As I watched, my mind volleyed from incredulity at how adept the puppeteers were in making the Cristobal puppet seem like a real person, to marvelling at the actors’ ability to employ their imaginations and activate those of the audience.

This naturally made me think of dramatic play with young children. Recently in Curriculum for Early Childhood Education, a course I am taking with Sal Vascellaro, we discussed the value in dramatic play for children. Giving children time, space, and materials to explore experiences that are new to them, allows them to make sense of their world. The opportunity to recreate scenes and roles provides children with a medium for problem solving skills, socializing, and building their confidence. When I worked with five-year-olds, I would regularly observe them pretending to be superheroes, monsters, and zombies at recess time, which likely demonstrated their desire to be powerful beings, able to do things that children cannot or are not allowed to do.

As I have pondered the importance of dramatic play, I have found myself questioning why it seems that as children grow, such play diminishes. In fact, unless an older child, teenager or adult takes an active interest in acting, they often do not participate in dramatic play again. Could dramatic play benefit people of all ages?

In my opinion, it could, and not just particularly for educators trying to capture the attention of their students. Imagining, or playing with concepts of reality can be a very powerful excursion for the mind, creating new perspectives, and even fostering compassion (you can’t know a person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes). As standardized testing and curriculum cause ever-increasing pressures in the classroom, it seems that the battle to dedicate time to dramatic play is tougher than ever, though not impossible to win. And the benefits are worth fighting for.  As the Association for Childhood Education International states ”No adult instruction can take the place of children’s own activities and experiences through continual play.”

Every Wednesday afternoon throughout student teaching last semester, I met with my conference group. Led by our advisor (who is also our professor), five other students and myself discuss our placements, our coursework and any other relevant (and sometimes less than relevant) issues.

Typically, we meet in an office (on one occasion we attended a discussion at the Rubin Museum). For two hours we chat over a table spread with various snacks – this is far from a formal atmosphere. This isn’t a course in which you ultimately earn a grade, though you do earn course credit, and attendance is key.

I have found that this group adds a unique richness to my overall experience at Bank Street. I like hearing about the student teaching experiences of my peers – their triumphs and challenges. It’s also nice to have a platform for sharing my experiences, with people who understand what it is like to be in a similar environment, attempting to achieve similar goals.

If anybody is going to understand your trials and tribulations in becoming a teacher, these are the people. We exchange advice on how to teach a particular lesson, how to finagle a behavioral issue, or even tips on courses to register for or job hunting. I also like to think that my conference group offer me a chance to get out of my head and try another way of thinking.  I don’t know about you, but I try not to get too bogged down in my approach – to teaching, to life! – and nothing helps more than hearing other people’s perspectives.

In fact, there are two people in my conference groupwho are further along in their program and are a wealth of knowledge on different courses in my program – museum education. They are also seasoned experts on interning in museums in this city, having been born and raised here and having been intent on working in this field for a long time.

Time for these quality conversations can be difficult to find during our actual classes. Conference group is a way to foster deeper connections between us, and make us think about what we might have yet to discover in each other. We are all a wealth of resources, but we won’t know it unless we try to get to know each other. Not only that, meeting with just a handful of others encourages both intimacy and discussion. It can be a lot less daunting to speak before five people rather than the twenty-five in a regular class.

In the Museum Education program, supervised fieldwork placements in museums happen during the Spring semester. I am really eager to attend my conference group as we embark on our new placements. I have a feeling that we are all in for an exciting period of adjustment, transferring to professional environments where we are more likely to be working on grants than helping eight-year-olds spell words. I’m looking forward to visiting each other’s institutions this Spring!

*Springbok

© Miri WTPOTUS June 4, 2012  

In an article recommended by Bridgette, Ion Mihai Pacepa warns about what is happening to our country [emphasis added]:

History usually repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance of seeing that re-enactment with your own eyes. In 1978, I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people rid themselves of their Marxist dictatorship, carefully disguised as socialism.

