(the confidential adventures of mr. meyer and his colossal t.a., katy)
managing my investment portfolio
Dan Meyer
Erbert & Gerbert’s Human Flipbook + its really great behind the scenes featurette. I love showin’ off videos like these, videos which require such precision planning, such perseverance, creativity, and self-motivation but which don’t require an abundance of cash. ¶ Already, I’m hearing fewer “get a life”-type comments and more amazed murmuring, which, I can only hope, will produce some creativity of its own before long. [via adgoodness]
Apple is in preproduction, eleven days away from mandating the themes, props, and settings that’ll comprise its Insomnia Film Festival, a 24-hour cast-shoot-edit-and-score-a-thon. ¶ Pass it along to your students. Whatever your class, guaranteed you’ve got some students who’d undertake this kind of exercise for adrenaline and giggles alone, but the prize package (full hardware / software kits for each team member) is something of an incentive also. ¶ Feel free to pass along, also, screenwriter John August’s (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) ten-step plan for victory.
One Direction
The Kingdom‘s opening credits are just oh-man jaw-droppingly forehead-smackingly good.
We’re talking a four-minute blend of motion graphics and archival footage so fine it’s tough to tell where one ends and the other begins. The mad geniuses at PIC Agency tossed ’em both in a blender, hit purée, and the result is an even-handed, sober narration of Saudi Arabia’s entire existence.
As a kid born after the embargo, I never understood until now just how their interests and ours have competed on their soil and, as of 9/11/01, on ours like some fatal game of football. “A violent collision of tradition and modernity,” as the narration puts it.
And they’re online. And in high-def. If you teach history, I’d sock this one away for the appropriate unit.
Another Direction
So clearly the visuals here supplement the narration in a sum-greater-than-the-parts kinda way. This wouldn’t have been nearly the accomplishment with just visuals or just text.
But I think the success of this piece and others like it leads some teachers to the wrong conclusion, that multimedia is the magic element here. The mistake is to assume that using video clips or pictures or sound or some combination thereof or even some student buffet selection thereof is gonna improve learning.
It is, as with every media, a matter of editing. What you leave out matters more than what you leave in.
What no one teaches teachers to do, what teachers only teach themselves if they’re of the mind, is how to edit their material into stories, how to set-up antagonists and position their students as protagonists, how to modulate their voices, letting them bend a little with the direction of the stories, how to use volume like a scalpel, letting it drop a little before a conclusion and pick up as they move along, how to generate kinesthetic energy by moving around the classroom when the lesson’s pace slackens, when to signal that something big is coming up and when to let it kinda drop on them and settle on different students at different times.
Or how to do that in multimedia, surround sound stereo.
More than the media matters is the quality of the media. The edubloc is taking up the cause of multimedia but how many bloggers realize that their responsibility doesn’t end with putting a camera in a kid’s hands or a microphone in front of her face.
How many of them realize that there’s a right way to teach this stuff, or that their multimedia fixation is making video / audio / photo production teachers out of them all?
In a recent comment, I asserted that a lot of stuff that matters to classroom teachers nowadays (and to me when I first started) doesn’t really matter. I asked a bunch of rhetorical questions, one of which Sarah picked up, mentioning that her school has Seven Universal Rules, one of which is no gum:
So at this point, when someone comes in chewing, I say, โGo ahead and spit it out.โ If I notice it in class, I bring the trashcan around. Iโm trying not to make it a big deal. But at the same time, what do I do with the rules forced on me?
Postponing any answer for a second, your last paragraph is great. “Go ahead and spit it out.” Nothing snide or demeaning. It’s pretty much 100% about attitude/tone in these situations and not about what is said.
Guaranteed: there is at least one teacher at your school โ probably someone on the Seven Universal Rules committee โ who takes those rules and wraps herself up in them.
- They give her leverage with her students when she couldn’t buy any by being fun, interesting, or clear.
- They give her a sense of self-definition when she couldn’t define herself by being fun, interesting, or clear.
- They give her a simple goal to work towards (the consistent enforcement of all seven) when she couldn’t grapple with more worthy, but complicated, ones like becoming fun, interesting, and clear.
There are a lot of smart folks on this here blogowhatever who would suggest in error that she craves power and control over her students. These people miss the greater point that she is scared. She craves freedom from fear. Power is merely her means. The eradication of fear is her end. Dismissing her as power-hungry offers no rehabilitative recourse except to take away her power.
Those are the teachers that every student dislikes except those who are similarly afraid. Power cures the teacher’s fear. That teacher’s structure cures the student’s.
The other students โ those more psychologically put-together than their harried teacher โ get a boring instructor who is professionally miserable (even if she wouldn’t self-report that misery) who has made a list of her seven largest anger buttons obvious and public.
My word. The fun those students will have at her expense.
You wanna see that teacher? One of her students took video of her awhile back. That sequence three minutes in which a student takes her box of Kleenex and she goes after it? The metaphorical significance of that box (which, to her, doesn’t just contain Kleenex) is unmistakable. Her student knows it and goes after it.
But if you aren’t afraid of your students then you’re in the best possible place.
You can enforce rules with calm detachment ’cause there’s no you in the disciplinary equation, only us and how much we can learn in a two-hour block.
You can also turn a blind eye to infractions ’cause that student surreptitiously chewing gum in the back doesn’t scare you. She isn’t chewing gum to piss you off, which is kinda the default assumption of the scared teacher.
Then two weeks before your evaluation you tell your students that we are getting absolutely crazy about these rules. You start writing standards on the board. You get heavyhanded with cell phones. You start caring about food, drink, and gum. You get a little meaner.
Then the day after your evaluation you get back to teaching.