#walnut hill

[llamamamma20]

Working on a new personal estate build. The lot is from Amelie. So far, tack lounge is complete.

[thejambicafe]

I love Connecticut

[mejoresvidentes]

Pitonisa en Stow Creek

#Tauro en el amor. Un día positivo y animado; tendrás una excelente predisposición a la comunicación, tu faceta más positiva te ayudará a concretar objetivos sentimentales; quienes estén en pareja, encontrarán gratas renovaciones en la vida sentimental. La economía. En el plano de tus ocupaciones, renueva ciertos criterios un tanto conservadores que están impidiendo que avances en el trabajo como mereces. Su salud. Molestias en las articulaciones.

Tarot Y Videncia:

Llámanos Ahora

🇺🇸 Estados Unidos: [phone]

Para resolver los problemas del corazón y entregarnos a la felicidad. ¡Los temas del corazón son tan complejos! Cuando el amor no ha tocado a la puerta nos sentimos ansiosos por encontrar a la paraje ideal y una vez que la tenemos nos enfrentamos al miedo de perderla. En cualquiera de los casos no hay de qué preocuparnos porque el tarot amor nos brinda la ayuda necesaria para triunfar en una relación.

[tarot-lectura-gratistarot-gratis]

Psíquico en Sweetwater

#Capricornio es prudente y gracias a eso, llega lejos.

Tarot Y Videncia:

Llámanos Ahora

🇺🇸 Estados Unidos: [phone]

Para resolver los problemas del corazón y entregarnos a la felicidad. ¡Los temas del corazón son tan complejos! Cuando el amor no ha tocado a la puerta nos sentimos ansiosos por encontrar a la paraje ideal y una vez que la tenemos nos enfrentamos al miedo de perderla. En cualquiera de los casos no hay de qué preocuparnos porque el tarot amor nos brinda la ayuda necesaria para triunfar en una relación.

[vanguardrealtyassociates]

Lot 14 HARPERS LANE - HUNTINGDON VALLEY - PA 19006

Lot 14 HARPERS LANE – HUNTINGDON VALLEY – PA 19006

You still have time to be a part of this extraordinary community- This is the FINAL location that is available in this extraordinary community!! Welcome to a wonderful New Home in “Walnut Hill”. An exclusive Enclave of 28 custom homes in prestigious, convenient Huntingdon Valley?

A picturesque setting is the background for these elegantly designed and appointed Single Family homes presented in…

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[katewcunningham]

walnut hills?

What about it?

[clarinetslayer-blog]

Full Circle with Walnut Hill

Nostalgia does a weird thing. It feels weird and good and bitter sweet.

I auditioned for Walnut Hill, an arts school in Massachusetts, without telling my parents. They were holding auditions at the Tanglewood Institute I was participating in one summer. My mailing address was my home, but 16 year old me was in the Berkshires. A few days later, my phone rang:

Mom: Celine, why did I get an acceptance letter to Walnut Hill?

Me: I got in?!

They mailed my acceptance letter to my house, and I had no idea that my audition was good enough to get in. So, at the end of the summer and after BYSO camp (full circle post to come), I packed my bags and moved in to Walnut Hill School for the Arts to begin my first and only year at a boarding school.

It was amazing. More music classes than academic classes (no math or foreign languages left!) Music theory, music history, sight singing, real singing in chorus, chamber music, master classes, so much time to practice, living with and eating with friends who all shared the same passion. It was a dream come true. However, it was an adjustment to leave home so suddenly to live somewhere else. I remember the day before I moved and had the realization “wait...is this my last time sleeping here?!” It was also an adjustment to apply to colleges, and prepare my auditions, and prepare my recitals and performances and orchestra music and chamber music all while being away from home. I was playing in two orchestras on the weekends, and practicing my ass off. I don’t think I’ll ever play my clarinet as much as I did in my years there. The cost of that was getting tendonitis and carpel tunnel in both arms due to the 7 hours of practicing I would do every day. 

I would learn later that it’s the quality, not the quantity of hours put in. 

