go west

I always liked the Pet Shop Boys' version of that phrase... Of course, my adolescent mind thought it was funny to belt out "Go west (Sex there is the best)/ Go west (Where women have big...)." You get the picture.

Taking a break from this to visit fam and friends. Happiest of new years to all.

fantasy and science fiction according to Jordan

I’m including a lengthy passage from Robert Jordan’s blog. For those of you fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with him, he’s the author of what is arguably the most successful ongoing series in fantasy right now, The Wheel of Time. I say it is unfortunate to know of him only because I’m frustrated with the series and have been for about the past 6 years. But, like any good habit, I keep coming back to it religiously. I say that he’s the most successful author in fantasy right now, but I would like to emphasize that this is not synonymous with being the best author, not by a long shot.

The passage I’m including talks about the current state of fantasy and science fiction, and I think he has some interesting things to say about it. This will probably not be interesting to anyone other than myself, so feel free to ignore this post and let me ramble on about it.

The reason for the popularity of fantasy, and the reason science fiction is fading in comparison, is quite simple, really. Increasingly in books and films, including science fiction but also in everything from mysteries to so-called "main stream literary" novels, the lines between right and wrong have become blurred. Good and evil are more and more portrayed as two sides of the same coin. This is called realism. People by and large want to believe that there is a clear cut right and wrong, though, and that good and evil depend on more than how you look in the mirror or whether you're squinting when you do. In fantasy, you can talk about good and evil, right and wrong, with a straight face and no need to elbow anybody in the ribs to let them know you're just kidding, you don't really believe in this childish, simplistic baloney. That seems to be less and less so in other genres.

Does that mean fantasy all has to be goody-goody on the side of right and black-as-the-pit on the side of evil. No. In my own work telling right from wrong is often difficult. Sometimes my characters make the wrong choice there. Sometimes they do things are quite horrific. But they try to find the right choice. This is the way I think most people see the world and their behavior in it -- trying to do the right thing with the knowledge that sometimes you're going to make the wrong choice, and with "right" defined as more than simply being of benefit to yourself -- and they want to read books that reflect this. Right and wrong are not simply different shades of gray. Good and evil are not simply a matter of how you look at them. (Have you ever noticed the use of "of course?' As in, "The actions of the suicide bombers is quite horrific, of course...." You know that a "but" is coming, followed by an explanation of why their actions. while "quite horrific. of course" are also "entirely understandable under the circumstances," which come down to "the death and destruction is all somebody else's fault completely.")

As the view of the world, as expressed by the evening news and most books, has increasingly become that everything is really just shades of gray, people have grown more and more to want something that says choosing right from wrong may be difficult, seeing what is evil might be hard, but it is not only worth making the effort, it is possible if you try. Maybe not every time, but most of the time by and large. And that is the heart of the popularity of fantasy, and why it has grown. I suspect that somebody has a doctorate in the waiting simply by showing a correlation between the increase in popularity of fantasy on one hand and, on the other, the increase on the evening news and in most literature of the view that right and wrong, good and evil, are just matters of where you stand and how you're holding your head at the moment.

My comments to this will follow later; I wanted to get this pasted before it disappeared.

xmas

Happy Mithras day! Happy winter solstice! Happy Saturnalia!

sunrise

Let the healing of mind, body, and spirit begin.

algebra

So some of the brainiac kids are making my test look easy, while some of the less adept students are struggling more than they should, while the mediocre are being...mediocre. It's sad, but several teachers told me to make long tests not for assessment purposes but for management purposes. I think that when a teacher begins to scrabble to take up time, the authenticity of the assessment can't help but be sacrificed, at least partially.

A creative writing class next door is having a final, but I think it's a "read my crappy story aloud" final. And I'm pretty sure that I just heard the MF-bomb float through the door that connects our rooms...

