100 Days of Wonder-#7
It may not be immediately obvious what you are looking at here but it is literally rocket science. In January 2023 we did a day trip to the Kennedy Space Centre to break up the Disney Magic with some space exploration wonder. I don’t know how I feel about space exploration. We’ve done quite enough damage here and if only the money going up in flames in this picture had been put to solving the world’s problems… We saw this particular rocket on the Space X launch pad. It was actually meant to launch the day before it did and we had forgotten about it and then happened to see it from out hotel room and it took a minute to realise what it was. It was sort of fun to have seen the rocket on the launch pad and then see this and I got lost in the wonder and the big what-ifs and wow space… and then it wore off. Somehow space has never really held my attention. Astronaut was probably one of the few things I didn’t want to be as a kid. The questions as to whether we are alone or whether there are aliens seemed irrelevant when as a kid I could just go to Narnia through a wardrobe…spaceships and rockets seemed excessive. Now the science got more interesting as i got older and then less interesting as I got even older (because I no longer understood it). So, because I really want to be a science nerd (but don’t understand…) I admire the science and the engineering and all of that. I love understanding fully how something works but I rarely do and I just think we should be doing something other than launching more junk into space with that knowledge. So for this post I marvel, in a very unjoyous way at the stupidity of us humans. I am sure I just don’t really get it but I think all that ingenuity, resilience, problem solving, time and money that has gone into, literal space, should perhaps have been put to better use. Back to the Happiest Place on Earth tomorrow, promise.
100 Days of Wonder – #6
I love this picture of me from our first trip to Florida. It’s nearly 19 years ago. It was our first full day and there was a whole load going on. I didn’t have any frame of reference or know what to expect. I hadn’t given Disney, theme parks or any of it any real thought, I was tagging along for the winter sun. We had walked up Main Street USA and I was in awe, overwhelmed and struggling to make sense of it all. There was a sort of wonder but it was tentative and not joyful. But then we came to the Winnie-the-Pooh ride and area around it and my brain had something to work with. Pooh bear and friends I knew, I’d been in and out of their stories and on adventures with them for years. Even now I remember a sort of relief and joy washing over me as I finally let my brain let go of reality and jumped into the 100 Acre Wood (trying not to bounce, didn’t want to upset Rabbit) and immersed myself in the story. Disney World, it turns out, is is just allowing yourself to jump in and out of stories. But there’s a lesson here for teaching (and for any sense making work): Our brains need something to work with. We need some sort of frame of reference. Something familiar (a base camp?) from which we can set off into new adventures of learning. Without the security of something familiar, things quickly become scary and disconnected – they don’t make sense. The familiar within the new allows us to test what this new world, new story is all about before diving straight in or taking tentative steps out. Even after all these years and several trips, the Winnie the Pooh ride is still my favourite and it’s still my go to place for a moment of familiarity and calm but I also often picture it as an anchor point when I am trying to work out how best to teach something – I need to help students find their own 100 Acre Wood in the middle of the hundreds of stories I want them to learn about so they can go and safely and joyfully explore a whole new world (yes Disney Pun intended).
100 Days of Wonder – #5
When I was a child it never occurred to me that there might be something I couldn’t do or be because I was a girl. Gendered toys and activities just weren’t consciously a part of my life and the idea of women being disadvantaged and the implications of living in a patriarchy hit me much much later, embarrassingly later, like in my very late teens later. I had wonderful strong women around me in real life and in the books I devoured. Although the last point might not be true. Maybe the heroes of my books weren’t girls or women, or at least not often, maybe I just didn’t care or really notice. Maybe in my fantasy world it really didn’t matter and in my imagination I could be whoever I wanted to me in whatever story I was in. But that was my imagination, encouraged by those around me to run wild without constraints of being told that something wasn’t for me. Seeing strong, flawed, complex, real female characters on screen gives me joy, (and I am not saying Marvel characters always have all of that) but not necessarily just because representation is important for those whose imagination isn’t allowed to run wild. It gives me joy because I can close my eyes, give a nod to the 7 year old me and tell her ‘The world catches up with what you already know eventually – everyone can be a superhero’.
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