Comments on: Beyond Brain-Storming to Brain-Flooding: Google Maps for Personal Narrative

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By: Far From Home « Edumacation Of Moi

Far From Home « Edumacation Of Moi — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:53:01 +0000

[...] today in a blog I just found, about how far one roamed as a child. The bloggers (John Larkin and Clay Burell)who wrote the original posts are probably in the 30-40 age range, solidly marking them as an older [...]

By: Jason Green

Jason Green — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:15:06 +0000

Clay,

This was an odd memory stirrer for me, because rather than thinking of my own childhood, I noticed that my first place in Chattanooga (by which point I was married and in my late 20’s) was just off your map. BTW, Eastgate is a ghost mall now. Everything has moved northeast around Hamilton Place.

By: Clay Burell

Clay Burell — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:26:10 +0000

Thanks for that, Claire. I just used the pedometer instead of eye-balling the distances and like you, found them shorter than I thought. I guess years and miles grow shorter with age.

There’s no way I’m going to fight Adobe Illustrator to correct the text on my map, though

By: John Larkin

John Larkin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:05:13 +0000

Thanks Clay for taking it up. Your stories of the ditch and the drain bring back memories of Cabbage Tree Creek for me. We sued to ride our bikes down a path and into the creek for a few metres up. Crazy. Riding one’s bike down the main target hill of the old rifle range was also a bit hairy too. I think I soiled my BVDs on my first effort. After that you could not stop me.
David: Loved reading your story of stealthy adventures. We used to play Phantom Agents as kids. My brother Peter even made some star knives. http://home.alphalink.com.au/~roglen/phantom.htm
Michael: Great stories. Real stuff. Life. Happiness. Tragedy. We used cardboard or masonite sleds to ride down sand, not snow. If there was a hill we would find a way to slide down it.
Claire: Those walks did always seem so long yet as we grow older those same walks become our old friends.
Cheers, John.

By: Claire Thompson

Claire Thompson — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:47:01 +0000

This meme really seems to have grabbed people, myself included. When I was a kid my family moved around a bit (each of my dad’s promotions meant a new town) so tonight after reading your post I hopped onto Google maps to check out each of my old neighbourhoods. I thought I’d like to see in which town I had the longest walk to school. To figure out the distances quickly I used Gmaps Pedometer. It’s a great web app I started using a while ago to figure out how long my run routes are.

I wasn’t surprised at my longest walk; 3.6 km (2.3 mi) when I lived in North Vancouver, BC. But I could have sworn that the walk to my elementary school in Prince George BC was longer than 0.7 km (0.4 mi)! I guess the pretty cold winters (-20C was usual) coupled with high snowbanks and short legs skewed my sense of distance

Anyway, I just wanted to share the Gmaps Pedometer link with those who are interested in taking on this meme. Thanks for the term ‘brain flooding’, and for the prod to take some walks down memory lane.

Claire Thompsons last blog post..Combatting Teacher Burnout

By: Michael Doyle

Michael Doyle — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:41:31 +0000

#1)More about the amygdala soon, I’m off to meet with a teacher about overhauling our curriculum, but for now, know that it is the part of the primitive brain that has long neural connections to the cortex, and is indeed where smell “sensations” pass through (and back) on the way to our “higher” part of our brain, It also appears to be the seat of fear and rage, as much as anything can be seated in our brain.

If you remove a rat’s amygdala, it will not run from a cat. (Which brings memories now of my mother singing “…and up on his haunches he sat, singing in the pale moonlight, bring out the goddamn cat” or something like that.;)

#2) Given our generation, I took the “blood-brother name-combining” naming of your stream literally. And, of course, memories rushed in of the moments just before you prick yourself, to mix your blood with your eternal friend, becoming blood brothers.

Or maybe we were just stupid literal kids with too much time on our hands–I think eventually every boy in the neighborhood had mixed blood with every other one within a grade or two in years.

But if I’m an administrator, I’m playing it safe and removing it anyway–cannot have too much safety in this world.

(Shoot…late…hit submit and run!)

Michael Doyles last blog post..A Bloomfield menagerie: praying mantis