It is the second day of spring, earlier the same year, and a colleague and I are shivering in soaking clothes in a damp ring of protective salal and cedar above Chin Beach. We are conducting reconnaissance on the Juan de Fuca Trail, assessing its relative difficulty, subjective and objective risks and hazards, and gauging the […]
Read more "Scenes in Adventure Learning (Part II): Reconnaissance"Admittedly, this is the Casa (not Soundlab), but that is the 12 string Grant was playing in the Soundlab recordings). Originally dropped in Alan Levine’s Storybox, which I think was supposed to remain a one-stop shop for media content, Grant Potter and I recorded a bunch of songs sitting around the Soundlab kitchen table back […]
Read more "Bootlegs Volume 1: the Soundlab Sessions"Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V Imagine a life where possibilities are opening at a speed that veers unpredictably between exhilarating and terrifying. The familiar, precisely because it’s familiar and safe, still tugs at you, but even so, you want out because your old life constricts as much as it […]
Read more "TALONS Hunger Games"As a guitar teacher at Gleneagle, I am priviliged to enjoy many of the magical exploits of our performing arts department. In concerts, tours and festivals over the past few years, I’ve increasingly brought along recording and editing tools in my Macbook & other digital toys to preserve the fleeting nature of jaw-dropping live performances. […]
Read more "Powell River Vocal Summit"We have survived the first week of school! (Though if you’ve seen me recently, you know I’ve been surviving just to make it here! Thanks for the concern from everyone who saw me and stared wide-eyed at the story of my last week and a bit!) As you may have heard, I was involved in […]
Read more "My Last Few Weeks"Last week I received an early-morning phone call informing me that a friend of a friend had passed away over the weekend along the lengths of the Yellowhead Highway’s western flank, in Smithers, BC. Weary of the drive through the Fraser’s canyon and the sheer distance involved in traversing the province’s northern shoulder – some two thousand kilometers in all – […]
Read more "Canada Day & Our Country's Parks"< p style=”text-align: center;”> Several years ago I was sitting in the aisle seat of an American Airlines 737 in Dallas, catching the evening flight to Vancouver. While we waited on the tarmac, a serious man in his early fifties cleared his throat and pushed the attendant button above us. When the flight attendant arrived […]
Read more "Harnessing Consumer Rage"Between 2003 and 2005 I spent three consecutive summers working in the woods of the Ozark Foothills in Arkansas at a summer camp, living in tents alongside sixty some young instructors huddling our lives around the idea that the indulgent experience of nature could provide some truth. We would wake with the dawn and attend […]
Read more "On Thoreau's Birthday"As part of my summer course work finishing up PDP at SFU, I took an eight-credit Designs for Learning Language Arts course with Dr. Carolyn Mamchur – to this date one of the most intelligent, warm and inspirational people I have yet encountered – during which each student was to study their favourite author. Since declaring […]
Read more "Marquezologue"A few months ago I caught wind of Google Docs and was struck with the flexibility offered beyond the clunky Wiki capabilities of my class SharePoint site. My gifted class (undertaking grade nine, ten & eleven English) had been working through draft phases of This I Believe essays, using the class’ Wiki to create blogs for daily writes […]
Read more "This We Believe: A Google Docs Collaborative Writing Experiment"