I locked myself into small, sound proof, carpeted practice rooms. Those rooms make you sound TERRIBLE. Once a month I would allow myself to play in a hall with resonance and each time I would sound better, and better. My tone improved immensely, my relationships grew and I truly loved the musicians and artists around me, and my experience of living away from home made me stronger. 

In June, I marched through the small town with my graduating class of 80, was whisked off to China on a 2.5 week orchestra tour, got stranded in China (more on that later), was awake for 3 entire days, came home and from the airport when immediately to BUTI, came home afterwards, packed, and went to college. 

I don’t think I had been allowed a healthy amount of time to process leaving the place that made me into the musician I had become. 

Fast forward to 9 years later. I am attending my little brother’s musical at Walnut Hill - the first time I have been back since graduating. There is a 12 year age difference in between my youngest brother and I, yet we are almost the same person. He has been creative and vocally inclined ever since he was born, and is growing up to become a strong and talented singer and actor. 

He got the lead in a musical, and when he made his entrance onto the stage where I had one of the best chamber music performances of my life, and with me being seated out in the hall where we had out weekly Monday morning meetings for high school, I almost lost it.

There he was, in the spot light, singing, dancing and being completely engrossed in his character, and I couldn’t have been more proud. Or weepy, but I tried to keep the tears to a minimum. 

Afterwards, my mom and dad left to get settled into their hotel room before the last performance that my brother was in, and I still had about an hour until my train left, so I hung out with my brother for an hour after we had something to eat. That hour was basically me saying things like:

 “Oh! can we go check out the music building?” 

“Holy crap, can we go in the student lounge? I totally forgot about the student lounge!” 

“Oh my god this used to be where student mail boxes were!” 

“Is the library still here? Where is the library now?”

“This is where I climbed through the window into the music lounge/went streaking in the snow and rolled down this hill over rocks until we were numb and bloody/ran through the academic building in the nude (arts kids...)/had my first rehearsal with a pianist/met one of my best friends/etc”

Everything came rushing back to me: dancing in the pouring rain and getting soaked outside the music hall in the warmer months, standing in an embrace overlooking the hill and gazebo with my first love, fooling around in the music lounge with my friends, sledding down the big hill in the snow using water jugs as our sleds, the practice room where I had chosen to practice in where someone leaped into my room, sat down at the piano, and played along with a Brahms sonata I was practicing, totally memorized, before he even introduced himself. 

There was my dorm where I had two roommates and our own bathroom, where one of my roommates was caught with an illegal boy in the room who had chosen to jump out our second story window and sprain his ankle, where I had watched Amadeus with a boy who I thought could be my boyfriend on the floor of my room but it didn’t work out, where I was first introduced to the SIMS game and Facebook, and where I had alcohol for the first time (illegally!). 

The time of the day was that twilight hour, where the sun was low in the sky and everything is golden and perfect and nostalgic. I walked Sam over to the theatre after we snuck in to the new ballet building and black box theatre that hadn’t even been thought of when I was there as a student. Everything was incredibly lovely, beautiful, and quiet. It was such a special moment to spend with my little brother. 

So much had changed, but so much had stayed the same. 

I got on my bike after wishing my brother luck on his final performance and rode into town, where I had spent a few weekend nights in as a student. Whether it was going to get Chinese food, or breaking into my first loves basement because he forgot his house key, I remembered everything. I got on the train feeling a mix of tremendous longing for that time of my life, excitement that my brother is in his current stage of life, pride of who I have become and who my brother is becoming, and awe at how much things have changed, and yet stayed the same. 

If you told me 9 years ago on my graduation day that I would be where I am today...I think the younger me would be confused but interested in the journey ahead.

So, thank you, Celine from 9 years ago. Thank you for working your butt off, for following your dreams, for being strong through all the tough things (I know it was hard) and for appreciating all the awesome things. 

[makingmeaningninja]

Worried about mediocre history on the internet? Use it.

by Benjamin Gregg

History is, in essence, the articulation of cause and effect. There are so many different types of events and trends that can cause and be caused - economic, cultural, political, demographic - and these can be combined, convoluted, conditional, and complex. However, in the end, all historical arguments must have some causes and some effects. Sometimes these are explicit, sometimes implied.

