Author Archives: Steve

A Few More Things Firefly

Thud! and Wash is dead. I think I understand how this works. Wash dies at a moment you wouldn’t expect. The hard ride through the beast’s belly is over and the next phase of the journey is about to commence: the final battle. Wash utters something about keen pilotry. The flying shook the theater. Then he’s shot through the chest with what looks like a massive whale bone or giant’s darning needle. Thud. Zip! Zoe’s response is shock, as is ours. Just like that, her love is dead. Wash is stripped of TV-series-character protection. The big arc takes him.

Course Goals and Evaluation

This semester I’m really leaning on specific articulations of where and how students meet course outcomes in evaluation and systematically expressing where a student needs to concentrate their pickups after an evaluation occurs. I will be doing a great deal of contact and in that contact specifying where a students needs to focus their energy.

For example, if I asked a student to identify a specific element of Old English prosody, a likely answer would be alliteration. The next step would be to identify in a well organized essay examples of alliteration in a few works, not just one. In this examination, multiple criteria are being assessed: an understanding of terminology, association between concept and example, term application, identification, reading and writing acumen. Analysis is a minimal issue here. At a more conceptual level, where analysis becomes key, a question could involve the idea of the journey and how Gawain expresses it. What are the criteria? What is the Christian journey (the consequence of temptation means different things here to Sir Gawain and Odysseus)? What was the context of the hero’s acceptance of the proposition (in Gawain it is intensely legalistic and ritualized); what are the tests? How do they reflect different psychological panoramas?

What do grades mean in this scenario? I’d love to do away with grades, but since I can’t, I must define them as symbolic representation of the degree to which a student demonstrates understanding of a standard. It’s easy to do, but the real work comes on the pickup, in challenging people to listen better and to take notes that can be searched, ordered, linked, and refined. Additionally, this calls for a better job on my part to be more assistive in lecture and discussion and to negotiate the texts with more skill. It’s a big problem. How do I teach prosody without revealing too much? Why should a student remark on metaphors I’ve already discussed in class?

Literature and Notes

Tonight in BL Uno, I spoke to students at the board and routined by taking on a persona who referred to things the teacher said. Teacher said that since the color black follows throughout Astrophel and Stella, then black must have some significance to the sonnet sequence. I wrote lines of poetry on the board and disentangled them with scribbles of notes. The lines go

Louing in trueth, and fayne in verse my loue to show,
That she, deare Shee, might take som pleasure of my paine,
Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pittie winne, and pity grace obtaine,
I sought fit wordes to paint the blackest face of woe;

Here we have “blackest face” and here we have all of sonnet 7

When Nature made her chief worke, Stellas eyes,
In colour blacke why wrapt she beames so bright?
Would she in beamy blacke, like Painter wise,
Frame daintiest lustre, mixt of shades and light?
Or did she else that sober hue deuise,
In obiect best to knitt and strength our sight;
Least, if no vaile these braue gleames did disguise,
They, sunlike, should more dazle then delight?
Or would she her miraculous power show,
That, whereas blacke seems Beauties contrary,
She euen in black doth make all beauties flow?
Both so, and thus, she, minding Loue should be
Plac’d euer there, gaue him this mourning weede
To honour all their deaths who for her bleed.

In this sonnet “black” returns. It’s not a strong link, because the black of Stella’s eyes doesn’t necessarily bleed from the “woe” of sonnet 1. But in terms of reading for literal understanding, the final line of 7 points back to “woefullness” and connects (links) to the deaths we die for love. Sidney is all over the contraries, spelling out love and desire in terms of pain and longing. There’s a darkness to love, a dark power, sweatly luminous and marvelously painful.

The notes on the board and the connections made through paraphrase indicate the importance of notes to study, learning, and organizing ideas, which fly and bonk about like bubbles. Why do the PCers wait for Tinderbox for PC? Because we need powerful tools for visualizing connections and making then accessible and sharable. Notebooks are cool, and embodying by writing in books as a means of response to ideas is cool too. We already know that the flexibility of weblog systems make for excellent ways of organizing whatever needs organizing. They’re wonderful tools for portfolios, if the thinker can conceptualize the space, understand the machine, and keep up the energy.

Note-taking while reading or in a state of reflection (the hypertext at work) is a critical procedure. At the board, while in that odd-ball state of character, I found myself learning before the crowd, learning more about a work that I’ve experienced many times. Sidney isn’t over by a long shot.

More of the Same (updated)

The strangeness (in this age I use strangeness in an extreme form, as in really really fucked up) continues. We have a man with very little experience virtually plopped into the role of Chief Justice. We have a woman nominated with no experience for the O’Connor position. Perhaps these are fine countryclubbers who will do just fine in their robes.

I just don’t get it.

Serenity and other things Firefly

Mark Bernstein on Serenity

A good movie. See it. Probably the best science fiction movie since The Matrix. And, while you could still make a case for the original Star Wars if you wanted, this is probably the best space opera to date.

S and I went for the show on Friday and we enjoyed a pretty much empty theater. I sensed that Serenity, a closer on the Joss Whedon series Firefly (which I was sort of sad to see drop off the air: if it’s good, it’s doomed on SciFi), was the result of a top-notch editing job, taking lots of episodes pipelined for story development, and truncating the whole into a tight narrative built for filmspace. I suspect also though that those unfamiliar with the series may find the characters and narrative complications perplexing.

Hats

One of the best things about teaching at a community college is all the hats you have to wear. One of the worst things about teaching at a community college is all the hats you have to wear. Abilities and outcomes, online learning, literature, poetry and fiction, new media, transfer, pedagogy, hiring, novels, games and other systems. What else?

On Solitude

From Susan Gibb on the idea and condition of solitude

So we are getting the feeling of the solitude, the aloneness each member of this odd family feels and surrounds himself with as what, protection? Or is it just a lack of social skill, a lack of understanding each other and thus, never developing a community with mankind, but standing outside of the touch-zone while walking daily within it for a lifetime.

. . . It is a state of mind well sought in a life filled with disappointments or traumatic and painful events that seem beyond our control, when one can no longer understand the workings of the mind and feels helpless to gain insight or benefit, yet is reluctant to accept. There develops a need to disassociate, an acknowledgement that true understanding could indeed threaten whatever balance the mind has managed to create for itself. It would just be too much; total loss of control appears inevitable. This bubble that must be built is drawn, as a wand from soapy water, as first an invisible illusion, exclusion, inclusion of space.

I see the building of the house of solitude as then formed with a framework of chickenwire.

Project Page

I’ve added a new page for collecting linked-to projects to the sidebar. The first is the Flash piece Stoning Field, a work of fiction planned in Storyspace and then realized in Flash. Stoning Field is a presentation with vexing loading and organizational problems, which I still don’t think I’ve solved. The loader elements between each destination space represent a compromize, a negociation in file size because of the incorporation of video, which I tried to trim to bare minimum without losing quality. In Stoning Field video used as an element of narrative time. Unfortunately, loading may trump the potential aesthetic of the read. But there you go.

The tools used for the project included: Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace, Macromedia Flash MX, Adobe Audition, Dominic Mazzoni’s Audacity, Adobe Premiere, and Microsoft Movie Maker.