Book mark recto
Originally uploaded by anselm23
I think it’s interesting that the crop
of the book mark
has played havoc with the format of
this entry…
A colleague of mine has been mentoring me in the fine art of teaching world languages. Her basic philosophy is simple:
- Read It
- Write It
- Say It
- Hear It
She drills kids incessantly, making them repeat words aloud and recite paradigms, sing hip hop songs with verb conjugations, and more. Her main subject of study is Spanish, and I made this bookmark for her because I’ve learned a lot from her as a colleague and mentor. The quotation is from Don Miguel de Cervantes, the great Spanish author of Don Quixote.
The patterns in the bookmark, of course, come from the patterns of Zentangle, which have not taken me too long to learn, although I tend to deploy them in spaces which are too tight to do me much good. All the same, I’ve learned a lot from doing the work this way. It’s akin to working from a grimoire — one learns a pattern, or a way of doing things, and then gradually one develops new ways of working with that pattern, or playing with it.
This is one of the critical things about design thinking, though: one has to have a certain facility with graphic design, or project management, or the technical skills related to the thing you’re building – whether it be an electronics device or a roller coaster. At some level, one needs a set of skills at a deep enough level that one can play. I said as much, or tried to, in an article I wrote for the CAIS CPD blog today.