Back to assessment: how genuine can an assessment of math skills be in this setting. Why aren't these kids at a grocery store or construction site being assessed? They need to be given real-world situations, but not real-world assessment on paper! Defeats the purpose, you see? Imagine the impact it would have if students were given actual problems faced by construction people (to continue the example) and expected to solve it using the methods they have learned. There are real stakes, and since educators are constantly being told that students will respond when we "raise the stakes," let's actually do it! I have to say that one thing that my TEP taught me was that university educators are completely out of touch with the reality of the student psyche. My director was continually saying that we had to raise the stakes for students, but when it came down to specific methods for doing so, the well ran dry. The same old ideas are being recycled and "revamped," but few of the ideas are taking into account the bleak reality of public education. Sweeping social changes have found their way into the schools, but the school system hasn't accommodated and adapted accordingly.

If this kid asks me to go to the bathroom one more time... Uh-oh. I need to go. Great. I have 16 kids with...15 kids with their exams, and my bladder chooses to release now. Do I pee myself? What would Iggy Pop do...? What would that chode from Dead Poet's Society do? Ah, forget him. Iggy Pop... Speaking of pop, I'm about to.

I'm gone.

friday morning, lawdy lawdy

I love the word sacrosanct. There's something musical and enigmatic about the word.

I've made a ridiculously sexy algebra test. Fractions, reciprocals, variables, word problems, all combined to form a beaut of a test. Curvaceous, mysterious, intelligent. She's my silver medal.

So I should be grading the reading test that my students just took, but I feel like doing this instead. I've been working on the math test all morning, and doggone it I deserve a short break. I'm having a hard time keeping the students who finished the test quiet while the last girl works on hers. Unfortunately, she missed a month of school because she wanted to drop out. The problem is, her mom disagreed so she became a truant student and started receiving legal warnings. She shows up one day and asks for the past month's worth of work. My response: "Too bad."

It's a beautiful day outside, and I have my windown open and can see all the way to downtown Lex. That's one advantage of being on the 3rd floor: the view is spectacular. I like the isolation, to be honest. Few students play in the halls, few students come up to our room in the morning, and few administrators make the trek up the stairs to our attic. I want to be outside right now with Maxx. He was ticked when I left him this morning, and he bit me when I went to grab my boxers. Of course, he was sitting on them at the time (clean laundry is his fetish, surpassed only by dirty laundry), something that I think was purposeful. Devious li'l poodle...

survival

Well, I survived the first day of finals fairly unscathed. It ended up being an 11 1/2 hour day, though my special lady friend will quickly point out that I went in earlier than I had to, so I should lose the martyr attitude. It was long, though, and quite hectic. My conversation test ended up being very interactive on my part, but it was worth it. It felt authentic, in many ways.

I'm off to bed now to prep for an early morning date with the photocopier. "Makin' copies..." Thursday night television is dead.

Bolivia is at a crucial crossroads this Sunday. Hope for the best, whatever that may be.

By the way, does the sidebar appear at the bottom of the page for you all? Depending on what computer I'm on, it either appears as the sidebar or at the very bottom. Just wondering.

finals morning

I got to school at 6:20 this morning. Of course, my special lady friend had been at work since 5:50, but she's insane so it doesn't count.

Today begins my first stint as the evil giver-of-finals, a rather awkward moment, really. I remember hating finals but not being that intimidated by them (at least the arts and humanities ones), but this has been just god-awful! It's a pain in the arse to come up with a test that assesses the students in a fair and reasonable manner. The hardest part for me has been making sure that I include only things that I know they can do. All semester I've had to "dumb down" my stuff because most of my students have such limited English proficiency, but when it came to making the test I had to be extra careful that I wasn't including idioms that they wouldn't know in the directions or the example sentences. This is just plain hard!

Anyway, I got here at the buttcrack of dawn so that I could beat the mad rush to the photocopier, and I certainly did that! It's nice having small classes because it means I use 1/3 of the trees that "normal" teachers do. Oh, and on top of getting here way too early, I didn't leave here until 8:05 last night. Education is demanding.

