When the hurly-burly’s done

I’ve been tagged by Sarah on the 8 random facts meme:

First, the Rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts

2) List 8 random facts about yourself

3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them

4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

So:

1. I was hospitalized twice in exactly one month–once for a car accident and once for an appendectomy. Though the two were entirely unrelated, you would’ve had a hard time convincing me of that back in 2003.

2. I once recorded a concept EP based on The Hunt for Red October. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

3. I’m very bad at saying “no” or “I’m not interested.”

4. My dietary habits come from growing up in a semi-kosher home (no pork, no shellfish, no simulataneous milk and dairy, but also no separate plates, fridges, sinks, etc). To this day, I have a hard time even considering ham, lobster, or cheeseburgers food, and I definitely won’t eat them (which isn’t to say I haven’t sampled).

5. I am convinced that the best way to travel is to carry everything you need on your back and just hoof it.

6. I don’t have the attention span for a PhD.

7. I think I’m closer with my family now than I’ve been at any point in my life up to this moment.

8. I am insanely jealous of anyone who can speak more than one language. In order to force myself to get on that bus, I’m thinking about booking a trip for next summer to a place where I won’t find too many English speakers (in all seriousness, I’ve almost been convinced, in the past couple of weeks, to check out the backpacking in Slovakia), then try to learn the language enough to be functional. If all of these people from around the world can be fluent enough in English to sit through the lectures that I can barely follow, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to do even a tenth of that.

Now, I’m not sure who to tag on this…if it’s redundant, my apologies. Let’s see:

Evan, Kim, Keath & Ceridwen (they count for two, even if they write on the same blog),  Damian, David, Alexander, and Eric.  Go to it, kids.  Go to it.

Clarence’s started thinking about how to set up his classroom processes, tech-wise, for the school year that’s about to begin. It’s cold and rainy outside (in Scotland, this is what passes for “pretty nice weather,” but here in CT, it’s not going to cut it), I’ve got a pot of coffee going, and I’m in the right mood to work on this sort of thing. I’ll start off by responding to some of Clarence’s ideas, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll stay on topic. Hopefully that’ll be okay.

His first entry in the “Nuts and Bolts” series is about wikis. Back before I knew what a wiki was, I applied for a grant (which got rejected) for some tech items that would let my students create their own US History textbook, as the one we had at my old school was garbage. Since I was teaching both US History and English at the time, to the same students, I thought writing a new textbook that subsequent classes could add to would be a fabulous way for my kids to demonstrate both their history content knowledge and their writing skills. The way I’d envisioned it, committees of students would write and edit the narrative sections, create sidebars, curate primary sources, create maps and charts, and post the whole thing online. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, and still does.

I want to use wikis more this year. Evan had our ENG/AMH213 students using wikis all the time by the end of last year. Their sophomore research papers, for example, were wikified. Though there was the usual grumbling at the start (”Another online thing? You’re KILLING us.”), the students seemed to have taken to it.

Now I’m wondering if it might be worthwhile/interesting/feasible to set up a 212 wiki, sort of a collective notebook for everything students might need to succeed in the class. Research done to understand allusions in texts, vocab lists, interesting links, etc., all could be posted to a central wiki to which each student would have access. Clarence has an interesting system for giving credit to students for working on wikis (they need 20 points a week, from what I can tell, and earn 2 points for small edits/contributions and 5 points for doing something that strongly contributes to the class’s knowledgebase). I am definitely thinking along those lines right now–there’s got to be an incentive for contributing to a wiki, but dictating what needs to be done goes against the spirit of the whole enterprise.

The second Nuts and Bolts post is about RSS. I’m with Clarence on this: it’s probably the most powerful tool we have available, and yet we as teachers aren’t using it. Clarence has his students subscribe to a selection of blogs using RSS and uses that to generate classroom conversations about information and how it’s gathered, presented, and used. To me, this is very important–we should, as teachers, be helping our students to make sense of the huge amounts of information that come at them every day. RSS is an easy way to take on at least some of this challenge.

The fact is that RSS is different for kids. They are used to being spoon fed information from often outdated textbooks which they hate reading. But when it comes right down to it, textbooks are easy. They simply have to open them to a certain page when they are told and work with whatever they find. RSS requires them to be active and involved with the collection and evaluation of the information they work with. They need to find trusted nodes and work with their “information pipe.”

This morning, I caught an episode of Where We Live, which is broadcast on Connecticut’s main NPR affiliate. It’s usually a show about local politics and issues, and it’s definitely got limited appeal if you’re not in CT. But this morning’s show was very interesting. It was about how Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks are changing the nature of friendships and social order in high schools.

A phrase stuck out, and I’ve been thinking about it all day. One of the guests described high school as an “information-rich environment.” This is nothing new–high school hallways years ago were filled with conversation, and classrooms with notes passed back and forth. But now that students are using social networks outside of school, the guest went on to say, there are new sources and kinds of information to which our students are privy.

