changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
one month to valentine's day! whatever shall i do with all the flowers and chocolates i'll receive? yeah, right. ok. back to reality.
 not
sleeping through the night really sucks. have i mentioned that before?
at least i slept for three hours before waking up. can't complain too
much though as it's given me the chance to find more photographic evidence
that cooki is the devil. clearly this evidence is irrefutable. is it any
wonder i cannot sleep when i know this creature inhabits my mother's house?
i'm reading what seems like the lamest book ever written. well, not counting
those horrible, thick, late victorian novels by eliot and trollope. gad,
the very thought of it makes me carry on in long, stupid sentences that
really don't have any true content, but oh, the truth of the indignities
of the horrors of the social uproar, of the trollopes traipsing through
the attics and cellars, oh for the way we were, for the pure who march
down the middle of the street knowing the true heart of kindness gains
the just reward of neverending sorrow and punishment in the upheavals
that humankind heaps upon the, oh dear, merciful Lord, dare i say it,
oh for it was the jest of times, and the wurst of times, for she saw sage
not and yet, heaving upon the ebbing tide of wastrels that lurked upon
the shore, tempests tossed forth by the gerry meandering that left the
country divided and yet singularly unified in the tampering mischief against
which they could hold no course in wide opposition and defense, for the
colours of the night they bleed into the streets, tearing at the hearts
and eyes and very fingers of those who...oh, good lord, how did that happen?
um, i'm reading a friends of ed book. i thought all foe books had a reputation
of being really good, but this one is trying my patience something fierce.
it's Learn Design with Flash MX (for Absolute Design Beginners). the
premise was to explain design concepts (e.g., how hue and saturuation
work, why shadows are darker where they are darker and lighter where they
are lighter, how the eye flows over a page of text) within the concept
of saying how you'd do these things in Flash MX. ok, sounded like a good
idea. i figured i could kill two birds at once, brushing up on my design
skills while figuring out some of the mysteries of Flash (which i'm to
use for a lot of the interactives i'm building). but...the book is set
up to follow the class sessions of a representative class who encounter
this information. and by that i mean the book is a supposed narrative
of the class sessions these people have:
"Oh!" Zed almost leaped out of his chair.
"You're drawing cartoon frames! That's how some comics show action
without showing every single movement. It's just like watching Lisa
under that strobe light at the theater, too. We knew she got from
one movement to the next, and we knew how she got there, even if we
couldn't actually see it."
"See how smart you are without that scarf?" I asked.
(Goin 389)
when i picked up the book, i thought that the paragraphs
looked short and choppy, but i trusted the publisher. now i realize that
those short, choppy paragraphs were paragraphs and paragraphs of inane
classroom chatter interspersed between actual content about design and
Flash. even the relevant content takes on this horrible interplay between
teacher and students:
Wes retrieved a toy from his pocket. "Look what
I have," he announced. "The eye of light!"
We all looked at the glass prism he held between his thumb and forefinger.
He moved it around until a rainbow of light shot from the side of
the prism onto the brick wall of the theater.
"Wow!" Zed bent forward to get a better look. Steve ran
his hand through the rainbow of light. [The reader vomited].
"Hard to believe this little prism can capture so much energy,"
Wes stated. "Waves of light are bombarding this glass at a speed
of 186,000 miles per second. The light waves are captured, bent as
they enter the prism, and then bent again as they leave the glass.
The energy is converted into visible color."
"Thanks for bringing in that prism, Wes, that's the perfect intro
for today's lesson." I talked as the students passed the pyramid
of light around. [ok, i'm sure i've made my point, but this passage
is so absurd, i'm typing it to the end so that someone else has to
experience this schlock with me.] "The discoveries Isaac Newton
made with his studies of prisms and light in the late 1600s formed
the basis of modern physics," I added. "However, color theory
now has its own place within the arts, and that's what we'll focus
on today at this theater."
Bonnie shivered. "If I''d known how much science and math played
a part in design. I'm not sure if I would have come to this class."
