Art and I have a long awaited heart-to-heart

I've never been an "Art Person", per se.  And especially not a high-minded modern art kinda guy.  You see, Modern Art and I have an agreement:  if I stay away from Art, art agrees to stop keeping me awake at night with horrible doubts about my sanity and the nature of humanity.  Because who needs that?  Not me. 

Dammit, Marcel Duchamp, We had a deal!

I didn't come to this conclusion lightly.  Exit through the Gift Shop helped a lot.  So did the fact that Jackson Pollack exists, and that guy who made a cross out of pee.  If that is art, then I really, really have better things to do. 

However, I recently learned about the basics of aesthetic theory, and the different ways in which people can appreciate art and the principle which make things pleasing to the eye.  Now this is where my life and art begin to intersect.  See, I've made no secret of the fact that I absolutely love webcomics.  I fritter away hours sifting through the archives of amazingly animated, fantastically creative comics like Sam Logan's Sam and Fuzzy, Kate Beaton's Hark a Vagrant!, Evan Dahm's Order of Tales, Jeffery Rowland's Wigu and Overcompensating, Scott Kurtz's PvP, Penny Arcade, Kris Straub's Starslip, and Dresden Codak's Bad Science.

I know that sounds like a lot, but to be honest that's probably not even half of them. My god, I've just outed myself as a massive nerd.  It was bound to happen, I guess.  But the point is, these are all beautiful.  In order for me to follow a webcomic, I have to be sure of the artist's chops.  Now I can recognize and verbalize what I like about each comic, each style:  I can understand the use of continuity and composition in each frame.  I'm no critic, but I'm no longer illiterate to the art that actually goes into something I love and enjoy everyday. 

You may have hurt me in the past, Art, but I'm willing to to make this work if you are.  C'mere, ya big lug!

But not You, Jackson Pollack!  You make painting like baby.

Gender Stereotyping in Ads

After watching Killing Us Softly, a short talk on how advertising dehumanizes and objectifies women, I've become hypersensitive towards ads.  I can't watch an ad without trying to decipher the villainous intent behind any sort of ad.  I mean, they have a point, I know, but at the same time I think a lot of the more subtle stuff was a little too read into.

Obviously a Beer commercial, right?  What do you mean you don't see it?

Visual Symbols

We all have some symbols that we immediately recognize as being important, or at least meaning something:  the dollar sign, McDonald's M's, traffic lights, those little Jesus fishes that people stick to their cars.  They all mean something to all of us collectively, but we each have our own personal visual symbols that speak to us on a more intimate level than our greater cultural symbols.  So i stopped and thought about some of my own visual symbols, and these are just a few of what I came up with:

Pic by Tom Morgan.

The Digital Envelope.
This symbol--and its one we probably all recognize--is now synonymous with almost all of our communication:  e-mail, text, voicemail, etc, and in our increasingly technological and connected world, this little symbol is the most likely one we are to see when someone is trying to communicate with us. 






The Gas Gauge:

Photo by Jackson Carson: 
I think there's a metaphor in there, too.

The gas gauge is pretty strange, in that it symbolizes a number of different things. The first and most cynical is poverty.  Or, rather that everything costs something, and it often takes money, or at least a continued investment, to keep things running.  It also holds a deep emotional resonance, as the gas gauge is a physical representation of anxiety and worry.  I rely on my car to get to school, work, and everywhere else I need to go, and there have been more than a few times when I've had to white-knuckle the steering wheel while I stare down at the orange gas light and empty gauge.  Even now, whenever I get behind the wheel of my car, I get that quick pang in the pit of my stomach, that little arrowhead of worry still stuck in my guts.



The Low Battery Light:

Photo by Matt Thomas.  Mine doesn't have a dead bird,
that might be a little too much even for me.

While I picked out the low battery icon as a purely visual symbol, I have to admit that my phone, as much of an ancient brick as it is, is an amazing barometer for my life.  My phone is tied immediately to my current stress level.  It reminds me that it is impossible to truly get away, and is a constant reminder of things I have to do, and many times, it is the way those things are delivered.  The more busy I am the more I use it, and it shows.  When I get busy, i often forget to charge it, and so I've had many nights trying to finish a project, and my phone will sit on my desk, a chirping, stalwart brick, reminding me that though I'm busy, I, like my phone, will eventually run out of juice, and will need to be recharged.  I can take that metaphor in stride, but it is the mornings I wake up after two or three hours of sleep. I reach for my phone, bleary-eyed and still exhausted, to silence the horrible alarm sounds, only to find the little battery icon is still a few bars short, in a sickly yellow or amber shade, and I have to shudder at how eerily accurate the symbolism has become.

Taking Classes for Grades.

I just read this essay from the Chronicle by "The Shadow Scholar." (Dramatic, I know.) I'm thinking a lot about it.

1)  I know these people, who just want grades, not to learn anything.
2)  I know these people, who would do this.
3)  Dammit.  I know these people.

3a)  I bet the "Shadow Scholar" totally looks like this.

Besides my obvious, and familiar (Grr, I know these guys!) outrage,  there is kind of an underlying thought.

We, students, are not doing enough.  Its really that simple.  I remember in my freshman (sophomore?) year of college I was supposed to write an assignment for my American Lit class that would essentially be a proposal for a chapter to be included for an anthology.  I remember that I thought I should do it on humor (Ammurican humor), but do I remember what my argument was?  Do I remember what my proposal's main points were?  Do I even remember what short stories or essays I picked?

Nope, I sure don't.