Thirty years later I witnessed how the same Marxism, camouflaged as socialism, began infecting the shores of my adoptive country, the United States, which had just won a 44-year Cold War against Marxism and against its earthly incarnation, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In a 2008 column titled “Big Political Shifts Are Underway,” Joelle Fishman, chairman of the Action Commission of the Communist Party USA, strongly endorsed the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, appealing to all working people in the United States to back Senator Barack Obama, in order to provide “a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right.”

That new alliance between the Democratic Party and the Communist Party was a first in the history of the United States, the world’s headquarters of democracy and free enterprise. In November 2008, over 65 million Americans who were unable to identify the stealth virus of Marxism that was infecting the Democratic Party voted to give this party the White House and both chambers of Congress.

How many Americans understand that Obama and his most avid followers in Congress are indeed Marxists, if not Communists? Or that the Democrat Party is not merely “progressive”, but is at best socialist (at worst, Communist)?

This election, our fellow Americans must be advised of these facts, so that everyone realizes exactly who and what Obama is, before they vote for him again, and before they elect any other “Democrat” to Congress.

No matter their professed beliefs while running for office, once in DC, Democrats will march in lockstep with their socialist party leaders–Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi.

Therefore, please do read Mr. Pacepa’s entire article and recommend it to all of your friends, but most especially to those who may vote for Democrats in November. Pacepa was an insider, so he knows stealth Marxists when he sees them.

Coincidentally, just this morning, I reviewed information I’d gathered about the May 19th Communist Organization in New York City, during the time that Obama was supposedly at Columbia University there. A quote from one article from 1984:

According to the FBI, militant feminists forged the group in 1976 from the remnants of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and lesser-known radical groups that sprang from the anti-war and civil rights movements of more than a decade ago.

The cause of these urban guerrillas of the 1980s is world socialism, in the style of Lenin and Marx. Their tools include bombs and bullets, say intelligence investigators with the FBI and New Jersey state police.

Under the banner of a shadowy parent group called at various times ”The Family” or ”The Collective,” the May 19th Communist Organization has committed numerous bombings and ”terrorist-style” armed robberies of armored cars to finance their cause, according to the FBI. The radicals say the holdups were ”expropriations” to fund a civil war and create the Republic of New Afrika in five southern states. …

The May 19th Communist Organization went public in 1981 with a statement to the press, according to the FBI. The group said it was committed to building a revolutionary movement that was ”part of the world-wide struggle to defeat U.S. imperialism,” an FBI spokesman said. The group said it aligned itself with other extremist organizations: the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, the Struggle of Native American Nations for Sovereignty and the Mexican-Chicano People for Liberation.

At a public meeting in 1983, the May 19th Communist Organization said it also supported the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriquena (FLAN [sic: FALN]), and the people jailed in the Brink’s case.

Also in 1983, the group said it was organizing ”white people within the (U.S.) empire committed to the development of armed struggle to win the liberation of oppressed nations and to bring about socialism,” the FBI spokesman said.

The above quote is from Radical Group Has Roots in ’60s by Ann O’Neill, Philadelphia Daily News; December 1, 1984. There’s no link; it’s available from a subscription database.

Many coincidences come to mind. Some facts:

(1) At Occidental in California, during his first two years of college, Obama spent much of his time organizing anti-apartheid activities.

(2) Between Christmas 1980 and the following summer, Obama ditched the name Barry Soetoro (or Barry Obama) and became Barack Hussein Obama II.

(3) Obama went to NYC to attend Columbia University around the same time that the May 19th Communist Organization began operating on the East Coast; at Columbia, Obama specifically sought out the “politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists,” according to his own book.

(4) Obama surely knew Bill Ayers and possibly also Bernardine Dohrn, both erstwhile members of the Weather Underground; Obama’s girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, attended Bank Street college at the same time as Ayers, in the early to middle 1980s. They all lived only blocks apart.

