gustav klimt's rocker sister

there has been a lot of outside time lately. the garden is growing in the backyard, lots of little seeds sprouting up, pink and white blossoms on the fruit trees, and crazy tall greens that just keep going and going.

work has been rough lately, feeling overextended, but i am trying my best. i find myself involved in miles' school through meetings and email conversations. the teasing and bullying task force. the middle school committee. the garden coordinator political fiasco. miles is doing fine, but there is so much pressure to get test scores up that there doesn't seem to be much time to look at how to engage the kids. they keep assessing the kids to find out what skills they don't have yet that they should. i know this is important but assessment should look at not just what they know and don't know, but how they learn best.

have i mentioned these things before? i think so. project based learning. cooperative learning groups.

anway, we have been learning by getting out and about.

yesterday maya and i walked up and over potrero hill to an art class where she learned about gustav klimt and painted a huge gold background. on the way back we saw this amazing kidserve mural on daniel webster elementary. this is just a section, this thing is huge.

maya experimented with making shadows in the window of this closed down hair studio. she said she was gustav klimt's sister, who was in a rock band.
today we went with friends to the mission science workshop, a big room in mission high with a free for all of musical instruments, projectors, bones, woodworking tools, glue guns, rocks, slices of 540 year old redwood trees, live animals, dead animals, computer parts, you name it. i love this place.
maya made this cool magnet pendulum which showed how magnets can repel each other. the little hanging magnet dances around on its string.
layers of people i knew were at the workshop, and are everywhere we go, really, from the neighborhood, baby class, preschool, even pre-kid life. and outside there was an old friend, alec, looking like the cool sailor engineer that he is, with his dyke march t shirt on, headed to sunny delores park. the park was packed, a green sea of people and dogs, throwing footballs, grilling sausage, giving free capoeira lessons, playing accordion, walking on tightropes. blasting bad rock music from a fender amp, selling ice cream, drinking and smoking weed. i told the kids about how we used to go to this park a lot, and sit on blankets and sometimes play instruments, and how cassie lived nearby.

we watched as a group of people prepared to release a balloon creation into the sky, tethered by fishing line so as not to pollute. it was the size of a small room, red balloons attached to each other in the shape of a heart. the kids were patient as a very sf crowd of older women with some young tattooed women and some men, well, hey, all kinds of people talked about going around the circle and departed love ones and meditation. "the ice cream!!!!!!!!!" screamed maya and the kids ran off hand in hand to buy crappy mexican ice cream from a cart. they returned in time for the release of the heart, which floated higher and higher until it was just a small red shape above delores park, with no destination but, as miles said, "as high as the moon."