Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability

1. Why is vulnerability important in your life? Do you feel like it would benefit your life?
2. What could you be vulnerable about that you feel would improve your life or others' lives?
3. What are we scared of when it comes to vulnerability?
4. How do we learn to be vulnerable?

Elizabeth Gilbert: Your Elusive Creative Genius

1. When have you written something, created something, done something that merited an "Allah, Allah, Allah?"


2. How does your "daemon" or "genius" work with you?


3. What are the struggles of a creative life or creating in general? What are you fears?

Parul Sehgal: An Ode to Envy

Before I Die Project: Candy Chang

http://beforeidie.cc/site/about/

What is Education?

I am teaching this documentary and doing an accompanying project with my students based on Vik Muniz's powerful social art project on garbage in Brasil. I truly was different after watching this film. Its called "The Waste Land" directed by Lucy Walker. I need to do things like this. It is in my heart to do them and while I know that my path with always come back to teaching in more formal classrooms, my life will not reach its full purpose until I spend time finding and learning from and documenting the stories of the people of this Earth. I have to meet them and love them and know their lives. Teaching is nothing without these stories. We spend so much time teaching about things that narrow our view to a single test or way of thinking. we start believing at our root that a letter grade is the most important thing in our lives. we begin to value ourselves and others based on performance at a desk and we become a patch of 2'x2'x6' nothingness. Strong words, I know, but education is not that. education is not copying worksheets and filling in small bubbles with a #2 lead pencil. It is spending time in a trash heap learning to love people who have become the fringe of society. it is involving them in something greater than themselves so they can step back and see how narrow they once saw their own lives. This CAN happen in our classrooms. we CAN teach our students who they are. we CAN show them how to step back from cares that mean nothing to the depths of what life has to offer. this is not idealism, this is truth. and so few of us are brave enough to teach it. we are scared of what it might do to us. and to them.

mistakes

"Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life. Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever." ~ Neil Gaiman

MLK, JR.

What do you know about Martin Luther King, Jr.?

How did he stand up for others?At what cost? And how did he affect our lives today? When and how have you stood up for your self or others?

"Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

What does this mean?
How do we affect others?
How does this apply to our art class?