Brooklyn Brainery get into things ✁

Get hyped, 'cause registration is open for our second semester! Each course meets once a week for a month, so there's plenty of time to dig deep into the topic. We've expanded from four courses to six, and we are ready to get our learn on:

The ever-popular Meat is back, since I can't get enough of introducing people to Chinatown beef jerky. If you've ever wanted to cure bacon or wondered what to do with top round, this is the class for you.

Learn about the daily occurrence we call The Weather in Applied Meteorology. Cold and warm fronts, cumulonimbus clouds, and DIY barometers are all on the menu. Clouds'll still look like sheep, but you'll know what their water-vapor hearts conceal.

I just got a backyard, so Introduction to Gardening is going to help me make the most of it. I wonder about things like seedlings and pruning and what puts the magic in Miracle-Gro, and we'll cover that and more. Even if you live in a shoebox, let's grow some green thumbs!

Modern Poetry will sate your poetical academic desires, and letting you know when it's okay to do that snappy thing you've seen in movies about beatniks. Formalism, modernism, minimalism!

There are a million things you can do with paper and we're going to do them all in Paper Arts. We'll bind books, fold origami, make fancy-pants paper from scratch and a ton more!

Beauty School Dropout is a lot about makeup and a little about hair. We'll cover the history, politics and chemistry of cosmetics, along with more fun things like picking and applying makeup. How can a conditioner give your curls bounce or soothe split ends? We'll find out!

Man, classes are filling up like crazy - we only have a few spots left in Looking At Things, grab 'em while we got 'em (and learn to stop talking about art like a third grader)!  If you missed your chance, get thee to our mailing list if you want to hear about when we open next semester's courses up for registration.

A couple months ago all the cool kids were atwitter with excitement over Google Wave and how, one day, maybe, when everyone else has it too, it’s going to make group collaboration awesome.  I have had about one active wave ever, and I don't understand how it works at all, but that's not going to stop us from giving everyone in Brainery classes invites (though I'm sure you all have them already, cool kids that you are) and going wild. 

Hopefully, Wave will be an extension of each class—a place to post pictures of your jerky experiment gone horribly wrong, link to some crazy website that sells fiber optic cable, suggest ideas for next week, whatever.   If that doesn’t work, we can always use it to reenact scenes from Pulp Fiction.

Hey hey we're in Time Out New York! We sound alarmingly interesting in it, too.

In other news I got one of the telescope building books for Optical Collusion in the mail yesterday and it is crazy. Did you know you shouldn't look at stars over the tops of houses? Apparently heat rises off of roofs at night and creates distortion in the air which makes the stars flickery and blurrier. You're already struggling enough trying to get your star-light through the whorls and turbulent bits of the atmosphere and you don't need to add anything else for it to fight through. You'd think that if that light traveled millions of light years it wouldn't wimp out at the last moment.

Also: sign up for classes before they fill up!

Oh my, people like us!

It's kind of old news by now, but we were on NYPost.com: Calling all nerds: Brooklyn Brainery launches Jan. The best part is my completely inane, obscenely modifier-ridden "I ... get really into things for a really short period of time a lot."

Brokelyn, everyone's favorite guide to living on the cheap, included us in a write-up about adult education. We're nestled between Babeland classes about pregnancy sex and Brooklyn Kitchen classes about choppin' pigs' heads off. If you're more into reading about pig-head-chopping than watching it happen, I'll go ahead and recommend our class about meat!

This whole thing will not get built, but if it does, I am leaving the newly shadowed over streets of Brooklyn forever.  Say, maybe, for Detroit. 

And maybe, if a whole bunch of people who own businesses or make art and are way more creative than I am move there too, then maybe Detroit will rebuild its tax base a bit, and old beautiful houses will eventually get restored, and maybe in thirty years everyone will have new monster development plans to rage against in the Motor City. 

And so, to hasten your trip our west, here are a handful of links about Detroit, including this awesome recent article from The Economist, which gives you lots of good facts (population’s now less than ½ of what it was in 1950; avg. house price is 15K) as well as being a lovely portrait of the art currently coming from there.  

-Also, a nice thorough piece from Model D about the coming wave of gentrification (but it’s from 2005--I’m too late!)

-Another long article about Detroit and urban farming, from Harper's in 2007.  I haven't read it yet but it seems pretty definitive.

-A good, long, old Salon interview with Richard Florida, who long ago wrote about the rise of the creative class and gentrification in cities.   

About Detroit specifically: “They got trapped in the organizational age; they thought we really live in a patriarchal, white, corporate society and that the key to success was to strap on your tie, go to work 9 to 5, and behave yourself. There was no room for people with new ideas.” Well, there's plenty of room now!

-From CNN, a nice overview of the D's current situation. Fact: Detroit has more murders than New York this year, but we have 10X as many people here.