Steve put his arm around Bonnie, "Aw, don't let it worry you—I'll
bet you didn't know that if you sent those beams of colored light
through another prism, the beams would turn into white light again."
Zed arched his eyebrows. "Don't let her play that game on you,
Steve. She's mad about this kind of stuff. Every time we meet to work
on our design, she's got some book or other about physics and art
with her."
Steve grinned, and Bonnie looked flustered. "Well, don't we look
silly, out here on the street passing a prism around. When are we
going to see the theater lights?"
"Let's get in there then!" Lisa grinned. She unlocked the
front door, and we entered the lobby, ready for our adventure with
color.
(Goin 322-23)
dear lord, don't we look silly indeed? who thought that
this was what a class sounded like? and who thought that this was a good
way to teach design and software? i'm all for getting at alternative learning
styles, and i'm sure that there are folks out there who find this sort
of narrative approach more, well, approachable than the traditional sorts
of pedagogical documentation. but i'm just left wondering how this representation
of classroom instruction, for all its efforts to provide a transcript
of class interaction, has really created a sort of PC classroom where
the students always seem miraculously to have prisms in their pocket at
just the right pedagogical moment and the banter of the classroom devolves
into a transcript where the real trials and errors of teaching are censored
from the picture.
it's not just that i find the style annoying and the information
in the text hard to ferret out between the supposedly comical classroom
asides and narrative structures. it's that i find this representation
of the classroom really violates what i know about how we teach, about
how a "real" classroom works, and about what being a student
and teacher in a classroom feels like. on second thought, maybe i would
rather read middlemarch. i'm certainly bored enough by this text
to try sleeping again anyway. it does have that value.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Monday, January 13, 2003
left work and went by the post office to mail the truth
to my mom. she doesn't understand that her poodle, cooki, is a bad girl
dog. i mean, the dog is a demon creature with red devil eyes way scarier
than any goat. so with the truth in the mail, i accomplished one of my
remaining to-do's for the week—no doubt the change of the week! (note
that you have to have changes if you're creating a changelog)
this will sound dumb to anyone with a real life, but today, this very
evening, all by myself, i got a library card! i am now a card-holding
patron of the champaign public library. ok, it's true that as a fun-filled
employee of NCTE, an affiliate organization of the University of Illinois,
that i can use the u of i library whenever i want. but who the hell wants
to figure out parking on campus to get some picture books?
so public library you are my goal, but, wow, have things changed in libraries
since i was a page at chesterfield county public library back in high
school. then again, that was twenty-thr, er, a few years ago. there was
a wild game of chase going on in the picture books. all computer terminals
were being hogged for video games. and there was a group of teens supposedly
playing candyland, but making so much noise that the security badge guy
had to come over and ask them to hushinate.
what a darned shame eric wasn't around! he could have just sauntered over
and glowered with that Dwight
D. Eisenhower Statuary Stance (TM) and the hush that would have fallen
over the room would have been adequate for papal mumblings to be loud
as a foghorn.
oh well. i minded my own business and fetched books and stuff. i scooped
up three cds ( Aladdin and the Magic Lamp with John Hurt and Mickey
Hart, Brer Rabbit and the Wonderful Tar Baby with Danny Glover
and Taj Mahal, and Brer Rabbit and Boss Lion with Danny Glover
and Dr. John). plan to listen to them while walking. then i meandered
over to the picture books. got June 29, 1999, which i want to create
a lesson for that we'll hook up to the calendar
on the site. besides Wiesner's books are always so lovely to look at.
got Jumanji for a tech writing lesson plan we have in the works,
by Erin Crisp. she has students writing the instructions for a game, and
after all, in Jumanji it's so-o-o-o important to "read instructions
carefully" : )
then i got four books on monsters! for another lesson plan. i own sendak's
wild things, so i didn't get that. with the librarian's help, we found
Nothing Scares Us, Go Away, Big Green Monster, It's Bedtime,
and Five Ugly Monsters (which is strangely like Five Little
Monkeys). we have a lesson proposed on using monsters to teach about
writing detailed descriptions.
