And so it goes

2010.04.17
401 Days Remaining

01. A lot of interesting things have happened during my two month blog hiatus, and I don't know if I can recall all of them at the moment. For now I'll focus on last weekend, when my Supernatural in American Popular Culture class did our overnight Ghost Hunting (in an auditorium/theater on campus which is reputed to be haunted). We were accompanied by a Campus Safety officer who has his own paranormal research group, and who is the other guy who does scary storytelling sessions for dorm groups around Halloween each year. We got started around 10pm (having had to wait for the Dance Department's rehearsal to end), and kept up all the way to 4am. The officer and I took groups of students (from 6 to 12 per group) onto the stage of the auditorium in the very low light, and proceeded to run through a series of observations (looking for shadowy figures, odd lights, etc.) and questions ("is there anyone present?" etc.) which are typical of the ways that most pop cultural paranormal research groups operate. The students seem to have had a good time, and I found it fascinating to observe, firsthand, exactly how silly these procedures are. I'm not in any way opposed to paranormal research, but if this is how these groups operate, they aren't actually doing paranormal research. We were three steps away from Spiritualist seances, in terms of method. Still, it was a great deal of fun and pedagogically very useful.

02. Last night I returned to the auditorium to attend the Senior Thesis Dance Concert held by the Dance Department each Spring (three of my students were in it and they invited me). I am uncertain how to describe the experience; I suppose the easiest thing to say is that I don't speak dance. I was often confused or unsure what, if anything, I was supposed to be getting out of the performances. I don't mean that they were unpleasant or nonsensical, I really felt like I was not speaking the language, because the rest of the audience (made up of non-seniors, professors, and family members) seemed to laugh all at the same times, or to find the same moves or sequences meaningful in a way I did not. I was most impressed by a few pieces which were rather atypical of the performance as a whole; two were solo pieces and the other by a trio (that one was not set to music and was apparently originally choreographed by Twyla Tharp).

03. One sequence (in one of the pieces I couldn't substantially grasp) in which several dancers were encouraging someone else (who was clearly, at that moment, the audience's intended focal point) to do something...it got me thinking about visual and somatic ways to represent the theory of mind I've been developing for a long while, where "ego" is a position rather than a thing, and the various internal sub-personalities which constitute us (all of our discrete drives, memories, aversions, habits, etc. are fragments out of which each one of us is constructed) contest one another to occupy the lead position. I may go and talk to the Dance Department faculty and see if anyone has worked on using dance to communicate and explore ideas like that. I've seen someone use masks to make a similar (but not identical) point.

04. Something else that has been on my mind lately: the new Arthur film (about which I've heard consistently bad things). At some point when I was a kid I saw (at least large parts of) the original Arthur, starring Dudley Moore, but I was too young (or my viewing of it was too fragmented) for me to have anything more than a vague sense of the characters or plot. I noted weeks ago that it was available for streaming/viewing on Netflix, and so I watched it while working on other things (mostly grading). I remembered a few scenes with some vividness, but upon watching the film now I have discovered that I mis-remembered their sequence, significance and, in one case, the characters involved. The movie I partially mis-remembered was somewhat more complicated regarding character development (Arthur's fiancee, Susan, is more sympathetic and rounded in my imagined version). There is one scene where Arthur's prospective father-in-law, Burt, tells Arthur that, when Burt was 11, he killed a man who tried to steal food from Burt's family. For reasons I cannot imagine, in my inaccurate memory I thought that scene was an important point in establishing Burt as a character with perspective and sympathy who was encouraging Arthur's maturation (in my mis-memory the scene occurs late in the film). In fact, in the actual movie, Burt was threatening to kill Arthur if Arthur hurt Burt's daughter, and was infantilizing him in the process. I still prefer my mis-remembered version of that scene.

05. Over the past few weeks I've somehow drawn the attention of several of the faculty involved in Baskerville College's Center for Teaching and Learning, an in-house group focused on improving teaching skills for professors in order to make the classroom experience as productive as possible. I've been invited to participate in several their programs, once as a presenter, and have generally enjoyed it. I've also noticed that the same people (about a dozen professors) tend to come to the sessions, which someone else commented on as indicating that the people who care are already there, whereas folks who don't care about teaching as much aren't motivated to attend. This is troubling on any number of levels, but I suspect it's true.

06. I've been spending a lot of time the last several weekends going over rough drafts of essays by my Supernatural students. Their weekly essays started off strong but then began to decline in quality after about a month, and I began requiring rough drafts from those who were declining most precipitously. Literally, for the past three weekends, I've spent at least 8 hours a day going over rough drafts (sometimes multiple iterations of one essay) and working to instill in my students a better understanding of how and why to write some things and not others. I commented to Belisarius the other night that I'm trying to cram four years of Mt Pleasant's honors writing courses' content into a single college semester. I'm not a huge fan of repetition and enforced structure, but I do believe that they are necessary, even if only as a stage from which one eventually graduates, having internalized the important conceptual and practical tools they require you to learn. My students don't accidentally write good essays, and they often have not received anything like the basic training in writing that I did in high school. And, on the upside, it's working. The rough drafts are overall improving, several students require fewer of them to get to a good final draft, and they are clearly seeing the benefit of it in their grades, having done the extra but necessary work.

07. This year's vernal allergy season has been particularly awful, and I've been taking Benadryl (or the Target generic version, which is much less expensive) daily for almost a month now. I've actually woken up a few times from a sound sleep asphyxiating because the mucus membranes in my nose are swollen completely closed, which has never happened before that I can recall. I love spring time, and we seem to finally be moving into steadily warmer weather (yesterday was the only exception to this), but the allergies are hell.

08. Something that occurred two Fridays ago, and which I feel deserves some mention: I received an email from my exing-wife saying that her cat, Jasper, had died. He was 18 years old. I am not aware of the specific circumstances of his death (I assume he was euthanized), but I had known that his condition was deteriorating this past year. He and I lived together for roughly 3 years, and knew each other for a year before becoming housemates. He was a grumpy, gluttonous old bastard (Iunia and Euander, in particular, found him frightening and ogre-like), and I'm sad about his death. He loved my exing-wife ferociously, and she loved him; they were together for 18 years, longer than any other relationship she's had. Whenever she was traveling he would stop eating for the first couple days (and this cat loved food only slightly less than he loved her) until resignation kicked in and he took solace in eating. One of my great fears throughout my marriage was that he would die while she was away, and so I'm glad they were together when he died. I know he'll be missed.