(5) The Springbok incident, where a Port Authority policeman was blinded by acid thrown into his face, happened in late Sept. 1981, after the school year started at Columbia; it involved an anti-apartheid protest; it involved many Columbia University students; this was the first semester that newly-renamed Barack Hussein Obama II attended Columbia, being fresh to that university after specializing in anti-apartheid activism at Occidental. (Of course, official stories differ about his time in attendance at Columbia, and Obama refuses to release any college records. Why the obfuscation?)

(6) The Springbok incident was traced to “a member of the 19th Communist Organization, a Marxist-Leninist organization that advocated the armed revolution and violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”

(7) Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with Eric Holder, orchestrated pardons for 16 members of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberation National (FALN) and Los Macheteros, terrorist organizations responsible for 130+ bombings and 6 murders.

(8) Eric Holder is now Obama’s Attorney General and Hillary Clinton is now Obama’s Secretary of State.

(9) The May 19th Communist Organization had connections to New Haven, Connecticut, which was the source for weapons and explosives they were charged with possessing in late December, 1984. (O’Neill article, cited above.)

(10) Obama’s social security number was allegedly issued in Connecticut, in 1977, although he never lived in Connecticut; Bill Ayers and his domestic terrorist associates were masters of creating false identity documents, including obtaining false social security numbers for themselves and cohorts. (When he wrote that linked article, Jack Cashill seemed unaware that Ayers and Obama coexisted in NYC for several years in the early ’80s.)

Many more such “coincidences” swirl around Barack Obama. It would behoove all Americans to ask this question before voting in November: Who is this man?

Is there an innocent explanation for every one of these coincidences? Perhaps. But so far, We the People haven’t been given any explanations. Instead, we’ve been called names simply for asking for our employee to provide particulars to back up his resume.

It’s long past time for the American people to ask these questions and to receive answers instead of stonewalling and insults.

########

* Photo source: Description Antidorcas marsupialis; Author Coda.coza

Did Genevieve Appeal to Obama’s Black or White Side?

Was She Real or a Composite? 

A “Composite” Gal, Genevieve Cook, and Big Headed Obama

What follows below is a transcription that I wrote of the video for those who prefer to read what was introduced by Kris in Obama File‘s YouTube presentation, “Exclusive: Obama’s Ex-Girlfriend Worked At Communist School.” Links and screenshots were added.  Click to enlarge the photos.  The source link is located at the end.   It was very well done.

Commentary by the author preceding the You Tube:

Vanity Fair, May 2,  published excerpts of a new Obama biography that makes the ‘stunning revelation’ that Obama’s New York girlfriend described in ‘Dreams From My Father’ was a composite of several different women. Politico then ran with a ‘Obama:  New York girlfriend was a composite’ headline. Then David Graham of The Atlantic went in for the kill:  ‘Politico has served as an unwitting pawn in a game conservative spin-meisters are playing to redefine Obama between now and November.’

This is all described in play-by-play detail by Tim Stanley in The Telegraph, bemoaning that Obama was not vetted in 2008, but sighs in relief that now conservatives are making up for lost time.

The only problem is that conservatives aren’t running the narrative, liberals are.

“Exclusive: Obama’s Ex-Girlfriend
Worked at Communist School”

Remember Vanity Fair was the rag that ran the 10,000-word hit piece against Sarah Palin in 2010 in anticipation of a presidential run, that even the slavering liberals criticized.

Or that Politico was the smear machine that ran 90+ vague, anonymous stories in less than a week about Herman Cain’s sexual harassment accusers.

The point is that when the liberal media ‘reveals’ something about Obama, we know something huge is about to be released.

When the Breitbart ‘Big’ sites were about to reveal the Derrick Bell video tapes, Buzzfeed got ahead of it, releasing edited versions of the tapes with toned down commentary, in what conservatives call the liberal process of controlling an explosion.

Obama Files initially thought this ‘controlled explosion’ had something to do with Obama’s sexual libido, or lack thereof, or variety thereof, as there have been numerous allegations  of Obama’s, shall we say ‘experimentation’ during the Harvard Law Review years, at least two male students stating they had been ‘sexually harassed’ by Obama.   (We won’t even talk about the Chicago years.).