it's my job to think up an 'interactive' for each lesson. understand that
'interactive' has a special definition. pdfs count as interactives. though
the more 'interactive' an interactive is the better. for the monsters,
i was thinking about the silly Fraser
the Eraser "rub-a-dub-dub" BBC monster, and then mr. potatohead
danced through my head, and i thought that maybe I could create a "monster
machine." sort of a cross between magnetic poetry and mr. potatohead.
ok, maybe not that original. we'll have to see.
i'm not sure about the interactives for the other two books i have. i
guess it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with some 'follow the instructions
or things go horribly wrong' thing. but how do you make things go wrong
on the Internet? well, what i mean is how do you make them go wrong in
ways that allow you to keep a job in k12 education?
enough on my day occupations though. i should get back to the brainclogging
blogging that gravel-lord rich wants me to do. sigh...
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
wow. it's been over three whole hours since i found an excuse
to do this instead of doing something else. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!
wrote the report on the fascinating broken links. checked all the pdfs
on the site for the logo, and added 
lots of cute graphics to the latest lessons (my favorite is the goose
on the Mother
Goose lesson. i mean, how could you not like a goose? well, actually,
now that i think of it, you could not like a goose. when
my younger brother was three, my grandmother had some geese penned up
behind the barn and when no one was watching, Noel was apparently doing
some animal behavior study. he came running, crying loudly, but wouldn't
tell us what was wrong. when we finally calmed him down, he tells us,
"goose bite my finger." i guess in these instances, one might
have good reason not to like a goose. but really, a little goose never
hurt anyone.)
hmm, eric has written that he's reading this. hmm. i fear that he stands
before his computer in the Dwight
D. Eisenhower Statuary Stance (TM) scowling. he's probably just getting
jealous of rich though. as soon as i return to writing about him, he'll
be ok.
oops. my officemate just asked what i'm working on "because you're
typing like a mad woman," she says. um. guess that's a sign to get
back to work, before she finds out what i'm really working on.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
ok, so now i'm procrastinating at work. i just got done fixing all the broken links that i'm responsible for at readwritethink. now i have to write the report that says i've done it. rich called a little bit ago to talk about blogging and gravel and stuff.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Sunday, January 12, 2003
got loads of cleaning and organizing done, though no real
writing. looking for some kind of small magnetic board for the office,
but all i seem able to find are big magnetic white boards. not exactly
the ideal solution
have been thinking about the MLK lesson plan that i've been
working on. letting it simmer mainly. i'm still sort of between feeling
unsure if it's a useful lesson or just a lesson with a social agenda without
any other real purpose.  i
have it has a 3-5 lesson focusing on the Martin's
Big Words book. have students talk about the notion of 'big' words
and then go out to choose their own 'big' words. the other alternative
is to give them MLK quotes and have them choose 'big' words which they
compose into a found poem, or something of that sort. i dunno. maybe it's
just that the theory section seems so gaggy to me right now:
To talk about Dr. King's life is to talk about horrible
things: racism, bombings, murders, assassination. Yet it is also to
discuss wonderful things: love, peace, harmony, pride, determination.
What do we tell children about the "bad" things in the world?
How can we "give [them] hope... provide [them] with reasons to
embrace life and its possibilities" (Stanley 41)?
Ultimately, Stanley resolves, "Education is the only solution
that I know to these dilemmas. Education, understood not as technique
or training, not as schooling, but as part and parcel of 'the engagement
of being human,' i.e., the shared act of making meaning of meanings
inherited from others" (41).
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the NCTE Executive
Committee issued a statement
that concluded similarly: "We assert that the long-term response
to violence and cruelty -- indeed the only truly effective response
-- is education, an education in which social justice and the dignity
of all people are held paramount."
In this activity, students focus on this kind of educational goals.