Because I was doing it for a grade.  Sure I learned a lot in that class, and it was one of my favorite lit classes, but that assignment didn't mean crap to me.  It was a grade.

There's also a corollary to student's efforts, and that's this: Teachers Don't Let Students Do Enough.  Our Shadowy friend mentions that when he tried to get his independent study, an attempt  to get his novel published, approved, his faculty just sort of ignored it and made him return to his traditional classes.  Does publishing a novel have literary merit as part of an English program?  Undoubtedly, but when his interests were declined, he stopped going to class, and started writing papers for others' assignments.  He lost faith in the system.

In most of my education classes, I've been taught to use multiple learning strategies to encourage your student's personal involvement, but I've heard it in a lecture in every one of them.  The only class that's required me to actually do it was my class for special education students. 

Student engagement has been a tag for just about all of my posts on this blog.  Because it is that important.  Its the difference between enjoying something and learning it, or just doing it for a grade.  Flexibility is key in Learning.  and Technology is key in Flexibility.  Use any and all tools available to encourage your students to create something their proud of, not just chase a grade.

Photo exists in the Public Domain, taken from TheChive.com.

1:1 Computing, and other, less fact-based stuff.

I recently got some news from my old high school.  Two things:  One pretty great and the other . . . I don't quite know how to feel about yet.  The first, and (pretty great) piece of news is that my high school is moving to 1:1 teaching over the next few years.  The other(and far more ambiguous news) is that a teacher I had in my last few years there is retiring. 

First, One-to-One Computing!  Fantastic!  Great!  Awesome!  If you haven't read up on any of this stuff, Start here, and here, and then move on, perhaps, to here.  This is even more amazing when you remember that my High School is Tiny.  and I really mean tiny.  I graduated with 67 other students, and we were the largest class in over a decade.  The whole thing might have 300.  On a good year.  The point is that our tiny agricultural school in Iowa will be moving to having one computer for every student.  Wow.  If that's not a sign that the future is literally happening all around us, I don't know what is.  

Seriously, Its like this.

The other News, though, has something to do with this as well.  When my old teacher told me she was retiring (We keep in touch), I was pretty bummed out at first.  I think that's understandable, She was a fantastic teacher.  She instilled in me a real love of learning (though to be fair, I was always a good student, and I was naturally pretty inquisitive), and that nerdiness has carried me through to becoming a teacher myself.

She was one of many great educators I experienced there, but that being said, I've come to realize that almost all my teachers taught in a style that really only benefited me, and students like me.  It was a Teacher heavy style: lecture, test, lecture, test, lecture, paper, etc., but it didn't work for a lot of the students.  I saw a lot of drifting of the student body away from any sort of learning just because they weren't engaged.  Its not that these teachers couldn't use technology, its just that they never learned how to use it to help students learn.  It was a curiosity, a fun add-on for projects, a nice break.  Its not that they were against technology, or that they weren't pretty snappy with those macbooks, it was that they had never learned how to incorporate it.

They were the old guard.  The ancient tweedy ones.  The lecturers.

Now, as I'm studying to join their ranks, I'm taking classes specifically geared to teach me how to use these new technologies to engage my kids.  I can't fall into the same traps as the old guard, as the tweedy ones.  I can't let the world change around me; because now even rural Iowa is going to have 1:1 teaching.

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt, used under a Creative Commons license.

The Machine is Changing Us.

I stumbled on this guy (Michael Wesch, yeah, this guy) through our old buddy Andrew Marcinek (You remember him, right? From my last post?) and I've found that Dr. Wesch is way, way smarter.  In this video, and on his YouTube Channel, Mike Wesch examines how technology is changing the way we view the world, how we create our very selves, and because we create, on some level, our selves, the search for authenticity, for what we really are is now making us narcissistic and "fragmented." Because the world is now manufacturing content directly for us, for free, all around the world, and accessible at any time, how could you not believe that the world was built for you?  Especially amazing is the series of clips of first time vloggers, and how self conscious they are.  (check out at 20:21, where a girl wants to place a face on her computer that will react to what she's saying.  If that doesn't tug your heartstrings, I just don't think you're really human.)
Check this puppy out.


So anyway, now that you've watched that, I'm thinking about what that means for us.  Now that we create ourselves as a virtual persona, or at least look for ourselves out there, on the 'ole interwebs, why should that end in the classroom?  Why shouldn't teachers network with their students, if that's where their students live their lives?  What better way is there to reach kids, and mold kids, than to meet them where they are actively creating themselves?

I'm not sure if I see anything wrong with that.

Photo from Creative Commons.

Here We Go.

My name is Alex, and I'm currently a Junior at the University of Northern Iowa, studying English, History, and Education. This blog is my way of tracking and publishing my progress, as well as share links and articles that I come across that relate to my personal and professional development. Be sure to check back every once and a while to see what I'm up to. I promise to make it as interesting as possible, and we might just learn something one of these days. No promises on that, though.

Edit: Found a Link this Weekend. Its was written by an English Teacher on Edutopia, Andrew Marcinek, and its about engaging your students. As an Aspiring English Teacher, This has always been a kind of fear of mine. How do I get kids to care about Dickens? or even Bradbury? Well, Marcinek has several steps here on how to rethink class projects and papers, including not accepting papers until they're "done," i, e, perfect, and treating the mistakes as learning opportunities to help kids learn to write better.

Also, not so helpful: "No. 9: make a Sandwich." C'mon, Man . . .

Find his List here.


Photo by  Alexandre Dulaunoy, used under a creative commons license.