For more details visit the AUSTRALIAN FAIRYTALE SOCIETY
Maths and Me
I am reconnecting with maths and brushing up my numeracy.
Why?
Compulsory lantite numeracy to be a teacher deems it so.
My attitude to maths was to just do what I need to do with it, with banking, checking my change and that’s it. More than that, well if you pushed me statistics for emphasising points in public talks.
Now to prepare for this test, it’s rediscovering patterns, shapes, sequences, algebra and more.
It’s about learning to ensure I read and interpret data, understand different graph types and what they reveal.
It’s building my maths muscle, through training in solving problems.
Three weeks ago I felt totally overwhelmed by this. Recalling maths from many years ago – was I going to be able to do it, to the point of taking an exam? Why had I neglected to remember the area of a triangle, the volume of a sphere?
The whole thing had me petrified.
However, I came across this video by Arthur Benjamin – and wish he had been my maths teacher in the past. Maybe my relationship with maths would have been lifelong.
For Benjamin, Maths is about:
Calculation
Application
and INSPIRATION!
Inspiration is what will bring it into the realm of a life long love for everyone.
So to make in through my preparation for the Lantite Numeracy I am watching inspirational videos as well as using the materials provided by my university.
Perhaps it is a good thing this reconnection is happening. I am hopeful and determined not only to pass that Lantite Numeracy but connect with the mystery of patterns, and the powers of prediction that can be fostered through mathematics.
Here is some further food for thought.
News
Wow! I can’t quite believe this has happened.
It is going to be a busy next couple of years.
All the candidates were immensely talented, experiences, and any one of them would have made an excellent contribution (and still can), including the outgoing chair, and yet I am grateful for this opportunity, as a woman of colour, of faith, and mixed heritages, and of place – to take on this role and see what I can bring to the table and who else I can bring to the table with me.
When living in a regional area, QWC helped me locate a local writing group, later they sent workshops, poets and others to our area.
I pitched an article to Writing Queensland on Blogging Cyclones – which they accepted, and later articles of Poetry Advocacy through poetry in galleries, and most recently guest edited. Other involvements have been participating in videos for kickstarters to assist for raising of scholarships of students, and submitting books to Books in Our Backyard Catalogue. From time to time I have been to a workshop when it’s up my alley.
Yet, also there are so many others who have also inspired me as a creative today QCAN (sadly no longer in existence), Cassowary Coastal Writers, Queensland Music Festival, QAGOMA, QLD Poetry, Share Your Story, ASA, Write Links, SCBWI, Tropical Writers in Cairns, Townsville Writers, Interplay 1994, Illumine Team, Kookie Magazine, Australian Fairy Tale Society, ABC Open, CYA, and the Ink of Light Team (and many more). Engagement with these various groups, their members and readers, and institutions and publications has enriched my life.
It is just too difficult to name individuals – and without stories for each of them I can’t do their role in my life justice, but there are many! You might find their stories on my various blogs! I could feel this post with many delightful moments.
Memories of Festivals in Cairns, anthology launches, readings, book shop launches – and then Brisbane, and an explosion of things to go to, and be part of. So many writers, well known, emerging, striving, regional, global- met read, appreciated, including the dear, dear children’s and young adult writing community.
I love the writing community of Queensland, and have long found writing like a light in my life, especially in the aftermath of great and little traumas as well as mega and micro joys. So if you hear a little less from me on my blog you will know I am busy seeing what else can happen for those with stories in their hearts and fire in their fingers, to share the visions, dreams, herstory, history, memories, a very special part of the world.
It’s the journey not the destination, sounds like such a cliche, but really it is just that – how we do things not just a brilliant outcome needs to be the goal. As for the role of stories in all of that, stories that excavate and understand the past, that communicate to the present possible futures, that imagines, extends, and reinvigorates.
This is the day for the stories that will move us, shift us – to connection.
And whether the form changes, from spoken, to written, to filmed, gamed, online, on a gallery wall – combining multimodalities, it is the heart of the story that illumines and elucidates for us the human conditions – loss, grief, hope, and more.
Fathomless
A meditation
What is this fathomless and
surging Ocean?
Can you hear it
in the flooding rivers and creeks?
Brisbane is upturned.
Can you see it
in the tears of hiding children
in tunnels of Ukraine
A child sings her nation and
everyone knows her name
for a moment.
Can you touch its life vein
when tears are thickened
from all that threatens life?
Surging trouble, deeper, harsher,
cutting into skin and bone
removing every comfort of home
every wall, door, window
streetscapes scarred.
Where is this feeling
that just nearby are
loved ones ?
Sending them letter like prayers
framed by the eternal postman
can I wish
reach
partake
take deep breaths ...
Pause
behold ...
astonishment
Feel
bounty rush closer
glorious...
(c) June Perkins words and image, inspired by the quotation.
Lights Leviathan
A poem for now…
“In every age and cycle He hath, through the splendorous light shed by the Manifestations of His wondrous Essence, recreated all things, so that whatsoever reflecteth in the heavens and on the earth the signs of His glory may not be deprived of the outpourings of His mercy, nor despair of the showers of His favors. How all-encompassing are the wonders of His boundless grace!”
-Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah
Inspired by this photograph and Gleaning from Nineteen Months
Outpourings in darkness
soul frames longing
lost, lassoing, looking
twisting twirling torrential
light.
Thoughts into action
flight from fancy
focus flowing freedom singing rungs to
heaven.
Ripple rising through the water
torch like
from torment, terrifying, tenacious
hope's
leviathan.
(c) Poem by June Perkins
Gumboootspearlz 