Category: TIK365

Things I Know 326 of 365: I hated New Year’s Eve

Plot Keywords: Videoconferencing | Nurse | Caterer | Illustrator | Ticket |

– IMDB’s plot keywords for New Year’s Eve

My sister Rachel and I have a long-standing tradition of going to see bad movies together. Sometimes, like last year’s trip to Burlesque, they are the good kind of bad where you leave the theater feeling as though everyone involved was in on the joke. From the stars of the show to the ticket takers, you walk away feeling as though we all knew the movie was bad, so we decided to have fun with it.

Tonight, not so much.

We went to see the Garry Marshall monstrosity New Year’s Eve. Not since 30 Minutes or Less have I so longed for the days of the Inquisition or the Crusades or silent films.

It was horrible.

So bad.

So horribly, horribly bad.

And no one, not a single soul, was in on the joke. Robert De Niro? Nope. Hillary Swank? Nah. Halle Berry? Huh-uh.

And that’s just the Oscar winners.

When De Niro’s character died, I envied him.

Every single actor on the screen, including Michelle Pfeiffer and Ludacris (Really, Luda?), seemed to be working under the assumption they were in a movie that was anything other that bad.

The film attempted to zip through a multitude of storylines in 118 minutes that felt like I was living in 127 Hours. Whether we were supposed to empathize with the characters or pity them, we never really knew how.

And we were supposed to overlook the idea that Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi were supposedly one another’s soulmates? He may only be 16 years older than her, but it played like we were watching Harrison Ford meet Colista Flockhart for the first time over a bowl of green Jell-O.

If there is any redeeming quality in New Year’s Eve, it is as follows.

As someone who has been perennially let down by the fake holiday in the past, I can take comfort this year in knowing whatever I’m doing as 2012 roles in, it will be better than that movie.

Things I Know 325 of 365: Strange or not, I want to know why

One of the most important things I learned last semester was put to our class by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot as the two most important statements of which a ethnographers should be mindful:

If this seems strange, I ask why. If this doesn’t seem strange, I ask why.

Give it the time and space it needs to sink in, and I think that couplet of statements will play the same havoc in your brain that it’s been playing in mine the last few months.

This will not become the sum of my treatise on how I evaluate the world. It has become an important lens through which I view those beliefs I hold and those I argue against.

The couplet invokes the eternal “Why?” and goes a step further to keep it always focused on the strangeness or lack thereof in any situation.

From where did normalcy arise and what makes me suppose it is absent?

Things I Know 324 of 365: From Freakonomics to freako-not-so-fast

Half my life is an act of revision.

– John Irving

I mentioned the other day how much I enjoy reading the Freakonomics blog. Today, I read this piece from American Scientist by Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung who took a deeper look at the work of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and found some easy mistakes.

They took the guys who ask “What’s really going on here?” and asked “What’s really going on here?”

Gelman and Fung aren’t out to discredit Levitt and Dubner. Instead, they are watching the watchmen and point out moments of Freakonomics where Levitt and Dubner miss the mark or fail to ask the next question.

It’s another case of what’s popular not necessarily being what is right.

The piece is interesting for a number of reasons, but appealed to me mainly on the level of helping people to ask good questions. Rather than simply pointing out the problem, Gelman and Fung conclude with a set of recommendations that have direct implications for anyone working to make inquiries into the world and working to make their work accessible to a larger audience:

  • Leave friendship at the door.
  • Don’t sell yourself short.
  • Maintain checks and balances.
  • Take your time.
  • Be clear about where you’re coming from.
  • Use latitude responsibly.

For guidelines to asking good questions and working to craft answers to those questions that show integrity and understanding, this list is a great start. It’s also a reminder to any reader of anything that the iconoclast should be questioned as often as the traditionalist.

Things I Know 323 of 365: Turns out I’m no huge fan of standardized running either

The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears or the sea.

– Isak Dinesen

After 10 years of running, I’ve tried a treadmill for the first time this week.

