Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Blood brothers and members of the Comitatus, Finn and Keiro both have a privileged standing in Incarceron. They are nontheless as the maestra reminds them prisoners. No one can ever leave the living prison that is Incarceron. The prison has many eyes that watch them and a voice that taunt them.

With the aid of a crystal key, Finn, Keiro, Gildas, and Attia hope to escape to the Outside as they Sappique did. After a dangerous escape from the Comitatus, they embark on a quest that tests and transforms them. 

Nearly killed by a beast in a cave, the four of them are rescued by a strange Sapienti called Blaze. Blaze takes them to a high tower where he tries to convince them that there is no Outside. But Blaze and nearly everyone else is not who they say they are. 

On the outside, Claudia's father plans for her to marry an odious boy, Caspar. John Arlex, her father, is Warden of Incarceron but he refuses to tell her anything about its secrets. He only wants to use her as a pawn to achieve power.

At court there are many factions but Claudia does what she can to protect her tutor, Jared, and Finn, whom she believes is the rightful heir of the kingdom. 

Faced-paced and exciting, this novel is a great fantasy for those who love suspense and plot twists. 

Catherine Fisher's official webpage,
https://www.catherine-fisher.com/

Lyric essay

What is a lyric essay?

A lyric essay is a cross between an essay and a lyric poem. In "Knit One,"  Suzanne Cody writes in Eastern Iowa Review about a woman's sorrow and dejection by using the metaphor of knitting:

"Sorrow ravels the sweater from the bottom--a slow, slow process. He appears to think the young woman doesn't notice. But she does. He may well know this, but likes to pretend." 

Their relationship is becoming unraveled just like the sweater:

"If you don't make time for this, eventually the pulling will go faster than the stitching and there will be nothing left between you and me but a pile of tangled wool"

The term lyric essay was invented by the late Deborah Tall, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Tall wrote A Family in Strangers in which she employed the lyric essay, a form she has been obsessed with for thirty years. 

Resources:
http://outofboundsradioshow.com/exc_audio_post/deborah-tall-poet-writer-and-professor-of-english-at-hobart-william-smith-colleges-geneva-ny/

The Brigands by Parris Afton Bonds

Set in Matamoros, this exciting romance explores the events that led to the formation of Texas. Filled with real and fictional characters, the basic outline of the story remains faithful to the historical record. The provisional government was rife with tension. Land speculation or “Matamoros fever” resulted in some land titles to be sold illegally. 

While there’s no record of a double agent, like the nefarious Chaparral Fox, the provisional government had many factions and dissenters. James Fannin’s decision to capture the port of Matamoros divided the Texas army, weakening the forces at the Alamo.

Against the brewing unrest in Tejas y Coahuila, many strong-willed characters come into conflict with each other. Rafaela, who was raised in England, learns that she must marry a man she loathes, Paladin. Her father arranged for her to marry Paladin, a Baron, for his title. In return, the Baron would receive a dowry and the ability to pay off debts.  The dark brooding Baron clearly prefers the Fiona, the feisty Irish woman hired to become Rafaela’s companion.

Fiona, wonderfully delineated by Bonds, is the kind of humorous, hard scrabble character that is a joy to discover. Deprived of many things in childhood, Fiona determines to get her due. Gutsy and determined, she will not back down to Paladin who claims ownership to the same rich parcel of land that she does.

Rafaela appear altogether different, yet in many ways, she is similar to Fiona. She wants a home more than riches; she desires true love and not an arranged marriage to a dilettante. Though Rafaela tries to resist the charms of Niall, Paladin’s friend, she finds herself inevitably drawn to the penniless Irish Traveler. 

What makes this novel exciting is the expert pacing.  In scene after scene, these characters risk everything for a chance at true love and happiness.  In one of the most pivotal scenes, Fiona, with Rafaela’s help, turns her carriage around, as a bridge goes up in flames. By choosing to turn her carriage around, she’s throwing in her lot with Paladin and the revolutionaries. The plight of the mismatched lovers is not dissimilar to the plight of the ragtag Texas army that defies the odds.

Coding with music

If your students like music and coding, there are great new ways to combine both interests.

Tutorial--composing Music
https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/using-tensorflow-to-compose-music


Made with Code's Music Mixer
https://www.madewithcode.com/projects/music
The Music Mixer from Made with Code is possibly the simplest way to play with code and virtual musical instruments.

Made with Code's Mentor Video (Ebony Oshunrinde)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOdkfOhUtjs

DiscoverE Engineering
http://www.discovere.org/
Sound Proof Box activity.

GrooveCoders
https://groovecoders.com/
While this isn't free, it gives students and coding clubs the opportunity to create songs.

Earsketch
https://earsketch.gatech.edu/landing/#/
Use python or javascript to mix music in a DAW. Free.