Don’t have causation? Then what you’ve got is not history. It might be fun, it might be cathartic, it might have a nifty narrative flow, but it’s not history. Indeed, without some attention to and control over the causations we want in describing the past, we likely end up ascribing causations we don’t like or don’t want. Without control of our cause and effect thinking, we can find ourselves saying things like “they realized” or “it became clear that” to stand in for actual causation. My favorite example of this comes up in discussions of the rise of women’s suffrage movements in the 19th century. Every year some students explain this in language along the lines of “people realized that women should have the vote” - but people don’t just wake up one day and “realize” that their long held notions of gender are wrong. Or a student might argue that “eventually these rights extended to women” as though the rights themselves had a will and took action, separate from the people in the culture.

We need to teach students to find and articulate real, hard-nosed causation logic, not assumptions that the past is just the story of the inevitable drift toward the present.

Now the internet brings us historical arguments in unprecedented amounts and in a range of formats. You can find the work of well respected scholars and you can find rants by fringe crazies from all parts of the political and craziness spectrum. You can find lectures, animated cartoons, music videos, puppet shows, all proposing to present historical information and argumentation. Yikes, you might think, this is either a goldmine of learning or a minefield of misinformation and manipulation!

If we arm students properly with a durable understanding of cause and effect thinking, we can dive right in. And when we do, we discover that the crazy fringes are actually not the main problems - students aren’t likely to be compelled by the arguments of the KKK or of alien conspiracy theorists. I see the trouble coming from the huge volume of information from the compelling, passionate, flashy, but historically mediocre middle.

I ask students to send me news artifacts that they harvest from the web and we’ve been paying a lot of attention to Syria recently. Here is a video about Syria that a student shared with me. To be clear, I admire this guy and his brother for their prolific and earnest videos. I couldn’t do anything like this. But they do make great artifacts for dissection in a lesson on cause and effect thinking partly because their causal arguments are fragmented or missing.

Here’s a fun lesson plan: show this video to students - it’s short - and ask them to find all the cause and effect arguments in it. If there isn’t an explicit cause and effect argument, there might be an implied one. If it’s really impossible to find any causation, then the implication may be some version of the ultimate in non-historical thinking, “shit happens.” Or worse, and I think this is going on here to some degree, the implication is that something is just inherently crazy or bent about the place or the people and that inherent bentness is enough to explain the events.

Some examples - First, according to this video, flag preferences are part of what drives some of these changes - most explicitly he uses the desire for an older flag as a reason for Syrian withdrawal from the UAR. I don’t think that he is actually believes that flags drove Syria’s history in the 20th century, but this is what he says. So if the flag causation argument is just a joke, what are the actual causations here?

There are some good ones - Russian involvement in Syria is supported mainly by the context of the Cold War and the desire for warm water ports - the social stress is presented as partly due to the sectarian conflict between the Alawi and the Sunni - but none of these explain why, at this time and in this way, Syria is melting to the degree that it is. He jokes about lines of dictators, about coup after coup, and all of this ends in Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown - but why this pattern of central control and political violence?

And here is my main concern. These very big effects demand significant, logical causation. Without causal explanations that measure up to the horror of the effects, we’re left exasperated by a place and a people who appear to be mired in impossibly cruel conflict just because. Or worse, we’re left with the possibility that this madness is because they are Arab, or Muslim, or because they are living in the Middle East. This author points out, for example, that Syria supported both sides in the Lebanese Civil War but doesn’t explain why. He describes Syria as having “a habit of assassinating Lebanese politicians.” Now I don’t think this guy is racist or anything, but what are we to believe in the absence of a clear causal driver behind the discussion? Isn’t the implication that these horrors are somehow natural to this place and these people?

So let’s get students to be stronger, pickier consumers of history by demanding that they identify the causation in the arguments they read and see as well as in what they write. Without attention to arguments of cause and effect, they will be prone to all manner of ahistorical thinking that will necessarily step in where rational arguments are absent.