Once, in my first weeks as a runner, my friend Katy persuaded me to try running on a treadmill at the student recreation center. Though I was struggling with running half a mile without walking, I was already enough of a runner to know something seemed wrong about running on a treadmill.

The weather back home in Illinois has been a bit gross over the last week, so I decided to give the treadmill another choice.

Three times this week, I put Google Music on shuffle, punched in a program and “went” for a run.

I’ll not lie. I ran faster than I’ve been running as of late. I was able to keep track of my pulse whenever I wanted. I new my speed at all times. I kept running the entire time. I was protected from the elements. I had a full report of each accomplishment when I was done.

As helpful as all that information is, I miss running outside.

When I was done with each treadmill run, no matter how successful the data flashing on the screen told me my run had been, I hadn’t gone anywhere.

I was still in my mom’s basement – staring at the furnace. I’d gotten nowhere faster and more efficiently than if I’d run outside, sure. But nowhere was still nowhere.

While I might pause to walk sometimes while running outdoors, I have control of that stopping, and it’s up to me to set the goal for starting again.

Sure, I was sheltered from the elements and protected from distractions, but I hadn’t seen anything. I imagined if I’d been running on a treadmill exclusively in training for my first marathon. Each week, my training would have improved, racheted up mechanically according to schedule.

What a shock it would have been, footfall after footfall, to attempt to reach my goal on a course filled with imperfections and distractions. I would have trained perfectly efficiently, but have no idea how or experience in adapting to my surroundings.

To learn how to run in the real world, I needed to practice running in the real world. My success wasn’t in a computer read out, but in the sense of accomplishment of enduring freezing rain or discovering a new part of my neighborhood.

While I’m home during break, I’ll likely continue to use the treadmill from time to time.

Starting next week, I’ll be back outside. When you’ve learned to do something authentically, anything less than feels just that.

Things I Know 322 of 365: Stupidity holds the answers

I read Ender’s Game yesterday. I lost myself frequently in Orson Scott Card’s future where the world monitors its children’s abilities as the best way to prepare a global military for a return attack by an extraterrestrial foe.

You know, the usual.

It’s as much about strategy and philosophy as it is about story.

This passage will stick with me for a while:

“I need you be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid”…Bean heard him climb into bed. He got up from the floor and did likewise. He thought of a half dozen ideas before he went to sleep. Ender would be pleased – every one of them was stupid.”

It’s a mission statement for an actual mission.

What if this was above your desk:

Be clever. Think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. Try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid.

That would inspire.

Things I Know 321 of 365: Orson Scott Card has some fine words on storytelling

From Orson Scott Card’s introduction to Ender’s Game:

All these uses are valid: all these readings of the book are “correct.” For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender’s Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and audience. The “true” story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experiences, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

Ironically, Card writes, that he would not only understand if the reader skipped the introduction and went straight to the story, he would agree with the reader. I’m glad I didn’t. I would have missed this reminder of the relationship of story.

Things I Know 320 of 365: YouTube for Schools is here because schools couldn’t be bothered to learn

My first inclination is to praise the advent of YouTube for Schools. I want to say, “Finally, we can get the content to the classrooms.” And that is true. At least, it’s more likely.

I can’t say that without also pointing out it was easier for one of the world’s largest corporations to change content streams, test and market a new product, and launch it than it was for America’s schools to consider changing how they think about the Internet.

There’s a reason other nations are outperforming America in tests of thinking.

Things I Know 319 of 365: I read about stuff other than education too

I get that the bulk of what I write about has to do about education or ends up being curved toward education no matter how seemingly unrelated it may seem at face value.

I do care about other things. To prove the point, here are 5 blogs I read on a regular basis that are not about education:

1. The Bloggess – My friend Kat turned me on to the Bloggess last year as we were sharing comedic twitter accounts to follow. I through it in my feed reader and didn’t pay it any mind for several months. By the time I got to cleaning out unread posts, several gems from The Bloggess were waiting for me. Irreverent, honest, comedic and slightly askew, The Bloggess makes me laugh on a consistent basis. Perhaps a stronger vote of confidence, there are few blogs I’ve forwarded on to friends more frequently than this one. Here’s a recent favorite post to get you started.