Is this a good thing? I don’t know. I use Facebook (students–don’t try to add me, because I’ll ignore you, and it’s amazing how potentially incriminating/embarrassing a lot of your photos are) to keep in touch with a large group of friends. I just got back from a summer program in Scotland with a lot of undergrads, and I was amazed at how natural it was for them to assume that everyone’d use Facebook for everything from sharing photos to making lunch plans. It’s part of their world, and definitely part of my students’ worlds.

But information comes from a lot more sources, and these are sources that we need to help our students to use. They’ll do Facebook stuff with no problem and no prompting, but will they read academic blogs? Will they set up RSS searches for research topics? Will they download podcasts of lectures and speeches? And, most importantly, will they know how to organize the information they find, and cull out the useless/spurious stuff?

Nuts and Bolts III is about blogging. It seems like it’s been a long time, but I only started blogging, and having my students blog, last year. This site, for example, went live in July. Since then, I’ve become, it seems, one of the go-to people for my colleagues who want to get into classroom blogging. It’s flattering that people think I know what I’m doing, but I get the most joy out of just telling people, quite honestly, that they can figure it all out on their own. That’s the beauty of the technology–it’s by far the easiest to use of anything I’ve found.

I’ve given a lot of thought to how I want to continue to use blogs in the classroom. This past year, I used what Clarence calls the “mother and child” model–one central blog (mine) with links to each student’s individual blog. I read their blogs using my handy-dandy RSS reader, which enabled me to stay on top of their assignments and make sure that what they wrote was appropriate. I had to step in a couple of times and take down posts that violated the rules laid out in the beginning of the year, but I was able to do that in about five minutes from the privacy of my home. It was great.

My next step is to figure out how to award honest credit for blogging. I’ve thought of a couple of models. One way might be to require a certain number of blog posts per week, cycle, month, semester, whatever, and do it based on quantity. Part of me really likes this idea–if a student does all 10 (or whatever) blog posts for the unit, she gets full credit. If she slacks and does 6 of ten, she gets 60% credit.

But there’s also got to be some way of measuring quality, not just quantity. The blogs my students keep aren’t meant to be read in a vacuum–if I’m the only person reading them, they might as well be those old-school journals I collect from time to time. A blog is meant to be interactive, to generate conversation and debate from the community as a whole. And commenting on other people’s blogs (whether fellow students or total strangers) needs to be factored in as well, because that’s important. I wonder if there’s a way to create some sort of metric for online academic conversation, in which students present to me a combination of a) their own blog posts that demonstrate good, incisive writing; b) their own blog posts that generated a lot of discussion; and c) their contributions to discussions on other blogs. That combination, I think, would be a much more accurate way of measuring how well students read and write on the internet, and how well they are able to communicate their ideas and opinions in a public forum.

That’s a lot to think about, and something I’ll return to at a later date. Right now, though, I’m sick of sitting in front of this screen. There’ll be more posts as this week goes on and I continue to record my thoughts about what needs to get done.

Peace.

(Recently found in a notebook I forgot I had.)

Commerce, street-style. Buying and selling Tattoo tickets is a full-contact sport. The Sikh in the plaid turban’s a sharp talker. I can’t even get much of a sound out–dry throat left over from last night’s farewells, some mist behind my eyes. Last night in Edinburgh.

Everyone from SUISS has scattered. I left Swetha and Sarah near the Book Festival. I’m glad they were the last people I hung out with here–they’re both genuine and mature and sweet and I’ll miss them terribly. Sarah’s talking about trying to get a job teaching Spanish in the US. I promised her I’d do anything I could to help her out.

But last night was emotional. We had the farewell party/show, then went out to a karaoke place. My guess is that we were steered that way to cut down on tears. I keep watching the video I shot from the center of the knot of people singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I guess it’s the light or something but everyone looks like they’re in slow motion.

(It tails off here, getting embarrassing and maudlin.  You can only imagine.  A short-lived crush cycle is described, and some more thoughts about how wonderful Edinburgh is.  After I wrote this I walked across town to my hostel, which was okay, and took some pictures along Princes Street.  Nobody was home at the hostel when I got there except some annoying American girls–the room was enormous and co-ed–who were going out to get bombed on a Friday night in Edinburgh.  I’d had an almost all-nighter Thursday night, so I went to sleep at about 9:30, woke up briefly when everyone came home at 3, and slept soundly until my watch alarm woke me to go to the airport.  It rained on my way to the bus stop, on the bus going to the airport, and definitely when I walked outside at the airport to get to the shuttle bus to the plane.  Everyone on the plane was soaking wet and miserable, and I didn’t really feel like dealing with the couple I sat with who couldn’t understand how I’d spent more than three days “doing” Edinburgh.)

I’ve already gotten a bit of a lecture about using “the world” to refer to back home in the States, but I’m going to stick to it. It’s Vietnam War-era grunt slang that comes up in almost every book about the war whenever someone leaves the war and goes home. It connotes adjustment, discomfort, anticipation, and, I think, the knowledge that the soldier in question is never going to look at things the same way again.