The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris

MacFarlane takes words that were dropped from children's dictionaries and creates poetic anagrams. Words like acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker, fern, heather were replaced with technological terms e.g. "cut and paste."

Conker, the shiny dark nut encased within the green spiky fruit, was used in children's games throughout the British isles. The horse chestnut or "conker" has an odd shape and would be hard to duplicate. Thus, MacFarlane's anagram includes the question, "Cabinet-maker, could you craft me a conker? He decided that neither Cabinet-maker nor King nor engineer could make one.

He calls a dandelion a little "sun-of-the-grass," and a kingfisher a "colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker, river's quiver."

All of these descriptions are worked beautifully into an anagram stanzas and illustrated with oversized images by Jackie Morris. For "starling," he writes,

Should green-as-moss be mixed with
  blue-of-steel be mixed with gleam-of-gold
     you'd still fall short by far of the--

Tar-bright oil-slick sheen and
    gloss of starling wing.

And if you sampled sneaker-squeaks
   and car alarms and phone ringtones
        you'd still come nowhere near the --

Rooftop riprap street-smart
    hip-hop of starling song.

Let shade clasp coal clasp pitch
    clasp storm clasp witch,
       they'd still be pale beside the --

In-the-dead-of-night-black, cave-black,
  head-cocked, fight-back gleam of starling eye.

Northern lights teaching shoaling fish teaching
   swarming flies teaching clouding ink
        would never learn the --

Ghostly swirling surging whirling melting
   murmuration of starling flock.


The Lost Words is a visual and verbal treat. 

Writer's League of Texas podcast episode 39-- Great first pages and Chapters

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

What makes a good opening page to a novel?

Some really good reminders in Episode #39.

Stacey Swann believes the voice draws readers in and makes readers want to keep listening. The opening gives some sense of who the character is and who they want.

The opening page is a little like a "first date." The first page tells the readers whether the character is someone they want to spend time with.

They also discuss "psychic distance."


In Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, odd details give a creeping, subtle feeling that something's not right.

The novel does a great job cultivating mystery.

https://soundcloud.com/writersleagueoftexas
(Episode 39)

Tony Hoagland

Don’t Tell Anyone

BY TONY HOAGLAND

We had been married for six or seven years

when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me

that she screams underwater when she swims—

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years

into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool

where she does laps every other day.  

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been

concealing anything,

not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming,

nor as if we should perform an act of therapy  

right that minute on the kitchen table,

—casually, she told me,

and I could see her turn her square face up

to take a gulp of oxygen,

then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.

For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming

as they go through life, silently,

politely keeping the big secret

that it is not all fun

to be ripped by the crooked beak

of something called psychology,

to be dipped down

again and again into time;

that the truest, most intimate

pleasure you can sometimes find

is the wet kiss

of your own pain.

There goes Kath, at one pm, to swim her twenty-two laps

back and forth in the community pool;

—what discipline she has!

Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,

that will never be read by anyone.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2012)

The Changeling Myth in Eggshells

In Eggshells, Catriona Lally uses the changeling myth to characterize Vivian, a mentally disabled woman who has just inherited her great Aunt's house in Dublin.

The death of her Aunt leaves Vivian more vulnerable than ever. Her only other relatives is a condescending sister. 

Accepting her parents' myth about her--that she is a changeling, Vivian,  embarks on journeys by foot and bus to find a portal to the fairy world.

Vivian is undeniably lonely. One of the first things Vivian does after her Aunt dies is seek a friend. Lacking social skills, she puts out an advertisement for friend named Penelope. 

Incredibly, someone answers the ad. Penelope, an artist who is just a little less madcap than Vivian, assists Vivian her with her eccentric schemes.

Though the pace can be slow, this novel will appeal to those who like quirky characters. 

She walks around libraries, museums, bridges, cafes and looks for small doors that might lead to a fairy world.

"I pass underneath Merchant's Arch and close my eyes, hoping for a transformation---an arch is surely as good a portal as any--but the smell of stale piss doesn't fade to flowers, and the noise of the traffic doesn't change to fairy bells."

Superbass [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Much of the charm of the novel is that the character visits real places with odd place names. There really is a Yellow road and Emerald street in Dublin. She copies graffiti into her notebook, looking for patterns and "thin places" where the real world and the fairy world intersect. 

She walks up the quays towards O'Connell Bridge and Bride street near the place where St. Patrick baptized local inhabitants. She goes to the Chester Beatty Library to look at magical things and the dervish dance. Yet, even doing a whirling dervish dance doesn't result in a transformation. 

Eggshells was the 2018 winner of the Rooney Prize for Literature. 

Circumcircles

Free Math animations on the web. 

Circumcircle is a circle that passes through every vertex of a triangle.

https://www.mathopenref.com/trianglecircumcircle.html

Play with the vertexes to change the size of the triangle and change the circumcircle. 