2. 101 Cookbooks – I love eating, cooking, and looking at things that are pretty. 101 Cookboooks satisfies each of these hobbies. Each recipe is beautifully photographed and described as if I was right there in the kitchen as it was being prepared. What’s more, the recipes are supremely followable. My latest endeavor was the Buttermilk Squash Soup. (drool)

3. Music from Go to Whoa – Aside from food, my most frequent consumption involves music. This blog posts new tracks and videos from musicians just this side of the main stream. Check in here has led me to finding bands that have found solid standing in my favorites file – including this video of tUnE-YarDs performing on Jimmy Fallon.

4. FlowingData – Anything that challenges how I think about the world while putting ideas in beautiful order is marked down as a winner in my book FlowingData is just that and provides a regular dose of “Huh, I’d never have thought of that.”

5. The Freakonomics Blog – Tim and I were talking the other night about how the Freakonomics books and podcast have shifted how we think about the world and led us to ask the question, “What’s really going on here?” The Freakonomics Blog does that with dazzling regularity. It’s a regular read for me, but also requires me to filter from information overload. The bloggers post so much quality content, it’s sometimes difficult for me to keep up. That said, it’s one of my favorite reads.

Things I Know 318 of 365: Christmas music used to be better

I love Christmas music.

I bide my time each year. Waiting. No Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving. We are civilized, after all.

The problem, each year, is there is more and more of what I would call crap counted by others as Christmas music.

Because I’m cool and wasn’t at all an outcast in high school, the  measure of any Christmas music claim is how close it resembles medevial madrigals.

Two years ago, I found refuge in Pandora’s “Classical Christmas” station, and never looked back. In the car, where the radio is my only choice, the crap sneeks in.

It’s not that I’m a purest. I just think we got it right a few hundred years ago and have been messing it up ever since (with the exception of Billie Holiday’s recording of “I’ve got my love to keep me warm).

See xkcd’s useful visualization of my point below.

Things I Know 317 of 365: Tomorrow, I read for me

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

– Angela Carter

Just because I’m not in classes at the moment doesn’t mean I’m not reading. It does mean I’m not reading anything that anyone has assigned to me.

It also means I’m sneaking some fiction into my brain. Tomorrow, I’ll pick up Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Some of my favorite students gushed over the book, but I never took the time to read it while I was in the classroom. Somehow, picking it up without the title of “Teacher” attached to my actions makes the reading seem more pure. I’m not reading it to teach in the next few months. No unit or lesson plans will rely on what I get from the experience. I’m reading it to be entertained.

One of the more frequent state standards (and now a Common Core standard) is identifying author’s purpose. (There’s a whole philosophical argument I could make against this, but that’s another post.)

As I anticipate delving into Card’s imagined dystopia tomorrow, I’ve started to think about the importance of asking students to identify reader’s purpose.

If a student is reading a non-fiction text in class, the answer to the question should be, “Because I’m curious,” or “Because it’s interesting.” Some off shoot thereof makes the most sense.

Reader’s purpose in school is most often, “I’m reading this because my teacher said,” or “It was assigned.”

That shifts the experience considerably. I’m looking forward to losing myself in the imagination of tomorrow’s reading, to meeting new characters and trying to figure out how pieces of the narrative puzzle fit together.

Most importantly, I’ll be shifting my purpose from word to word, chapter to chapter. The journey through the book will inform what I want out of it and what I expect.

Were I reading for someone else because the book had been assigned me, the journey would be emptier. I’d be reading to run someone else’s literary errands, hoping to keep the change when all was said and done.

A balanced reading diet is important. Compelling others to read what they are told is forcing them to eat their vegetables. It’s a great way to get people to hate their vegetables.