Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
I thought this was a lot of fun to read/learn about (while I should have been doing other things): First, there’s this amazing water slide video:
This is fake, and I guess that’s kind of common sense, really. But what I liked as much and/or better was this from Juice The Blog: Unbelievable Waterslide Compositing Walkthrough. Yet another reason to learn more about video….
In a previous post, I described my view from the Great Wolf Lodge; here it is:
Oh, and also the previously mentioned bird shit:
The whole set of our Traverse City photos is available here, for the truly curious.
Oh, and PS: if you are looking at this in early August 2009, the header at the top is Will at the dune climb in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
I’m sitting here in Traverse City on the patio of my hotel writing this post. I’ve got somewhat dicey internet access, and there is a fair amount of bird shit on the patio because of a nest that is in the eaves above. Across the way, there’s a fenced-in small herd (10 or so?) of buffalo. Somewhat close to nature, I suppose. Will is watching Spongebob while playing computer games, and Annette is reading and napping. Somewhat close to home, too.
We’re up here because I’m teaching a course called Technology for Teaching and Learning, which is offered as part of the EMU continuing ed program in Traverse City. Basically, my concept of the class has been as a hands-on course/workshop that runs from 8-ish in the morning until 2-ish in the afternoon for a week. The focus is on exposure to all sorts of tools (mostly of the web 2.0 variety) with the goal of helping folks figure out how various things might (or not) work in their teaching. It’s a lot of practice that hopefully sparks some theory. I originally imagined it as an English/Writing course, but all but one of the eight students have come from other programs and they are all grad students, too. It’s been a lot of fun and useful for students (I think), and the format has worked out pretty much the way that I hoped: lots of time to really try to figure out some of this software, lots of time to talk and brainstorm about what might work, lots of time to “bond” with each other. Anyway, check out the web site above.
As part of the deal, EMU puts faculty up in a local hotel, and in our case, we selected the option of the Great Wolf Lodge. Check out the web site for those not familiar; basically, it is a hotel with a waterpark, or a waterpark with a hotel. As Annette put it, staying here is a bit like staying in a Chuck E. Cheese: everything is set up for the 12 and under crowd (and parents, of course) for a one or two night stay (the desk clerk expressed surprise at my eight day reservation) of waterpark fun, story-time, ice cream, arcade games, some sort of weird Harry Potter-esque game in the hallways that involve kids playing with wands. Don’t ask because that’s all I know. Mind you, it’s a decent-enough hotel. Everyone has been quite nice, and, relatively speaking, it is pretty conveniently located, especially to get to the points east of here that are of touristy interest. But I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t on EMU’s dime.
While I’ve been teaching, Annette and Will have been touring about, taking advantage of the waterpark, and just generally hanging about. When you’re up north this long, you don’t feel as much pressure to do something all the time. So far, we’ve been up to Leeland (Fishtown and the Bluebird), Glen Arbor (and Cherry Republic), Sleeping Bear, Empire Beach, downtown Traverse City, and a few points in-between. We’re thinking about going up to Petoskey on Saturday. Whenever I come up here, I always have two reoccuring thoughts: first, it sure is beautiful up here and I understand the appeal of a sorta run-down cabin down a gravel lane by the lake. Conversely, it reminds me of how it is a lot more fun to visit a tourist town than to live in a tourist town. The traffic around here, especially in the “city” of Traverse City: jesh.
Anyway, some pictures/movies soon, including of the bird shit, birds, and buffalo.
Via the NCTE Inbox, I came across this Time magazine article, “Mourning the Death of Handwriting.” It’s pretty much the same discussion about handwriting that I’ve posted about in the past: isn’t it a shame that handwriting is dying, though there is no compelling reason as to why this really that bad of a thing.
