Response to a totally unwieldy meme:
The key to staying on top of things is to treat everything like it’s your first project. Like it’s your first day like back when you was an intern. Like that’s how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry.
Notorious B.I.G.
Or: Best Lesson Ever
Or: Why It’s Nice To Have Some Totally Extraneous Skills
Or: Skip The Blah-Blah. Downloads At The End.
The Blah-Blah
I know this isn’t new. I’m not the first person to ask a class to make an x-y graph out of some ripped-from-real-life event.
“Give me a graph of what happens to a bouncing ball over time.”
“Show me what happens to your height as you grow up.”
“Give me a graph of your marriage odds for each year of your life.”
“Et cetera.”
This idea that we can describe things that happen with mathematical graphs isn’t new, nor is the idea that this is an effective introduction to a linear unit. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that it’s never been done this well.
I was rereading my most recent post — the default activity when I’m feeling bored and narcissistic — and I realized I buried the lede beneath a pile of television criticism. Wrong blog, sorry.
And that thesis keeps hankering at me. I doubt it’ll leave me alone until I do it justice so the last paragraph, once again:
The truth, if you’re a speaker addressing an audience, is that the only way to get your audience more engaged is to become, yourself, more engaging. There is no shortcut. The solution is simple but not easy and the difference between those two adjectives lies somewhere on your TiVo.
That last point — that we can and should be imitating our favorite entertainers — is the most important.
I’ve led story development meetings. I’ve sat at a table with four other writers, a character to kill, and no way to kill him.
I’ve sat in front of my computer with a concept to teach and no idea how to make it engaging, new, or fun.
The two experiences are, in their intents and purposes and agony, completely the same.
I’ve been watching The Shield compulsively lately. I’ll have an episode tucked into one corner of my screen while I design handouts or plan lessons or whatever. I’ve got some great television on deck too, the season finale of Friday Night Lights, for instance, but I haven’t watched and can’t watch any of them, simply because the twisted morality play of The Shield is engrossing to the exclusion of all other drama.
At the start of every episode, like so many other shows, they roll a recap of previous episodes. With 24, this recap tends to be so totally comprehensive, re-introducing characters only the mouthbreathers had forgotten, that I can’t help but check out.
The Shield, in contrast, plays only five or six choice vignettes, sometimes cut from seasons long-gone, and even though I just watched that episode last week, I can’t help but pay close attention.
Once again, there’s 24‘s sloppy, encyclopedic approach to story review and then The Shield‘s, where every moment of every recap pertains directly to the episode you’re about to watch. You know that every flashback is gonna blast through the current story arc like an asteroid.
How this matters to education in general and this blog in particular is this: if The Shield were a teacher, his classes would be too satisfying to cut.
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