Speaking of Awards... (Nobel Prize Education Site)

The folks who brought you the Nobel Prize now bring you... Nobel Prize inspired educational games!

Mostly Flash-based, the games run the gambit from the sublime to the mundane; but over all, the site is fun and full of tons of auxiliary information. While some of the little adventures were obviously put together for younger students, the texts, lessons, and ideas are often quite advanced and more than applicable to students of all ages.

The games range in style and pedagogical purpose, with some, such as 'Lord of the Flies', serving double duty as both a reading check and a source for further biographical and research purposes; and others, such as 'The Ear Pages' used to help explain complex scientific concepts.

I particularly liked the Peace Prize page's interactive 'Conflict Map' which asks the simple yet disturbing question:

In the course of the 20th century, mankind experienced some of the most devastating wars of all times. Where did these wars take place?

The answer forces students and teachers alike to confront some pretty harrowing realities.

For more in depth research and information purposes, the site hosts an excellent overview of all of the Nobel Laureates with internal links to biographies, photo sets, and transcripts of their Nobel acceptance speeches.

Practically Impossible

Thinking a lot lately about the parallels among and intersections between the arts and education.

As an artist who teaches, this is one of those things that comes up often in conversations with colleagues in both fields. Some of those conversations are pretty funny... like the one where a new high school art teacher was asking me if I thought she should remove her nude self-portraits from her website.

But some of those intersections can be quite gentle and inspiring as well: like the time a very great, but very troubled artist friend of mine living in a far off place made a short video for one of my students -- considering a career in the arts -- telling her quite honestly and powerfully about what it takes to make it in art school and in the art world on your own terms.

It is humbling to be one of the lucky few whose life and work bridges art and education. And so, as I'm just finishing up a new website where for the first time I am trying to bring into full view both aspects of my life, I of course thought to myself that one of the things that would make the site most meaningful to me would be a forum where artists and teachers could share ideas, observations, and stories both humorous and telling of the difficulties of each vocation -- and the links between them.

The new site is called Practically Impossible (it's still in beta form... not that it won't always look like it's in beta form given my challenges with graphic design) and it'll serve sort of as the nerve-center for all of my work in the arts, organization, and education.

TeachPaperless will continue being a daily blog -- you don't have to worry (or do have to worry) about that. But the Practically Impossible forum I see as both a meeting place and a place to post responses to life's most vexing questions as well as a place to take many of the great questions and conversations that pop up here via reader comments as well as in the Friday Chats and continue them in a forum accessible to everybody.