But there are two twists. First, the article’s author, Claire Suddath, actually quotes pretty much the only “real” expert on handwriting I know, Tamara Thornton, who wrote a fantastic book called Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Thornton’s theory about the “death” of handwriting is more tied to the role of standardized testing than increased computer use. “If something isn’t on a test,” she said, “it’s viewed as a luxury.” She has a point.
Second, the article once again highlights the difficulty in trying to figure out just when exactly handwriting “died.” My parents were both born in the 1940s, and my mother writes with a sort of combination of cursive and print, while my father’s handwriting is print, and one that looks like it was heavily influenced by something like an engineering or drafting class he took. My wife and I were both born in the 1960s; Annette’s handwriting is neat and cursive, and my handwriting is awful. We and pretty much everyone else in our generation were formally taught handwriting, but it seems like I and everyone else I know prints. The article’s author, Suddath, interviews her third grade teacher (Suddath said she was in the third grade in 1990) who taught her handwriting and who implies that Suddath’s was pretty much the last generation for whom cursive was a “rite of passage.” My son, born in the late 1990s, has awful handwriting, but he was most definitely taught cursive and I do recall the third and fourth graders seeing writing in cursive as a “grown-up” thing to do.
Anyway, my point is it seems like handwriting has been waning and lost on the next generation for a long time now. But once again, as someone who has never had the coordination (left-handedness, mostly), skill, or patience to write– even print!– neatly, I welcome the ever-returning end of handwriting.
It’s funny because while I haven’t been here for the last week, I spent plenty of time online here, here, and here. In the real world, I was off on the every other year Krause family summer get together in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. Here’s a set of pictures on Flickr; here’s a few highlights:
All in all, a good trip. Now it’s a couple weeks of “normalness” at home before the Traverse City experience.
For the amount of work that these folks put into their Fancy Fast Food, they could make actual fancy food. But I have to admire the artistry of making a chow mein out of a Domino’s pizza.
It’s been a pretty busy spring and summer this year, but we’ve still had time to have a fine and successful square-foot garden experiment on the side of the house. Back in mid-April, it was pretty much just a plot with dirt. Now here we are in mid-July, and the garden is going mad. Here’s a link to the set so far; a few highlights:
Wow, it’s been a weird one, huh? Just off the top of my head:
Man, I hope that next month is a little less weird….
I’m off to what is generally my favorite conference of the year, Computers and Writing, which this year is in Davis, California. It’s not one of the “big ones,” like the CCCCs or something, and it can be kind of inconsistent in terms of who attends and the overall “quality” of the experience because it is a conference that is more or less hosted by folks who are willing to host it. But it is still my favorite or one of my favorites, mainly because these are my people, so to speak.
Anyway, a few random, preparatory thoughts:
Cory Doctorow had a post on boing-boing yesterday, “Daily Routines: a blog about the habits of interesting people.” The blog he was talking about, Daily Routines, is only kinda/sorta interesting. More interesting to me was the routine Doctorow described for himself:
I’m a total creature of habit, even when I’m on the road, a 5AM-rising daily writer; the last thing I do before bed is all the breakfast prep for a huge, elaborate three-course breakfast for the family so that I can bang it all out in ten minutes after getting to inbox0 from the night’s email and getting through all the morning’s blogposts, hot and ready by 7AM. I get a nap, half an hour’s reading and half and hour’s yoga every afternoon, get in two pages of the novel, two pages of the short story, and about 3 to 5 times a week, I write a column. Every Monday is podcast day. Monday and Wednesday night, I leave the office ten minutes early, get the kid from day care and make sure she’s bathed, fed and in bed by 7 when the sitter comes by so Alice and I can go to a proper 1.5h yoga class around the corner. Sunday mornings we have breakfast out, and I walk the kid to the PO Box, stop and play in the park on the way back, drop off all the stuff from the box at my office, then come home and put the kid to bed while Alice kills zombies on the Xbox. I love my routine.
All of which makes me think a) I need a routine, and b) I need a nap because I did not intend to wake up at 5 am this morning.
