“It’s up to each individual to make learning fun.”
~~~Trenton Doyle Hancock
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays and/or Just Jot It January! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2023/01/25/one-liner-wednesday-jusjojan-the-25th-2023-how-i-know/
B
“Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.”
~~~~~ Sandra Day O’Connor
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Join us for Linda’s Just Jot It January and/or One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2022/01/26/one-liner-wednesday-jusjojan-the-26th-2022-enchanted-snowfall/
So, here I am, trying out the new block editor, as promised here: SoCS: new editor . Not sure how to make the link show up with text I choose, but at least it is there.
I’ve tried reading some of the introductory articles, so I think this is a second paragraph blog, not just a continuation of the first block. Okay…
When I do my JC’s Confessions series, I start with a block quote, so I am trying out a block quote block. “Block quote block” is an awkward phrase…
So, when I finished that block, it defaulted back to paragraph block, which is nice because I’m sure I will use that the most.
Sometimes I use bullet points. Let’s see how that works.
The other thing I do sometimes is insert images. Hmmm…what should I choose to try that out?
Okay, it was a bit tricky to get out of my caption of the photo, but I managed to start a new paragraph block. Somehow, though, I lost my sidebar that had the category, tagging, and other post stuff….
Yay! I managed to get it back. It had gotten moved over to having info for just the block I was working on, but now I have gotten it back to Document mode.
While I’m sure this exploration of the basics of the block editor has been fascinating – not – I’m going to try to throw on some categories and tags and get it published.
Fingers crossed…
Change is good.
Change is difficult.
Change is necessary.
Change is easier when you have a choice about it.
Obviously, many of us have made a lot of changes due to the pandemic, but this is not going to be another one of my pandemic posts. (Silent cheering.)
Instead, it is about being faced with WordPress retiring the classic editor in favor of the block editor. Those of you with newer blogs are probably already using it – and, I’m sure, many of the people with older blogs are, too.
I admit to not being especially tech-savvy, but I learned to use the classic editor well enough to be able to keep Top of JC’s Mind going for six years and counting. I admit that it has been frustrating at times, especially in getting poetry to format properly. White space is not a friend of the classic editor. I had to learn to add photos, but I tend to post text only most of the time. My brain processes words better than images and I don’t like having to think about copyright issues and such when I’m posting.
I did do a bit of experimenting with the block editor a few months back when I began to set up a new website for the Boiler House Poets Collective. [Note to self: Get the site public soon.] I found it very confusing, so I swapped back into the classic editor. “It” in the prior sentence meaning the block editor.
Yesterday, when I logged in to post about the first anniversary of my mom’s death, I was faced with the news that the current classic editor is being retired as of June 1 in favor of the ever-so-superior block editor. I was not in the mood to experiment at that point, although I did read the short article about it and opened a tab with a longer article for future reference.
Later in the day yesterday, I wrote a post scheduled for tomorrow, using the classic editor.
And here I am on Saturday morning, writing this post using the classic editor.
I’m promising myself to read more about the block editor later today. I’m really hoping I can learn to use it without a long and painful learning curve.
If push comes to shove, though, I do have the instructions to revert to something that is very close to the classic editor.
I’ll try not to wimp out and use it, though.
Promise.
Change is good. Right?
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is basing the post on a word beginning with ch. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2020/05/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-23-2020
2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley!
https://www.quaintrevival.com/
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
~~~ Benjamin Franklin
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https://lindaghill.com/2018/02/07/one-liner-wednesday-you-know-youve-made-it/
Hmmm….I seem to be indulging my love of parentheses lately.
Warning: I may move on to ellipses next…
Okay, back to the post…
Over the weekend, we went to our wireless store to shop for T’s first smartphone. Given that she is about to head to Missouri to work at a grasslands field research station, she will need GPS and access to databases and such to help with her fieldwork. She also may need it for internet access from the place where she will be living, which does not have broadband available.
They were having a half-price special on an appropriate phone, which the salesperson referred to as buy-one-get-one-free…
So, the next thing I knew, I was getting my first smartphone, too.
It’s quite a step forward in technology for me, given that I was using a flip-phone that was so old the store didn’t have a connector to copy my contacts onto the smartphone. Fortunately, I didn’t have a ton of contacts, although it was tedious to copy them myself. On the other hand, it was a lot easier to type in the names than to push the number buttons the appropriate amount of times for each letter.
It is handy to have E here, as she has had a smartphone for a while and could help me learn how to use my new phone and how to delete or disable apps that came pre-installed, but that I don’t want to bother with. She also taught me important things, like how to silence the ringer.