So I’m not leaving a jungle or a war, and the toilets here flush and there’s power and running water and everything, but I’ve started to think about what going back home is going to be like. There’s a lot to do in the next week and half–in addition to getting everything ready for the return to school, I keep getting emails about the Beth El youth group that I agreed to run and which is turning into way more work than was advertised (nothing unmanageable, but), and I’ve got gigs in August, September, October, and November to get ready for. Yikes.

So going back to the World means giving up, I think, most of everything here–the Housekeeping staff who clean my room, make my bed, and bring me fresh towels every morning (freaked me out at first, but I got used to more quickly than I’d like to admit), the people who make my meals for me, the proximity to friends that only comes from living in dorms (although, I suppose, that the Branch Davidians made a good attempt at this in their time). Back in the World, I can’t just wander down the hall, knock on someone’s door at night, and expect them to a) not call the cops, fearing a break-in or b) agree to come out to see what’s going on in town.

I was invited to see a few plays at the Fringe this week, but I’m skipping them. I’d much rather spend the time (and the money) somewhere where I can talk to the friends I’ve made and who I’ll probably never see again, mostly. We went out last night to Medina, where over a dozen SUISSers sat on pillows on the floor and just talked. Everyone, it seemed, was from somewhere else–Alek from Serbia, Zuzka from Slovakia, Mairin from Ireland, Roxanne from Italy, myself and Matt and Meghann from the US, Amir from Iran, Sweta from India, Rachel from Australia, Liza from Israel, and plenty more who I’m forgetting right now. That to me’s been the best part of being out of the World–meeting people from all over the place and forging a little community of expat temporary students from places with lousy exchange rates with the pound. Bliss.

There’s been some talk of setting up a message board to help everyone keep in touch after this is all over tomorrow morning. I’m all for it, but I don’t hold out much hope for its success. I’m afraid that everyone’ll go back to their lives, and barring the occasional email or Facebook message, this is all over. And letting go is okay–it’ll make going back to Connecticut easier, for sure, and it’ll give me focus. But I kind of want this to last just a few more days. The World’ll still be there.

David’s comment reminds me that I haven’t blogged in a few days, and that in the intervening time I’ve experienced a pretty wide swath of the Fringe. Basic quick rundown follows, as I’ve got 2,500 more words to write if I want to hand in this draft:

Saturday night: A Midsummer Night’s Tree. Nothing to do with Shakespeare, as Heather and Jaki and I thought it would have, but still great. Breakdancers, trapeze artists, a singer, and a comedian (whose bits went on a bit too long, though he was pretty funny) performed separate pieces on a stage beneath a gigantic tree in the middle of a park on the outside of the New Town. I think they might be the world’s strongest people.   The whole night was nice, despite the midgies that came out when the drizzle subsided.

The evening ended at a famous pub called the Hebrides, where Martin, who is one of the tutors here, was playing Scottish folk music with one of his two bands. In addition to the folk songs, some of which I knew (and which turned out to be Irish, actually), they performed that Edinburgh classic “(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles,” and some sort of very localized political parody of “Billie Jean.”

Sunday afternoon: (Aine) Tigone, basicle Sophocles’s play adapted and re-set in Belfast, 1972. I think the performers were local high school students, and they didn’t give the most even performance, but the script was amazing and I left feeling really moved. I don’t know very much about Antigone, having never read or taught it, but this actually made me a little interested in the original.

Monday afternoon: Bouncy Castle Macbeth. Forget Kurosawa. Forget Polanski. This is the way the Scottish Play needs to be done. An hour and fifteen minutes, a cast of fewer than ten (Banquo was played by an inflatable doll wearing a kilt), and a big purple bouncy castle as the stage. Not sure why Macbeth used an inflatable Tyrannosaurus Rex as his sword in the final battle scene, but I’m sure it was a necessary piece of stage business (or the balloon sword he’d had earlier in the play popped). Magical. 

Tuesday night: The Ballad of James II. Douglas Maxwell, Scotland’s most prolific young playwrite (his words), wrote this show about truth and mythmaking in the lives of nations. James II, an ugly, schizophrenic, and asexual king of Scotland, must make a decision that might lead to a civil war. The cast of five did a remarkable job with the complicated emotions involved, and the staging (in the famous Rosslyn Chapel) made the performance even more special. This is the show I’d recommend most highly of the four, though the others have a lot to recommend (especially Bouncy Castle Macbeth). But there’s something about great theatre, and a great script, and great actors, that transcends gimmickery. James II would’ve worked anywhere–I could see it being done at the GHS Black Box, for example, or on Broadway, or anywhere there’s a performance space. I left that play wanting a copy of the script and another opportunity to see the show. Alas, last night was our last off night until next week, as we’re pretty heavily programmed here.

And now I really need to write this story. It’s easy to forget why I’m here–Edinburgh’s not a good city if you’ve got ADHD that’s triggered by impending deadlines.