Right triangles are a special case:

In the case of a right triangle, the hypotenuse is a diameter of the circumcircle, and its center is exactly at the midpoint of the hypotenuse. This is the same situation as Thales Theorem, where the diameter subtends a right angle to any point on a circle's circumference. (www.mathopenref.com).

Gone Without a Trace by Mary Torjussen

Hannah's life is upended when her boyfriend Matt disappears. Hannah lives in the Wirral peninsula and is on the fast track for promotion at the company where she works.

Matt doesn't just disappear. He obliterates his presence by taking every single item he owns from her apartment and deleting every photo and text from her computer and phone. 

A quick call to the architectural firm where Matt worked establishes the fact that he no longer works there. His mother has also changed residences. No one can give Hannah any answers. Worst of all, she has been receiving strange text messages and believes someone has been entering her house without her permission. When she goes for a jog, someone films her, and then sends the video to her phone.

While this tense-filled situation has no easy explanation, several characters are suspect. Katie, Hannah's best friend, has always been insanely competitive with Hannah. Her next door neighbors, members of the neighborhood watch, are seriously creepy. Her co-worker seems to be on her side but he also seems deceitful.

 Given how shady her close associations are, any one of these characters could be gas lighting Hannah. Matt has always seen supportive but maybe she's seeing a side of Matt she never knew existed?

Torjussen gives her character an intriguing puzzle to decipher. The reader gets a jolt when a surprising twist is thrown in to the mix. A thrilling, yet well-developed novel with a unexpected conclusion. 

Educational Sites

The Fable Cottage
https://thefablecottage.com
I love this site and will try telling parents about this.

Slope and Y intercept

Photo by John Lockwood on Unsplash

One of the best websites (interactive animations) for explaining slope and y-intercept.

Move the slider for slope and the y-intercept to see different version of the line.

https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/straight_line_graph.html

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Funke's story is about the power and  magic of books. They bring great joy to a family, Mo, Teresa, and Meggie,  and yet they also bring great calamities. When Mo, also called Silvertongue, reads he accidentally transports fictional characters and objects to his own world. Conversely, Mo also inadvertently draws people or things into the book's world. 

To his sorrow, and without meaning to, Mo has read his wife, Teresa, into the dangerous world of Inkheart. He has accidently sent a hapless fire-eater into his own world and let loose some of Inkheart's most dangerous villains. 

Mo pities the fire-eater, Dustfinger, who longs to return to the pages of Inkheart. Dustfinger hates, the speed, and the crowds of the contemporary world.

Though Dustfinger traitorously works with the arch villian, he later tries to free Mo's family from the clutches of Capricorn and his men. Along with two companions, Farid and Gwin, Dustfinger bravely returns to Capricorn's village. 

Mo has two competing desires. He fervently wants to free his wife, Teresa, from Inkheart's pages but he also wants to keep his daughter, Meggie safe. 

Capricorn wants Meggie to read another villian to life, the nefarious Shadow, so that he can execute prisoners. Fengolio, Inkheart's author, desperately wants to re-write his own fictional work. 

This is a heart-stopping race to the finish for Mo, his family, and his friends.  This novel has lots of action but also beautiful passages and characterization.

Travel

Sadly, Shuri Castle that dates from the Ryukyu era has burned to the ground in Okinawa. The World Heritage site was mostly made of wood.

Photo by Galen Crout on Unsplash

Shuri Castle was probably built during the Gusuku period and used as a palace of the Ryukyu kingdom between 1429 and 1879. 

Throughout history, the castle has been burned and rebuilt many times. Hopefully, the castle will be rebuilt after the most recent fire. 

By 663highland - Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6988105

https://www.japan-guide.com/

Failure isn't always bad

 Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash


This article, "Why We Should Learn To Embrace Failure" really resonated with me today. Elizabeth Day writes in The Guardian how we should learn to embrace failure. Failure is a starting point. There can be no success without it.

Day, a journalist and fiction writer, runs the podcast, How to Fail.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jul/15/divorce-miscarriage-jobs-learn-to-embrace-failure-elizabeth-day

Day recommends Tim Harford's Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. 

Parents may want to look at Jessica Lahey's The Gift of Failure.

While its hard to look at failure as a gift, its ultimately more healthy to look at failure as an opportunity.

Adafruit's HalloWing

Adafruit's new product, Hallowing, is perfect for Halloween,
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3900

A similar yet different product, Adafruit's Animated Eyes Bonnet For Raspberry Pi,
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3813.

Photo by David Menidrey on Unsplash

Check the Adafruit website for availability.

Columbus Day

Before you decide whether to celebrate Columbus day, read a biography about him. One of the best recent books about Columbus is actually about his illegitimate son, Hernando Columbus.

The Catalog of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest by Edward Wilson-Lee is an amazing story about Hernando and his desire to honor his father's memory while also creating the first private library.