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Month: January 2016

Justin Flom to release debut book, ‘Adventures of a Kid Magician’..

Justin Flom to release debut book, ‘Adventures of a Kid Magician’..


LAS VEGAS (The CW Las Vegas) — Magician Justin Flom’s career skyrocketed last year through television appearances, constant touring and multiplied millions of views on Facebook, Snapchat and other social media.

Flom, who has been named as an Up and Coming Entertainer by Las Vegas Weekly, will be releasing a book next month.

“Adventures of a Kid Magician” will be made available Feb. 9 exclusively through Walmart and Walmart.com. He talks with Jeff Maher about this endeavor and shows a few tricks..

http://news3lv.com/news/wake-up-with-the-cw/justin-flom-to-release-debut-book-adventures-of-a-kid-magician

In Male-Dominated Sphere, Magician Jeanette Andrews Uses Science, Art to Make Her Mark..

In Male-Dominated Sphere, Magician Jeanette Andrews Uses Science, Art to Make Her Mark..

It took two men and a tiger to convince Jeanette Andrews of her true calling.

Just months after watching a Siegfried and Roy TV special, a 4-year-old Andrews was performing magic for her class. Two years later, she staged her first paid gig. Since then, she and magic have been virtually inseparable. At 14, she became a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians (with Siegfried and Roy sponsoring her membership) and now, at 25, she regularly performs her magic – which blends elements of philosophy, science and art – for audiences both corporate and casual.

On Tuesday, the Chicago-based magician will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art performing “Thresholds,” a show which pairs illusions with each of the five senses.

We spoke with Andrews on the magic inherent in science, the power of audience participation, and what it feels like to be one of the only women killing it in an almost exclusively male-dominated field.   Read more….

http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2016/01/25/male-dominated-sphere-magician-jeanette-andrews-uses-science-art-make-her-mark

Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic..

Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic..

Education, at its most engaging, is performance art. From the moment a teacher steps into the classroom, students look to him or her to set the tone and course of study for everyone, from the most enthusiastic to the most apathetic students. Even teachers who have moved away from the traditional lecture format, toward more learner autonomy-supportive approaches such as project-based and peer-to-peer learning, still need to engage students in the process, and serve as a vital conduit between learner and subject matter.

Teachers are seldom trained in the performance aspect of teaching, however, and given that every American classroom contains at least one bored, reluctant, or frustrated student, engagement through performance may just be the most important skill in a teacher’s bag of tricks.

I asked Teller, a former Latin teacher and the silent half of the magical partnership known as Penn & Teller, about his years as an educator, and the role performance played in his teaching. Teller taught high school Latin for six years before he left to pursue a career in magic with Penn, and in the 40 years since, the duo have won Emmys, Obies, and Writer’s Guild Awards, as well as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As our conversation meandered through Catullus, Vergil, Shakespeare, and education theory, he explained why he believes performance is an essential, elemental aspect of effective teaching.

The first job of a teacher is to make the student fall in love with the subject. That doesn’t have to be done by waving your arms and prancing around the classroom; there’s all sorts of ways to go at it, but no matter what, you are a symbol of the subject in the students’ minds.”  (Photo: Wikipedia )

Read more… http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/what-classrooms-can-learn-from-magic/425100/

SyFy manages a neat trick with ‘The Magicians’..

SyFy manages a neat trick with ‘The Magicians’..

(Photo: Syfy / Hilary Bronwyn Gayle / SyFy )

There’s a kind of sly genius behind the SyFy Channel’s new series “The Magicians,” which begins with a number of thinly disguised references to frothy, magic-laced fantasies such as “Harry Potter,” “The Secret Garden” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” among others.

But “The Magicians,” premiering Monday, Jan. 25, is anything but adapted kiddie lit.

  • The series, adapted by Sera Gamble and John McNamara from Lev Grossman’s best-selling trilogy, focuses on misfit and recent college graduate Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), who is about to take an entrance exam for postgraduate work at Yale.

As a kid, he was deeply into fantasy and magic, as were many of his friends, including his bestie, Julia (Stella Maeve). Other kids grew out of the fantasy phase, but not Quentin. He knows what he’s supposed to be doing at this point in his life, but his heart isn’t in it. His Peter Pan syndrome has landed him in a mental institution for a few days and earned him a mood-leveling drug prescription.

Quentin is fixated on a five-novel series of fantasy books by the fictional Christopher Plover called “Fillory & Further,” about three English children who enter a secret world by stepping into a grandfather clock. One day, Quentin is handed the manuscript of a hitherto unknown sixth book in the series, which leads him into the land of Fillory and to an upstate New York magic college known as Brakebills University.  Read more…

http://www.sfchronicle.com/tv/article/SyFy-manages-a-neat-trick-with-The-Magicians-6772018.php