I'm currently creating a test sheet on which I will create my algebra final. I have a program to do it in Word, but it takes for-ever because you have to insert an object each time, a real pain in the tuckus. I can't believe that I'm creating an algebra final because I could not hate math more than I do. The fact that I'm teaching a class on it is sickeningly ironic. I'm proud of myself, though, for remembering most of it (granted, it's basic), and I'm impressed with my teachers for getting it through to me. Who knows how they did it, but it's there, like it or not.

Bueno, I need to go come up with a better conversation final because mine sucks. I hate my conversation class. It's not the kids (at least not completely); it's the fact that I have no idea how to teach conversation. I have 3 classes with the same students, and there's only so much material I can come up with! Not fun.

inhumanifesto

Some day I’m going to pen an “inhumanifesto,” primarily for the fun of the pun.

bacardi 151

One of my favorite lines from Calvin (not John Calvin) is "Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery." I feel like Lexington won a nickel this morning.

The title is an alcoholic reference to this, my 151st post.

il divo

I am unpardonably late in becoming aware of the music of Il Divo. This quartet is an amazing group of hot lovers--I mean singers!--who are the only good thing to come out of Simon Cowell. I came across them through another impressive (and only slightly less sexy) group, Celtic Woman. Thank you, PBS, for doing pledge drives. Anyway, they sing a song called "Nella Fantasia," a gorgeous song that I have since learned is an arrangment of Sarah Brightman's. She, in turn, took it from one of my favorite scores, Ennio Morricone's The Mission. There's a motif that runs through the movie--showcased in "Gabriel's Oboe"--which Sarah Brightman used as the music for "Nella Fantasia," and I'm not sure who wrote the words. So realy, she did nothing but ask for permission to use the song... Oh well, I'll give her credit for that. Anyway, you owe it to yourself to find it somehow and listen to it. I have yet to hear a version that I disliked, and I doubt I will until Gwen Stefani gets her skankwhore meat-strokers on it and turns it hip-hop.

Looking back at what I've written, I've really only covered the history of the song (sort've a "six degrees of Ennio" thing), but I'm content at leaving it at that. I couldn't do it justice with my limited lexicon of musical terms, plus there are some things that can only be sullied with words, so I'll leave the sacred clean.

tee-hee-hee

A certain joy bubbles up in my heart to hear that many “megachurches” are closing for Xmas. It’s not a completely evil bubble, either; I think it can lead to more meaningful celebrations, but I also feel vindicated in my cynicism about the authenticity of faith in modern culture.

Go Catholic church!

pics

I forgot to mention that I've added a few pictures to my flickr page (see the right column of this page to go to my page). If you get a chance, I recommend checking out pictures by this person ( there are a lot, so skip around a lot!). He/she takes a lot of Bolivia, some of them beautiful.

flight

I don't remember if I ever put these up, so I'll do it now. This is at the Valle de las Rocas (Valley of the Rocks), one of the most no-duh names ever. This stone resembles--loosely--an eagle's beak, in my mind, so I decided to soar 15 feet above the ground. It wasn't easy to climb up on this eagle's back (I nearly fell numerous times, and I'm gripping with my knees for all I'm worth to keep from toppling over backwards), but it was well worth the trouble. I felt rather like Bilbo clinging to a dwarf's foot: I want down!



This is me taking a picture of myself near the top of Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) where the Sun and Moon were born. Now that I think about it, I think I put this up before... Oh, well, you get two. Lago Titicaca (Titikarka means something about a puma--rock, I think--and is also derived from a formation on the island).

children

"There needs to be a give and take," says Suarez, an associate professor of social work at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. "Children don't need to be allowed to run wild and free, but they do need to be allowed to express themselves."

Too often, though, our cultural emphasis on freedom and individual rights gets taken to the extreme, becoming "a kind of selfish entitlement that undermines our ability to function as a civil community," says George Scarlett, a professor of child development at Tufts University in Boston.

"The rights of any one individual -- whether he or she be a parent, child or stranger -- do not negate the rights of others." (Full article)

Preach it!