The reason for this suspicion is that the David Maraniss bio excerpts seem to focus on Obama’s sexual personae with the passage most quoted on thousands of websites since May 2 (supposedly from Genevieve Cook’s ‘secret diary’):

Saturday, February 25  “the sexual warmth is definitely there –but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all.  I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons.  His warmth can be deceptive.  Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness — and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.” 

pg. 3

But there is something less salacious but no less perfidious about Ms. Cook, that is likely to come out very soon, so that the Obama campaign and its front groups/people – including Maraniss – are trying to begin to bend the narrative so that the bombshell won’t be so hard to swallow when it comes out.

Don’t waste your time searching for Cook on the Internet.  She has been dutifully scrubbed, but Maraniss committed a few faux pas when he divulged in his bio excerpts that Cook had worked as a teacher at the Brooklyn Friends School while dating our Community Organizer- in- Chief, and also where she had gone to prep school and college.

The K-12 Brooklyn Friends School has a little, carefully
hidden secret that exists to this day.

They like communists.

Don’t expect to find a picture of Lenin in the office, but with a little digging Obama Files found a few juicy tidbits.  Before we get into the Brooklyn Friends School, let’s take a tour of Ms. Cook’s education.

Maraniss reveals that Ms. Cook got her prep school training at none other than ‘Hanoi’ Jane Fonda’s old stomping grounds, Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, that to this day is concerned with ‘social justice’ issues  (socialism in plain speak).

Genevieve’s  journal-keeping started in 1975 during her final year at Emma Willard School, an academically rigorous prep school for young women in Troy, New York, and continued through her undergraduate years at Swarthmore and on into adulthood.” 

pg. 3.

Ah here is where it gets interesting.    Beginning in the 1960′s, Swarthmore, near Philadelphia, has been ground zero for Marxists.    When Obama say ‘Marxist professors and structural feminist’ in  Dreams From My Father, more than likely they were bred at Swarthmore.

Swarthmore often got  high praise for being good community organizers.   Swarthmore has had the distinction of being a breeding ground for radicals until this day.

Daily Gazette College Newspaper – Sept 16, 2007

Swarthmore – SDS – September 16, 2007

“After 40 Year Hiatus,  SDS Returns to Swat”

The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] an important force in organizing campus protests during the turbulent 1960′s is returning Swarthmore College after a hiatus of more than forty years.

SDS?  That’s not the same SDS associated with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn is it?

Swarthmore College was a leading school within the original SDS movement.   Swarthmore was heavily involved in the groups national organization.  “Vernon Grizzard ’66 was vice president of national SDS.  Paul Booth ’64 was a member of the National Council and led a SDS splinter-group, the Peace Research and Education Project [PREP].”

Paul Booth of SDS and Weather Underground fame, crony to Ayers and Dohrn?

Now we know the basis for Obama’s New York girlfriend working at a communist school while they were dating.

Barack Obama’s New York Girlfriend Genevieve Cook as described by Maraniss:

December, 1983.   A Christmas Party down in the East Village, at 240 East 13th Street.  It was a B.Y.O.B., and Genevieve Cook brought a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream.  The host was a young man employed as a typist at the Chanticleer Press, a small Manhattan publishing company that specialized in coffee-table books.  Genevieve had worked there briefly but had left to attend graduate school at Bank Street College, up near Columbia, and was now an assistant   teacher for second and third graders at Brooklyn Friends School.  She was living temporarily at her mother and stepfather’s place on the Upper East Side.

~

Standing in the kitchen was a guy named Barack, wearing blue jeans, T-shirt, dark leather jacket.  They spoke briefly, then moved on.  Hours later, after midnight, she was about to leave when Barack Obama approached and asked her to wait.  They plopped down on an orange beanbag chair a the end of the hall, and this time the conversation clicked.

pg. 2

Notice how quickly Maraniss passes over ‘Brooklyn Friends School.’    It’s like Obama’s reference in Dreams from my Father when he quickly mentions ‘socialist conference I sometimes attended.‘ Ah, the art of saying something without saying something.  But let’s look a little closer at Brooklyn Friends School.

