. We listened to their stories and discussed the sustainability of alternative schools.

RERC bbq at David's rich friends' pad (May 17th 2009)

We met. We socialized. Too much beer and sunshine to discuss anything linear.