I have this awesome little book called Pattern Language, which is sort of a 1200 page choose-you-own-adventure about urban planning, architecture, furniture and anything else that takes physical form in your life.  The end of each section leads you to about 5 more connected chapters and there are lots of little charming hand-drawn diagrams, very Berkeley in the 70s. (which is a good thing!)

This book rules because it doesn't require my short attention span to stay active for more than 5 minutes at once, they bold all the important things, and they illustrate all the really, really important things, which is kind of like the author giving up straight from the get go and never even once thinking you will read the whole thing. 

So this book is full of these great little nuggets of information and I happened to stumble on one today about decentralizing education that seemed kind of pertinent.  The general argument is this: destroy centralized educational systems and physically disperse the act of learning throughout the city, to houses, workshops, museums, shops, everywhere.  Everyone should be constantly engaged in both learning from those around them to the point where there are 100 home classes for 10,000 people. (The best parts of this book are the ways they assign very specific numbers to everything--it is a pattern book, after all).  The shape of education transforms from a pyramid to a grid-like web, with connections being made all over the place.

This last bit, about the web, made me think about this cool tidbit from the Times' Year in Ideas section, about the pretty near banning of cul-de-sacs in Virginia and a bunch of other places around the country, because they're inefficient, cause all kinds of traffic issues, make kids fatter since they can't walk anywhere, and pretty much make life miserable. 

And so, if there's one lesson to learn from all this rambling, it's that grids are the way to go, even when they're six grids all patched together that really make no sense and cause people who live in South Brooklyn to be utterly confused every time they venture up the G to Metropolitan, but I guess that's another story.

Registration is open open open open oooopeeeen! You can now sign up for classes to your heart's content. 

$25 apiece, and if you want to take multiples sign up for one and drop us an email and we can try to cut you a break on the rest.

Let's do an overview:

Scents & Sensibility: I'm teaching this one because F.I.T. wouldn't let me take a class about perfume! And because it's a good excuse to make a bunch of stuff with my ice cream maker in the name of Science.

Visual-Eyes: Looking at Things: Once upon a time Jen went to school for Art History and then graduated and got a job, and now she just wants to talk about buildings that look like ducks (I PROMISE. READ THE COURSE DESCRIPTION.) I am taking this class so I don't sound like an infant when I try to discuss art.

Optical Collusion: Bump and grind some lenses and mirrors! We are going to be putting light into the corner until it bends to our collective will. We'll balance out the sciencetown aspect of it with cool light sculptures involving stuff like electroluminescent panels.

And that's about it! Now please sign up for classes so I can stop telling you to sign up for classes.

Dear everyone in my class at F.I.T. who I just preached to (and everyone else, for that matter!),

We need you to take these classes. For serious.

The thing that makes Brooklyn Brainery work is the people in the classes, and what they bring to it. Since we don't have an official bossy teacher, a lot of the class relies on our backgrounds and experiences and own personal knowledge to. Maybe I know about Ethiopian food, and Jen knows about what trees are in Fort Greene park, and there's a billion things you could know that we sure don't. Everyone brings something different, and I'm convinced that you (all and any of you!) know plenty that other people would be interested in.

Aaaaand let's be honest, I'd rather hear your take on Draping or Accessories Drawing than drop a thousand dollars learning the two.

So, everyone! Even if you aren't interested in the classes this semester (although you should all want to take my perfume class), sign up for the mailing list. Really. It's up top. We're going to host at least 4 classes every couple months, and at some point we're going to run across something you want to learn.

Or just tell us you want to teach a class! Let's say you kind of like domesticating falcons, maybe we'll go ahead and have a how-to-turn-dangerous-birds-into-pets class. And someone will know how to sew and we'll all get those wicked gloves!

Brooklyn Brainery will be awesome, but that'll really be thanks to you.

Back in October we went to the Brooklyn Skillshare and spent a day a-learnin'. For the underinformed, the skillshare was a day-long event broken into 5 1.5-hour-long blocks. For each block you chose between 3 classes. Classes were taught by a variety of teachers, from hobbyists to professionals. And O, the Cost!: a ten-dollar sliding scale donation. If you aren't good at economics, that means it's basically free. A ton of people showed up, with probably a solid thirty to seventy people attending every class.

Now for a completely navel-gazing essay about the good, the bad, and how Brooklyn Brainery is the other half of the cheap Brooklyn education puzzle.

The Skillshare was successful in getting a huge group of people introduced to a lot of varied topics. I didn't know a damn thing about bike maintenance beforehand, but I can now fix wobbly tires on my too-heavy girls' bike with ease. Same thing with silversmithing. It would have taken either a pricy class or a whoooole lot of youtube to cover everything we did in those 90 minutes.