Brooklyn Friends School had a little publication called ‘The Life.’ A little Left-leaning, but certainly not communist!

“The Life” November 16, 1965

Oh, what a few years brings.

“The Life”, February, 1971, left side column are the names:  Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Trotsky.

“The Life” February, 1971

And, like Swarthmore, some things never change.  At most K-12 schools, a field trip consists of going to the museum or opera.  At Brooklyn Friends School:

“Field Days”at Brooklyn Friends School – a trip to Russia

White Nights and Cultural Immersion for BFS
Upper Schoolers in Russia
by Jeffrey
Sept. 2007

This past summer eight upper school students, accompanied by teachers Sergei Mikhelsen and Lyubov Obertnaya spent two weeks in Russia touring the cities of St. Petersburg, Pakov and Moscow.  The students were sophomore Dominique White, seniors Brittany Fuller, Katelin Jackson, and Patricia O’Meara and…from the Class of 2007.

On their trip home from St. Petersburg, the group stopped in Moscow for two days, taking a walking tour of the Kremlin and making a requisite macabre visit to Lenin’s tomb.  But the highlight of Moscow was the world famous Russian Circus, everyone agreed.

For Sergei, the trip had three purposes for our students:  getting to know Russian culture and history better, getting them acquainted with their Russian peers so they could see in what ways they’re similar, and getting them to accept people from other cultures and beliefs.  The students are currently in the midst of preparing a presentation of photos and other media to present to the Upper School this fall during a special assembly.

Brooklyn Friends School – Trip to Russia

But as the commercials say, but wait, there’s more!

The other ‘controlled explosion’ in the Maraniss piece seems to have something to do with ‘Pakistani friends,’ that is dropped liberally here and there:

If Barack and Genevieve were in social occasions as a couple, it was almost always with the Pakistanis.

pg. 4

Obama Files, along with everyone else who knows anything about Obama, knows this will probably lead to Obama’s trip to Pakistan in 1981 that he kept secret and revealed as an off-hand remark while campaigning in April,2008.

This trip has been highly suspect.  In 1981, Pakistan was under martial law and barred not only Americans, but Jews and Christians,  from entering the country.  So that it has been theorized in 1981,  Obama had an Indonesian passport and identified himself as a Muslim in order to gain access to the country.

Funny, ‘right-wing conspiracy theorists’ have been trying to dig up Obama’s past for five years with little luck.  And Mr. Maraniss easily digs up two old girlfriends, a horde of Pakistani friends by name; is given access to the girlfriends’ letters and journals.  Just all sounds kinda strange…

But I guess we’re all just conspiracy theorists…

#######

Don’t Both Characters, Obama and Genevieve,
Belong in the Fiction Category?

Video Link

Leonard Marcus, a children’s literature expert, moderated a discussion between Mr. Juster & Mr. Feiffer, during which they described their childhoods and how the book was created.

After the discussion, Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer signed new 50th anniversary editions of The Phantom Tollbooth. While getting her book signed, Debbie found out that Norton Juster grew up in her Brooklyn neighborhood and attended her high school!

After the autographing session, everyone broke into groups to talk about books. Marci attended the “Mini-Caldecott” discussion group and Debbie attended the “Picture Book Biography” group.

The afternoon schedule included two more informative panels, one discussing comics for the very young and the other about Greek Myths retold.

All in all, it was a great day – at least until we got home to no electricity!

At Pace University‘s main cafeteria in Lower Manhattan last month, city health inspectors found food not kept at the proper temperature, workers using bare hands, workers not washing their hands, and soiled wiping cloths.

