Kate Sitzman

I found this passage in a book called "Killing Monsters" by Gerard Jones. I
highly recommend it to anyone struggling with the TV issue. I typed out this
lengthy quote, because I feel like it really sums up how useful TV can be in
an unschooling context. Bear with me.



{Quote}

"[Mihaly] Csikszentmihalyi developed the concept of 'flow,' a confluence of
emotion, cognitive function, social affect, and self perception. In 'high
flow' states, people feel happy and learn quickly, present themselves
appealingly to the world, and think well of themselves. In 'low flow' they
feel depressed, have trouble processing information, chase the world away
with their affect, and criticize themselves harshly. Csikszentmihalyi has
found that teenagers highest flow states occur when they are deeply immersed
in a demanding activity or socializing. Their lowest states occur during
classroom lectures, when they feel bored, disaffected, passive, and trapped.
Almost as low are the flow states they experience during solitary passive
entertainment, especially watching TV. The research indicates that teenagers
who engage in less passive entertainment and more activities, whether
individual or social, tend to do better later in life. 'Activities that
encourage high flow states make demands of us,' Csikszentmihalyi said,
'force us to expand our personalities and learn new dimensions of ourselves.
The difficulty is that the low flow state is so much easier to settle into
and remain trapped in. The danger of television is that it is such a
seductive medium. We may turn it on because there is something we truly want
to learn from it, but once it's on it is so easy to just sit there. Our mood
lowers, and still we sit.'



He has pointed out, however, that the situation is more complex than
TV-is-bad, activities-are-good. Research suggests that through the age of
about twelve, children considered 'talented' tend to watch more television
than 'less talented' children. From the age of about fourteen, that
reverses; more talented teenagers watch less TV. 'I believe this is because
younger children use television as a source of ideas and fantasies,' he
said. 'They watch, they discover, and then they think about what they've
discovered, play games with it, and draw pictures of it. Then, at a certain
point, the medium becomes redundant. They've seen just about everything it
has to offer, or they've discovered more fertile sources of ideas. The young
people who continue to watch large amounts of television through adolescence
tend to be using it as a relaxant or time killer, and so keep themselves in
a low mood.'



The critical difference is in the viewer's relationship with the material.
Csikszentmihalyi has found that flow states can be quite high when a child
is watching TV with a friend or family member and talking about what he
sees. Even solitary watching can be active: 'If a person watches a
historical documentary because he wants to understand the topic, and he
looks at it very closely, perhaps saying 'Wait, that isn't true. Who
produced this? What are they trying to put across? Or if he watches a
basketball game and is wondering, why isn't Kobe Bryant playing his best
game? Or if he watches an action movie and tries to understand how the
effects were achieved, or what's going to happen next, or why the
screenwriter made that decision. These are very active states, and they can
be very valuable. Another activity, even a lecture or the opera, will be far
less useful if we're only going through the motions."



{END Quote}



I think I had an intuitive sense of flow states before I heard the term, and
that intuition told me that TV was sort of a passive, depressing force,
which made me feel like it wasn't necessary in my kids' lives. I have since
come to feel differently (largely because of these unschooling lists) and I
think I finally turned the corner when I realized that TV wasn't solely a
passive activity but could be as active as anything else. This quote really
mirrored my thought process on the issue and I just wanted to share it. I
think the flow states concept also is a useful concept in terms of
unschooling, because it really encompasses the heart of what makes
unschooling work. We are helping keep our children maintain high flow
states, and as long as they stay in that mental space, they are free to
learn.



Kate

Duvall, WA













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Fetteroll

Apparently the corpse flower only blooms once every 75 years and then only
for a few days.

There's a webcam on one at the University of Connecticut. Apparently its
blooming is imminent!

http://www.news.uconn.edu/2004/jun2004/rel04065.htm

Here's the article from the webpage:

> STORRS, Conn. ‹ Within the next few weeks, New Englanders will have the
> opportunity to see and smell one of the strangest productions of the vegetable
> kingdom: the titan arum, or corpse flower, which features a gigantic bloom ‹
> and a mighty stench -- is expected to open sometime near the end of June, at
> the University of Connecticut's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
> Conservatory. Live Webcam
>
> The last time a corpse flower opened in the northeast was in the 1930s, at the
> New York Botanical Garden. Fewer than two-dozen have flowered in the United
> States since the titan arum bloomed for the first time in cultivation, at the
> Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England, in 1889.
>
> Currently, the UConn-based flower bud is more than three feet high and growing
> by several inches each day. Clint Morse, plant growth facilities manager and
> the researcher who obtained and planted the titan arum, is estimating the
> plant will flower between June 28 and July 2. He emphasizes, however, that
> those dates only represent his best guess.
>
> The fully open flower lasts only a few days, so visitors hoping to catch it at
> its peak will have to time their visit carefully. The infamous odor of the
> corpse flower is strongest just as the flower opens, becoming faint, for
> better or worse, after the first day. Already, gardeners, botanists and
> curiosity-seekers from across the northeast and beyond are making plans to
> travel to Storrs to experience the horticultural equivalent of twin NCAA
> basketball championships.
>
> The titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) is a native of the sultry equatorial
> rainforests of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where it is known as bunga
> bangkai, the corpse flower. Plants grow from a potato-like underground tuber,
> which produces umbrella-shaped leaves 10 feet high and 15 feet across. Only a
> single leaf is present at any one time, but it is dissected into many smaller
> leaflets. The whole looks something like a palm tree with a spotted green
> trunk, and is rather attractive. A leaf can last for several years before it
> withers and is replaced, all the time quietly capturing sunlight and storing
> food in the tuber. Eventually, after the tuber has grown to weigh as much as
> an average man, the corpse flower decides to bloom. The bud on the UConn plant
> could grow to more than six-feet-tall before it opens.
>
> Corpse flowers bloom directly from their tubers, in between cycles of leaf
> production (like an amaryllis). Flowers are about 6 feet high and 3 feet
> across, shaped like an urn, with a tall spike rising from the center.
> (Technically, this is a composite of many small flowers, but it looks like one
> gigantic flower.) They are similar in shape to the flowers of local woodland
> plants like jack-in-the-pulpit and skunk cabbage, or to calla lilies, all of
> which are distant relatives.
>
> The corpse flower is specifically adapted to attract carrion flies and
> beetles, which ferry pollen between plants so they can produce seed, a job
> accomplished for more ordinary plants by bees or butterflies. The colors of
> the corpse flower ‹ a sickly yellow and blackish purple -- imitate a pot roast
> that sat out in the sun for a week. The fragrance is universally described as
> being powerful and revolting, with elements of old socks, dead fish and rotten
> vegetables. As if that isn't weird enough, the corpse flower is actually
> warm-blooded, heating itself up at the height of flowering, probably to help
> spread its putrid odor. All of this is totally irresistible to flies, who must
> think they've chanced upon a dead elephant, and are tricked into pollinating
> the plant.
>
> The corpse flower is uncommon and difficult to locate in the wilds of Sumatra,
> and very rare in cultivation. Recent greenhouse flowerings in California,
> Washington, D.C., and London have attracted coverage from the international
> media, and thousands of visitors who braved longlines and foul odors for a
> glimpse of this botanical marvel. The UConn bloom will be the first ever in
> New England, and the only one anywhere in the northeast since the New York
> Botanical Gardens had a specimen in the 1930s. That earlier flowering inspired
> the designation of Amorphophallus titanum as the official flower of the Bronx,
> a title that was maintained until quite recently, when a more innocuous form
> of vegetation was chosen to replace it.
>
> The Connecticut corpse flower was started 10 years ago, from a seed the size
> of a lima bean, donated to UConn by botanical explorer James Symon. Since
> then, the plant has been nurtured in an environment of bright light, high
> humidity, and constant warmth. It also receives plenty of food, in the form of
> plain houseplant fertilizer. It is not carnivorous, as some people suppose.
> Only now, after growing a tuber that is splitting the sides of a pot bigger
> than a garbage can, has the plant stored enough resources to bloom. Readers
> may check the progress of the flower bud in person at the Department of
> Ecology and Evolutionary Biology's Conservatory, located behind the Torrey
> Life Sciences Building on North Eagleville Road, or on the web at:
> http://florawww.eeb.uconn.edu/Titanum/Titanum2004.html
>
> It tends to be warm in the greenhouse, so bring water and light clothing.
> Admission is free.
>
> About the University of Connecticut Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
> Conservatory
>
> The UConn EEB Conservatory is the finest collection of exotic plants under
> glass between New York and Montreal, with outstanding displays of orchids,
> cacti and succulents, carnivorous plants, tropical ferns, and many other
> groups. The collections are used for classes, public outreach, and research
> into plant biology and conservation.
>
> The Conservatory is open to the public from 8 a.m.-4 p.m. weekdays. While the
> corpse flower is open, the Conservatory will be open from 8 a.m.-8 p.m., daily
> and on weekends. [Update]
>
>

Joyce

G&M Contracting Inc., Kenneth Gillilan

Joyce,
What happened to the corpse flower?! Is it blooming or did it die? It
seems to have lost it's pod.

AnnMarie
My daughter and I were toying with the idea of going to see/smell it if we
could gauge when it was going to open.
-----Original Message-----
From: Fetteroll [mailto:fetteroll@...]
Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 7:08 AM
To:

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