Through an exploration of Dr. King's use of non-violence protest and
the power of words as a weapon for social justice, students learn
more about Dr. King's life and think about their own impact on the
future. And by turning from King's words to their own hopes for the
future, the activity makes specifically highlights hope for the future.
Further Reading
Stanley, Timothy J. 1999. "A
Letter to My Children: Historical Memory and the Silences of Childhood."
Teaching for a Tolerant World, Grades K-6: Essays and Resources.
Ed. Judith P. Robertson. Urbana: NCTE. Pp. 34-44.
Stanley's article focuses on talking
to his children about whether Nazis are "bad guys." While
not directly about King or African American history, the piece is
a relevant discussion of the things that we do and do not talk to
children and students about, when we discuss the, how we discuss them,
and why we discuss them.
i dunno. it's ok i guess but it feels so PC instead of sounding like me. it's like i'm not even there. some stuffy theory paraphraser is. or maybe the problem is that i'm trying to justify teaching MLK rather than why we're teaching about the idea of "big" words and such. i don't have to finish it till at least tomorrow.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
finally slept. have been working on laundry, unpacking, cleaning. wrote to rich this morning about quoting from his email. i'm not sure what i'm writing here. personal ramblings. maybe they don't belong online. of course, that's why i want to dig into what rich is saying, details at blogger, and so on. but for now, i need to get back to unpacking and such.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
i wonder if people who can sleep through the night appreciate how lucky they are. you really have to go through the endless nights of waking up every two or three hours. and the long gaps spent trying to fall asleep. trying to situate your arms and hands and legs so that they won't creep into uncomfortable positions and wake you any sooner than you'll already waken.
so this time i'm out of bed, i unpacked some more stuff, the candles essentially. they're in the bottom of the china cabinet. now if i could only get the china unpacked from the boxes it moved here in three years ago. i must have the slowest progress of anyone i know. though if you count the fact that i get out of bed every two or three hours and unpack something perhaps you can say i'm at least persistent.
i feel almost like macbeth. just without the guilt of murdering folks. i have plenty of guilt—that chapter promised to mday that will likely never materialize, book proposals promised to pete, unwritten letters, unwashed clothes, undone to-dos. i'm just not murdering folks. i'll go back to bed, and tasks i can't even think of now will begin marching through my head, telling me how simple they would be to write, to accomplish. i do a thousand things in those moments when i'm not asleep, lying there in the bed and make plans to do a thousand more. so simple they seem and yet when i get up, as hard to accomplish as sleep is to find.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
i hate when i can't sleep. ok, partly, i have a headache; but also, i'm just lying in there thinking about all the things that i should be writing and am not. when i come out to the keyboard are any of those brilliant sentences still in my head? of course not. i can't even completely remember what the sentences were about. i guess one of the more important things was trying to figure out how to explain what on earth i'm doing here. writing this stuff that is. i want to refer to an email rich sent me, but i need to write him and ask if it's ok. writing that would require way more concentrating than i want to do right now though. hmm.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
this is about the 3 millionth try at getting this page set
up. today was my great-grandmother's birthday. maybe that means i can
run out to the store tomorrow and buy birthday cake and celebrate. well,
or, i could work on the 15million things on my to-do list. and it's been
what? months and months since a list of ten. i need to get my technotes
on here too. but it's bedtime for now.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Saturday, January 11, 2003
ok, i really needed to do something about my homepage, but i also need to unpack some stuff from vacation. but i'd much rather sit and poodle around with web pages. so....
Posted Friday, 24-Aug-2007 17:08:11 PDT
Copyright © 1998-2004 Traci Gardner, P. O. Box 6783, Champaign, IL 61826-6783.
These materials may be referenced, linked to, and indexed, but their contents
may not be duplicated without express written consent of the author. See the
Copying and Sharing page for more details.
|
|
disclaimer
Lijit Search
links
search categories
release history
amusements
education
news
people
places
technoise
techrhet
YA lit authors
|
|