A necessity of cheap classes is that you end up with inexperienced teachers, or reaaaallly nice professionals who don’t mind working for free. The instructors at the Skillshare were reasonably well put-together, especially the one presenting bike maintenance (he fielded questions like a champ). A downside to pulling your instructors from hobbyists is that they aren't necessarily all that skilled in their field, and you end up with a situation where members of the audience might know more than the presenter. The top-down teaching method that lectures necessarily use can be tough in a less-experienced-instructor situation; misinformation or incomplete understanding is easily transmitted to the students because there's no vehicle for communication or second-guessing (too much audience participation can really, really kill an otherwise good lecture).

There really isn't any way to combat that outside of having small classes, which is what we're doing at the Brainery. You go into classes at BrBy knowing that the instructor doesn't know a damn thing, so everything is open to questioning and exploration. Don't take this as a shortcoming of the Skillshare, though! It's just how things have to be - you can't teach anything to six dozen people without the teacher having a degree of authority (which, in the case of the Skillshare, they actually deserve). 

Hour and a half long lectures, which is a great great length for a short introduction, really don't let you get too deep into a subject. Add in large classes (which generally prevent much hands-on work, though the knitting class seemed to handle the multitudes unexpectedly well) and you're really only going to skim the surface. That's why our classes are 4 weeks long - we want to take the interest something like the Skillshare generates and make it bear some sort of fruit. I'll let you know when I figure out a pun about growing seasons.

Something I really enjoyed about the Skillshare was how mobile you were allowed to be - you weren't shut up in a classroom and restricted to one class for a whole block. When I ended up in a lecture that wasn’t really for me, I could just run off to another one! Brooklyn Brainery definitely doesn't have that - our draconian policies require you to sign up and pay for specific classes. We do this to help raise funds but also to make sure we have a steady group that can go through the topic together. Accumulating knowledge and familiarity over a few class meetings will go a long way in cultivating ownership over a topic. Also! we're probably old fogeys who love tradition and are going to make you say the Pledge of Allegiance before every class at least twice.

If you're reading this and haven't signed up for our mailing list yet, you're breaking my heart into a hundred thousand pieces. You'd also be breaking your own if you knew what you were missing! The sign-up form is in the ATTENTION-GRABBING yellow box up at the top of every page, and filling it out lets you get incredibly, amazingly cool emails from us about classes and registration and the like, which is the opposite of the spam you're used to. So please do. Oh and follow @bkbrains, too.

Had you any idea that brainery is a real word?!

Neither did I, and actually, I'm still not sure.  It's here, but not in the dictionary, and the Scrabble dictionary is down so I can't tell you if it's legal on the big board, but I'm gonna guess no.   (Have you ever read that book, Word Freak? Highly recommended.)

Across the internet, there are 66,700 search results for "brainery" but the only one that seems remotely interesting is The General George Squier Brainery, a conference named after the founder of Muzak (they're a company?).  They even had a performance by The Constellations, a band that once recorded a song with Asher Roth, of all people.  I could not have made any of that up if I had tried.

In case the above wasn't educational enough for you, here's a couple of random, entirely unrelated facts I've been telling everyone lately:

Bangladesh is the world's 7th most populous country!

Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the US!

If your friends are anything like mine, they will only be mildly impressed by these facts, but it's a start.

Our web site is up! That means we're one step closer to us teaching you and you teaching us and you (sing.) teaching you (pl.) and it will all just be very excellent together.

Pretty much Jen and I spend a horrifying amount of time going to lectures and taking classes. Whether it's a talk on Papua New Guinea Secret Science Club, metalworking at 3rd Ward, something about embalming at Observatory, we've got a lot of learning going on. But I'll be damned if everything we do isn't either short or expensive. Lectures are great, but sometimes you want a little more of an in-depth look at something. And as for the latter, I'm admirably cheap.

Enter Brooklyn Brainery! Cheap, weekly classes of all stripes. How do we do it? First, another anecdote!

I've been taking some cobbling classes at FIT and decided I wanted to learn a bit about perfumes. But, oh burn!, not being a Cosmetics & Fragrances graduate student kept me out of every single slightly awesome class. Cue despair, and a lot of my mumbling and grumbling along the lines of "I could do all of this myself!"

And so we're going to.

Take a bunch of people who want to learn the same thing. Find some materials they can use to teach themselves. Give them instructors whose job is not to teach, but facilitate. These people will learn.

If you (over there) have read every wikipedia page related to steam disillation and you (right here) have read The Secret of Scent and someone over there actually wears perfume we've got a pretty good start to a collaborative learning experience. Everyone brings something different to the table, even if it's just curiosity. Add in someone whose job it is to keep us on task (that's me!) and you are going to learn the hell out of some scents.

So, that's us! If I've gotten you sufficiently psyched you can check out the course offerings, or if you'd like to read a little more about us you can check out the about us page.