FreshEd #303 – Playing with Blocks - The Square Root of Tree (Michael Rumbelow) by The FreshEd Podcast published on 2022-11-16T09:02:03Z Today we air the last episode of Flux Season 2. Flux is a FreshEd series where graduate students turn their research interests into narrative-based podcasts. This episode was created by Michael Rumbelow, a PhD student at the University of Bristol. In his Flux episode, Michael takes listeners on a sonic journey to explore block play. He weaves together sounds and ideas to show the power and possibilities of play. I hope you enjoy today’s episode. freshedpodcast.com/flux-rumbelow -- Credits: This episode was created, written, produced and edited by Michael Rumbelow. Johannah Fahey was the executive producer. Brett Lashua and Will Brehm were the producers. Vicki Mitchem played Virginia Woolf and Bertha Ronge, Dave Jackson played Friedrich Froebel, Karl Marx, and Charles Dickens, and Simone Datzberger played Melanie Klein. Studio audio technicians were Patrick Robinson and Simon Vause. Thank you and Aray to Sifo Lakaw, chairman of the Association of Pangcah Language Revitalization in Taiwan, Adrian Rooke, Druid of the order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, Gregg Wagstaff, and the National Film Board of Canada, for kindly giving me permissions to use recordings. With many thanks to Professor Alf Coles for educating my awareness. And a special thank you to Gene for the Minecraft interview and stop-motion animation. Sound effects and music credits can be found at freshedpodcast.com/flux-rumbelow -- Learn more about Flux: freshedpodcast.com/flux/about/ Twitter: @FreshEdpodcast Facebook: FreshEd Email: info@freshedpodcast.com Support FreshEd: www.freshedpodcast.com/donate Genre Learning Comment by Michael [28] The Woolfs published the first English translations of Freud, and Virginia later seemed to embrace Freudian concepts: “My mother obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my novels, To the Lighthouse, in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly, and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some long felt and very deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.” (Woolf, 1985, p.92) 2022-12-02T15:08:10Z Comment by Michael [24] In Froebel’s The Education of Man, he spends over twenty pages on the applications of crystallography to education. In particular, Froebel finds meaning in the two-fold and three-fold symmetries of crystals – noting that regular five-fold symmetries are all but absent in crystal forms. He thus finds deep significance in the five-fold symmetries of flowers and other forms of life, which he sees as a manifestation of a higher ‘life-energy' 2022-12-02T14:30:43Z Comment by Michael [22] Froebel carefully designed a series of playthings he called ‘Gifts’, to be introduced to children sequentially from birth to around age 7. The first Gift, for babies, was a red yarn ball on a string, designed to resemble the mother’s breast. In the second Gift there was a similar sized ball of solid wood, along with a wooden cylinder and cube. By hanging the cylinder on its side from a string and spinning it, a sphere was revealed, and similarly by spinning the cube a cylinder appeared. Thus, the sphere could be said to be in the cylinder and the cylinder in the cube. So, the sphere – initially connected with the mother’s breast – could be demonstrated to children as transforming into the cube and vica versa. Similarly ‘Mother Nature’ can be seen to produce and consist of cubic crystal forms. In Gift 3 the cube is halved in each dimension to make 8 smaller cubes. In Gift 5 this becomes a 3 x 3 x 3 cube. 2022-12-02T14:29:02Z Comment by Michael [21] “When I was a Boy, and my sense for what is in nature was all awakening within me, I discovered a little flower, under a hedge of white roses in my Father’s garden; it was very difficult to see it at all; it had five petals and was red, with five golden points in the middle of it. It was a simple child of nature, and a hundred far more beautiful flowers were to be found all over the garden, tended by my Father’s careful hand, while that one had been allowed to bloom unnoticed, in a corner out of sight. Yet it was just this flower which riveted my attention more than all the rest; for when I looked down into its coronet, and between the little golden stars, I could fancy I was looking down into endless depths. I have looked into it for hours at a time, during months and years when the flower was in bloom: it seemed to me always to be wishing to say something.” (Froebel, in 'Mothersongs') 2022-12-02T14:28:10Z Comment by Michael [19] The UCL Bloomsbury project describes the Ronges’ Kindergarten, also known as a ‘Humanistic’ school , quoting Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper of 31st July 1853: “The Humanistic community, established by Mr. Ronge, the German religious reformer, took the premises of the house, 23 [sic] Tavistock Place, Tavistock Square, to hold there weekly meetings.. On the 14th inst., a gentleman was engaged in painting the solar system on the ceiling of the meeting-hall, adjoining the garden: two large stones were thrown at him from behind the walls enclosing the garden, and broke two squares of glass in the window; a few minutes later, another big stone was hit at Mr. Ronge’s head, sitting then and writing in the adjoining small room, without, however, succeeding in doing any bodily damage to any one. A policeman was called in, examined the premises, and took away with him the stones, since there was no other mischief done.” www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project…nistic_schools.htm 2022-12-02T14:23:50Z Comment by Michael [18] There is a quote on the statue of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square from her diaries: “Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush.” 2022-12-02T14:18:12Z Comment by Michael [9] Architects such as John Wood the Elder who designed many of the Georgian streets in Bath, as well as drawing on classical Palladian architecture were also influenced by the geometry of stone circles such as Stanton Drew and Stonehenge. 2022-12-02T14:04:54Z Comment by Michael [8] Many prehistoric stone circles in Britain and Ireland appear to be aligned with sunrise on the longest day of the summer solstice, and/or sunset on the shortest day of the winter solstice, which is always exactly the opposite direction. So it is sometimes difficult for archaeologists to tell which solstice was of most significance to the builders. 2022-12-02T14:04:38Z Comment by Michael [4] “…the Institute’s Secretary Willis Dixon wrote: “We did not want long corridors, in which if you lie on the floor you can detect the curvature of the earth”. 2022-12-02T13:59:50Z Comment by Michael [2] Anxiety has been long-studied in psychology since Freud. Clinical definitions vary, but typically involve three dimensions: a subjective emotion of dread or foreboding, physiological symptoms of tension such as raised blood pressure and sweating, and a behavioural response of escape or avoidance (Ohman 1993, p.574). Anxiety may be contrasted with fear in that it concerns future rather than present events, it is in a sense unresolved fear, the cause of which one has not been able to escape. Maths anxiety was first formally identified and studied as ‘number anxiety’ in 1957 in a study of US college students (Dreger & Aitken 1957), but recently there has been increasing research focusing on younger primary children (Dowker, Sarkar & Looi 2016). 2022-12-02T13:57:18Z