This probably sounds funny to people who are used to using smartphones and other devices. I realize they are supposed to be intuitive and easy to figure out, but I am not very good at dealing with symbols and swiping and such. I do better with words and manuals with an index that I can read. Of course, those don’t exist any more…
I also don’t use my cell phone as most people do. My landline is still my primary phone number. Very few people have my cell number. I realize that most people want to be connected at all times, but I don’t want anyone bothering me when I am off doing something else. I don’t want a reminder call on my dentist appointment while I am grocery shopping or visiting my parents.
I also don’t text. That may change with T leaving soon for Missouri. I do use g-chat for messaging, so texting is a natural extension of that.
One thing that will be helpful is downloading the apps for some of the stores that I frequent. Recently, our supermarket decided that it would no longer mail out coupons. Having a smartphone will make it easier to download them to my loyalty card.
Who knows? Maybe I will go wild and start taking photos and streaming videos and texting all the time and playing games and such.
Most likely, not…
*****
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In these divisive days around the US elections, I have been clinging to any positive news of people reaching out and offering love, hope, and acceptance. I want to share this story from this past Sunday at my church.
There is a parishioner who co-teaches a service learning course at the local community college. Part of this course is a service trip to Haiti, to a village in the northern section of the island. The church has raised funds and donated materials for the projects on a regular basis over the last several years, so she gives us periodic updates.
The group went to Haiti in October. Because of flooding and hurricane Matthew, the village had endured damage to many of the mudbrick and straw buildings, but other repairs had already been made. The water system that protects the people from water-borne diseases was back in service. The two-classroom school that was part of the earlier iterations of the project had re-opened. Two more classrooms will be added soon. They and the adjoining church, which also serves as a community gathering place, are powered by solar panels and there is enough energy storage to allow the children to do homework at the school after dark, using LED lights. Computers that were donated are part of the school curriculum. There is also a newly-opened sewing school with donated machines that is helping local people learn a useful trade.
Last year, land was cleared for a community garden which grows food for the schoolchildren’s lunch. They had been growing staples like corn and beans which can be dried for later use, as there is no refrigeration available. The community had decided to grow rice as well, which wound up being a fortuitous decision; when the floods came, the rice crop continued to grow nicely and they just had their first rice harvest, with many bags of rice in storage for future school lunches.
The school lunch program is especially important as many of the children will eat their only meal of the day at school.
School costs the equivalent of $25 a year, but that sum is too much for some of the families, so there is a new scholarship fund in place to help more children attend school. There is also a plan to add a kitchen with solar ovens to the school, so that the cooks who make the school lunch can also bake breads and pies for sale to benefit the lunch program.
The people in the village are filled with hope, as they work steadily toward making their lives safer and more comfortable with the help of their friends and partners from our area.
We all need hope. We all need to reach out to each other, to help each other, to recognize that every person has inherent dignity.
Thank you to the villagers in Haiti for reminding me of the power of hope.
I am a proud alumna of Smith College, one of the oldest women’s colleges in the United States. I am committed to the liberal arts tradition of pursuing education in both breadth and depth and am eager to learn new things.
So, when Smith announced that it was offering its first ever MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), entitled Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World, I jumped at the chance to sign up, ultimately joining over 5,000 participants from 140 countries.
The seven-week course, taught by Professor Lauren Duncan, was scheduled to begin March 21. In the weeks prior, I had carefully planned for the three to five hours a week that the course was projected to take.
Within the first twenty-four hours that the course was available online, my mother-in-law died after suffering a heart attack.
I wasn’t sure whether or not I would still be able to do all the course activities as I had planned. In one of our first assignments, we had to state our learning goals. I honestly said that I didn’t know how well I would be able to keep up, but that I intended to try.
Back in the day, I was a very good student – and hyper-conscientous. Those instincts reasserted themselves and, even though I was exhausted and overwhelmed, I kept up with the coursework, which often took longer than five hours for me to complete, until the last week. We were to write a five to ten page paper and critique another student’s paper – and I just did not have the time/brain power/concentration to do it. It was some comfort that, because I had completed all the other work, I had enough points to pass the course, had I actually been taking it for credit, which I wasn’t…
Despite my less than optimal participation, I was very pleased to have taken this course and learned a lot from it. I have admired many activists and it was interesting to gain insights into their personal makeup and motivations. Given that I have been involved in activism myself in several different areas, including feminism, social justice, and environmentalism, I was also able to see some of what I learned alive in me.
