Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!
On the Solstice, AI Notebooks, and Returning Light
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8 December 2024 Solstice & Podcasts AheadMid-December warmth, to all! I've always been more drawn to the Solstice than the traditional New Year, that shortest of daygleams, that center of Halcyon illusions of serenity. What it marks moving forward, though, is the gradual lengthening of light. And with it, perhaps, resolve. Still, in keeping with a tradition both Victorian and far more ancient (imagining birth and death rituals, Saturnalia, Stonehenge), Waywords will bring a ghost story reading in time for Solstice. Watch for it as the Waywords Podcast finally emerges again, and over the course of January, reinvents itself a bit as the podcast Literary Nomads. Together, we will explore texts (and their reading, our meaning-making, and even dialogue with them), taking them further I think than many might imagine. It will be my longform method of bringing critical literacy to bear upon our own thinking, our classrooms, our public spaces. And I will be calling on the Waywords Street Team to support where they can. (Join them if you wish!)
And speaking of Halcyon, this reminder from Unwoven, an earlier draft variant: Engaging UpdatesStill thinking a great deal on engaging community, part of that resolve thing. And of course, with your ideas I am updating the Engagement page of the website with new organizations and resources that will be valuable to all of us, how we can find the support and opportunities to become actively invested in the evolving global political-cultural narratives. Find nine new groups added since this last newsletter! The important point: in a culture that too often offers the illusion of connectedness, we need not work and live alone if we find the right communities for our thinking, talk, reading, and writing. Have communities that work for you? Let me know!
Ideally, what appears here is free or low cost, globally applicable, and a space which works for constructive individual support. Scholarship and NotebookLMI've a few tools I use for keeping organized, calendaring my way, setting priorities, and the like. But if you have not tried Google's NotebookLM and have some larger projects ahead or archives behind you, this might be the very thing, and (for now) it's free. In brief, you offer this AI access to your chosen GoogleDrive files or uploads of PDFs, and it draws specifically from them to answer your questions and help you synthesize, noting the doc it found the answers in. While each topic "folder" has a limit of 50 sources, these sources can be ~1000 pages long each. I took, for instance, nearly all of my notes on curriculum design and combined them into a single doc. I might have done the same with meeting minutes or entire booklength manuscripts. Learning how to ask it the most productive questions is still a task, but I've found (especially as I work on that Unwoven Teacher Guide!) that it prevents me from forgetting some aspect or complication in teaching and design. (Gone are my early days of spreading penciled index cards across my floor!) I've been using it, too, to plan out the path and connections for Literary Nomads. After 35 years in the classroom, I have . . . a few notes that are difficult to keep track of! If you've already been using it (or have a different tool that works well), let me know!
Early Recommendation from My Reading:Kumar relates the ancient tale of Angulimala ("Necklace of Fingers") and his meeting with the Buddha. What follows is a brief but wonder-full tale of dialogue and love, of engaging hate and irrationality, of discovering the means to transform. I have read and taught this book frequently, and I keep coming back to it, for all the right reasons. Away with a Culture of Exclamation"The act of asking is an epistemological leap, a deliberate step into the unknown. We refine and adapt our understanding, not necessarily through the precision of answers, but through the evolution of our inquiries."
(Remind me to talk of escapist readings, later, okay?) Thanks for reading! And we're at the edge of needed renewal. Steve What's Ahead?
Solstice Tidings |
Waywords Studio
Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!