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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

TV Magician Dynamo And Interior Designer Kelly Hoppen Collaborate on Mind-Bending 3D Wallpaper..

TV Magician Dynamo And Interior Designer Kelly Hoppen Collaborate on Mind-Bending 3D Wallpaper..

Magician Dynamo has teamed up with interior designer Kelly Hoppen to create a range of wallpaper that uses optical illusions to make rooms appear bigger.

The digitally printed wallpapers feature the ‘trompe l’oeil’ art technique, which uses realistic images to create optical illusions, often in 3D.

The patterns have been developed to give a sense of more space within the home.

The Enigma design features a series of blocks that appear to be extending out of the wall and into the room, while the Paradox pattern depicts an angled concrete wall that appears to include recesses. Read more..

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/tv-magician-dynamo-interior-designer-164513809.html

‘Sleight’ Is A Must-See Thriller About A Street Magician [Sundance Review]

‘Sleight’ Is A Must-See Thriller About A Street Magician [Sundance Review]

“Anyone can learn a trick, but doing something nobody else can do makes you a magician.”

The story follows a young street magician named Bo (The Maze Runner’s Jacob Latimore) who is taking care of his little sister Tina (12 Years a Slave’s Storm Reid) following the death of their mother. Performing magic on the streets for tourists isn’t enough to pay the bills, so Bo has turned to peddling drugs at clubs and parties for a local drug dealer Angelo (Psych and West Wing’s Dulé Hill). Making clever use of his sleight of hand skills, Bo is able to avoid trouble from the police.

When another dealer tries to take over the Los Angeles market, Bo is propelled into a world of guns and gang violence, definitely not the “selling dime bags to club-goers” job he signed up for. Along the way, Bo falls for a girl named Holly (Seychelles Gabriel, a stand-out from the television series Falling Skies).  And of course, quitting the drug business isn’t as easy as it sounds — the film transitions from a moretypical indie drama into a comic book origin story disguised inside a thriller. How will Bo use his magic skills to get out of this situation?

Dillard is a refreshing new filmmaker who is certainly one to watch. This may be his first feature film, but Dillard has directed some music videos and is also developing a film project for Bad Robot and Paramount Pictures (the details on this project are unknown). When I saw Safety Not Guaranteed at Sundance a few years back, I knew that Colin Trevorrow was about to be tapped for much bigger films (but even I wouldn’t have predicted Star Wars and Jurassic Park sequels). I think its easy to see Dillard will probably also capture the attention of Hollywood genre films — I could definitely see him at the helm of a future Marvel movie.  Read more……  http://www.slashfilm.com/sleight-movie-review/