The course used the lives of eight activists to help teach various theories of the psychology underlying group identity and activism. Our first step was to choose one of the eight women to study in depth by reading her oral history transcript from the Smith College Archives. Our choice divided us into study groups facilitated by Professor Duncan’s on-campus student assistants.
I chose Katsi Cook, who is a member of the Mohawk nation and an activist for feminism and indigenous rights, combining in her work as a midwife/educator utilizing medical knowledge in a culturally appropriate practice, and for environmental justice. Since my New England childhood, where we lived in an area that had once been home to the Mohawk nation, I have been interested in the indigenous peoples of North America, so I loved reading about Katsi’s experiences as a Mohawk, particularly the storytelling aspect. I was also drawn to Katsi as I have a long-standing interest in women’s health issues and in environmental issues.
Even though we each chose one activist to study in depth, we learned about all the others, who were active in racial issues, gender issues, and civil rights, through their timelines and other course references. Each week, we also learned about Smith alum and feminist icon Gloria Steinem. There was even a special discussion board for Gloria Steinem’s segment of the course, which gave us a forum for addressing our own experiences with activism.
After an introductory week in which we chose the activist to study in depth and read her oral history, we used the next five weeks to study a relevant psychological theory, beginning with earlier work and progressing through to more recent developments in the field. We read scholarly articles and viewed Professor Duncan’s lectures on them, along with relevant applications to our group of activists.
I found the earlier weeks, which involved older theories, to be insufficient to explain Katsi Cook’s or Gloria Steinem’s or my own experiences, although I certainly gained some insights. One of the most important for me was learning about Politicized Racial and Feminist Identity Theory. There is a stage in this theory called immersion in politicized racial identity and embeddedness in feminist identity in which the individual ties themselves so closely to their racial or gender group that they exclude those who don’t belong to their group. In this phase, attitudes toward people outside the group can be very rigid and negative. For the vast majority of people, this phase leads to an emersion/emanation phase, in which the individual develops a more open and nuanced way of relating to people from other identity groups.
Learning about this theory made sense of a situation that bothers me. Many people have a negative connotation of feminism because they think that feminists hate men and feel superior to them, a viewpoint that may be held by women feminists in the embeddedness phase but that is not held by most feminists. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding has led many feminists of all ages and genders to be reluctant to use the word feminist to describe themselves. I appreciate and participate in the current efforts to reclaim the accurate use of the words feminism and feminist, but it can be difficult to educate people. It was helpful for me to be able to apply insights from this theory to this current problem.
In the later weeks of the course, we learned more about some more recent developments in psychological theory. One of the most helpful for me in describing what I saw in Katsi Cook’s life and my own was the concept of intersectionality. The theory takes into account that we each have multiple identities which interact and determine our thoughts and actions. For example, I am a woman, a Catholic, a person with roots in the rural Northeast United States, a parent, a college graduate, and an Irish-Italian-American. Those aspects of my identity, along with others, impact my thoughts, actions, and reactions. Causes in which I am active, such as the movement toward women’s ordination in the Catholic church and the climate justice movement, relate in various ways to several aspects of my identity, not just one.
Another concept that struck me in particular in the later weeks was that of generativity. In examining what personality traits and life experiences lead to activism, we examined the impetus to change things for the better for current and future generations and to pass on knowledge and wisdom. All of the activists we studied showed this trait and it is something that I am acutely aware of in my own life. So much of the work of activism is about making change possible for the future, even when you know you are unlikely to see the final results of your work. Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not live to see women gain the federal right to vote in the United States, but her activism helped to make it possible. Many civil rights activists died before seeing Barack Obama elected president, but their witness was vital in moving the country forward. I myself am aware of the generativity aspect of my own activism. I may not see women ordained in the Catholic church but perhaps my daughters will. I won’t know how much impact my work against fossil fuels and for renewable energy and efficiency will have on the extent of global warming, but I feel obligated to future generations to try.
I truly appreciated this course and all I learned from it. The second offering of this course will begin on September 12, just a few days from now. If you are interested you can register here: https://www.edx.org/course/psychology-political-activism-women-smithx-psy374x-0. Professor Duncan has wisely added an audit option for the course, so people can choose to view the course materials and participate in the discussion boards without having to worry about papers, quizzes, and grades.
When things settle down here, I may be on the lookout for another MOOC. There is always so much more to learn.
This evening, in the adult version of Binghamton Poetry Project, I wrote my first tanka. Here, I am sharing the precious post about some of the first grade poets who are loving, learning, and creating with the BPP.
“We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.”
– Gloria Steinem
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Top of JC's Mind 