WCBS 880′s Sean Adams: Pace University Is Not Alone

Download: adams_dining1w_morn_110420.mp3|titles=Health%20Department%20Says%20Some%20NYC%20College%20Dining%20Halls%20Don't%20Make%20The%20Grade%20-%20WCBS%20880%20reporter%20Sean%20Adams%20has%20the%20story%20from%20Pace%20University%20in%20Lower%20Manhattan.|artists=WCBS%20880

The cafeteria received the lowest grade, a C. It was closed for two meal periods.

LINK: Check The Grade Of Your Favorite Restaurant

The New York Times reports that when it reopened, students boycotted.

It’s left a bad taste in their mouths.

“My meal plan ran out. So, I wouldnt be spending money in there,” one student told WCBS 880 reporter Sean Adams. “I don’t think the food is worth the money that they’re charging.”

Some were surprised by the results.

“Yeah, we definitely didn’t see anything that was that bad,” said another student.

Pace is not alone. Health inspectors found roaches and mice at three Fordham University eateries, and the same at Bank Street College.

New York University‘s Hayden Hall received a C, but seven other dining options at the school got As.

Schools tell the Times they’re going to do a better job.

The teacher who brings his or her class on a museum field trip provides that class with a potentially lasting impression. It is hoped that this impression benefits that class “educationally” (within rigid academic understanding and assessment) and experientially (those aspects of learning which are more personal and which reach beyond the immediate assessments of paper and pencil tests).

The value of an elementary school or middle school museum field trip as opposed to visiting the institution’s Web site is raw physical sensation of being in a new or rarely visited space. A space that is not always planned with the mission of teaching children. A space that in varying degrees and in varying ways offers opportunities for firsthand interactions or observations with physical objects. This is important because these interactions and observations potentially engrain the learning to create a lifelong lesson or experience.

When I was a student in the Museum Education at Bank Street, one of the questions we had to reflect upon was the purpose of the museum. After much debate the class concluded that a museum “had to be all things to all people.” It sounds glib but when you consider the processes museum curators and educators must engage in it makes sense.

The museum must first decide what is artifact and what is just junk. Then it must decide whose artifact or junk it is (as in cases of objects with potentially strong religious or cultural connotations)? Then it must decide on how to present that object in a manner that is dramatic and engaging while not offending its potential visitors. Then it must figure out how to teach with that object.

A museum without an education department or hearty educational offerings is not complete. While it may have exquisite and rare objects in their collection, those objects carry no additional value outside being pretty or rare and will immediately devalue once another like object is found, made prettier, or simply rises to fashion. Trained museum educators imbue a museum’s collection with meaning and relevance both academically and emotionally (or experientially).

When I heard on NPR that the Field Museum in Chicago was “teaching to the test,” my immediate reaction was negative. I mean how could they sully a potentially brilliant experience of visiting a museum by forcing that museum to adhere (in my opinion) to the worst aspects of institutionalized schooling – the unending creation of irrelevant data through an increasing battery of absurd tests.

Much like the stance taken by the author of the Instructify post, Rebecca Haines, the idea of museums being diminished to satellite test preparation centers was infuriating. I believe as Rebecca believes. Museum field trips are the “most valuable for all of the other learning opportunities and experiences” students can be provided. I also believe that a student’s museum experience can “enhance and reinforce the topics to which students are exposed in the classroom.”

But then, perhaps due to mellowing from old age, I took a more moderate view of the situation. I could see the need to “teach to the test.” I am willing to consider Director of Education at the Field Museum, Elizabeth Babcock’s need to show teachers that the Field Museum is relevant to their classrooms by addressing the demands of their administrators and districts.

However, I believe that relevance has always been there per Rebecca’s words. I also believe caution must be taken to avoid corruption of the positive and very necessary educational experiences museums provide. Unquestioned wholesale adoption of “teaching to the test” is not relevance but a short term fix based on the pedagogical whims.

If the shared definition of a museum “teaching to the test” is it providing opportunities for its visitors to practice academic skills in meaningful and relevant real world ways then I see no reason to condemn it. However, if it is not then we risk diminishing the true value of the museum as “space.”