Yesterday I attended the Kansas State University shindig recognizing this year’s promoted faculty. We have some amazing people working at this place. There were professors hailing from all over the world. Everyone was from somewhere else, it seemed, and I think that’s pretty normal in academia. It’s not very prestigious for everyone to be home-grown.
But I was there too. A Marysville High School graduate, from just up the road to K-State. A military veteran, recruited out of Manhattan, KS. A Cloud County Community College graduate among scholars from MIT and Harvard. And yes, proudly a graduate of, with my final degree earned at Kansas State University.
Doesn’t it seem just a little bit strange that I was the stranger there, the odd one, being the Kansas native with the background I have? But there I was, a professor at K-State. So happy, and so proud to be serving the people of the state that I call home – Kansas.
The evening of Thanksgiving in 2015, about a year and a half ago, I experienced the worst stomach ache I’ve ever had. We were staying in a hotel visiting family, and I spent several hours writhing in pain on the floor of the room. No stores were open, and I didn’t have any stomach remedies with me, so I just sat there and suffered. I figured that I had over-eaten, and left it at that.
After that, not too long afterwards, it happened again. I figured that I was either eating too much, or there were certain foods that no longer agreed with me. So I began watching how much I would eat and tried to pay attention to the kinds of foods that would trigger it.
I figure over the past year and a half, I’ve had similar episodes of severe stomach pain 4-5 times, with some lesser ones thrown in as well. Sometimes, if I realized it was likely to happen, I could stave it off by going for walks.
Historically, I haven’t really been one for seeing doctors. I’d never been to the emergency room. The last time I was a hospital patient was when I was born. I knew something was going on with my health, but I didn’t know exactly what, or what to do about it. But after my last stomach episode, I decided if it happened again, I’d go to the doctor or ER.
Last Saturday evening, after a delicious meal of crock pot roast beef & potatoes, the pain started up again. It was the worst I’d ever felt. I was coughing, vomiting, and had unbelievable discomfort in my gut, a pressure that couldn’t be relieved. Finally, around 11pm, I decided to go to the ER.
Now the hospital is 15 miles away and I decided to drive myself there. Probably not the best decision to drive myself, but it was late, and I didn’t want to upset the family. I told my wife where I was going, and let the kids sleep. When I finally arrived at the hospital, it felt like it was taking forever to get checked in and answer all of their questions.
Oh, it hurt! But it seemed like it was taking forever to get any relief. Drawing blood. Asking questions. Trying to figure out what was going on with me. Finally, they gave me an IV and some pain killers and I was able to relax. I was getting woozy, and had to lie down. Soon, I was getting X-rayed and CT scanned, and with those results we knew I had a problem with my gallbladder, and it had to come out.
I had to go to another hospital an hour away to have surgery, so that meant I’d go for my first ambulance ride. I called my wife and told her to meet me there. I was so tired, I slept most of that ride. Once I got checked into the Salina hospital, there were more tests, more questions, and explanations about what was going to happen. I would be having emergency surgery. It was all happening so fast. Incredibly fast, really. In less than 20 hours, I would go to the ER, transfer to another hospital, have my gallbladder removed, and return home again.
Here we are, just before going into the operating room. I was obviously feeling no pain at this point.
I probably should have been more nervous about things than I was, but heading into the operating room, it only took a couple of minutes and it was lights out for me.
It only felt like a couple of minutes later, and I was awake again and the surgery was already done. I was amazed that I was able to walk within a few hours after surgery. I was sent home on the same day. I was able to take my dog for a walk that evening. A big part of the speedy recovery is that it was a laparoscopic surgery done with cameras and four small incisions instead of one large one.
Gallbladder surgery used four small incisions.
The wifi was good in the room.
I used the walker to regain my legs. My daughter asked me to do a dab.
Recovery has been pretty quick. I’ve had some tenderness and soreness, but overall things are getting back to normal pretty quickly.
Today I was reading Fulton Sheen’s book Life of Christ when I came across the word “valedictory” and I had no clue as to its meaning. That is what happens when you read Sheen, he is going to lay some big words on you and you are going to learn something along the way.
Sheen was referring to Mary’s command at the wedding of Cana to the wine stewards, “Do whatever he tells you.” These are the last words of the mother of Christ recorded in scripture. And being so, they are a clue to the meaning of the word “valedictory.”
When I want to understand the meaning and origin of a word, many times I consult the online etymology dictionary. So I looked up “valedictory” and I learned it means “departing words.” Ok, that makes sense; Sheen is referring to Mary’s departing words.
Intrigued, I dig a little deeper. Valedictorian is a common word stemming from the word valedictory. It means one who speaks departing words. Digging a little deeper, the Latin root words are Valere – “be strong” (like valor) and Dicere – “to say” (like diction).
Again, I had no idea that the job of valedictorian literally is to tell departing classmates at commencement to “be strong.” I thought it was just an honorific bestowed on the student with the highest GPA. I learned something new today.
This past Sunday at church we heard about the letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote to school children shortly before he passed away. To me, the essence of the advice he gave was this:
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Indeed, make your soul grow. Today is the beginning of the season of Lent, a time when many Christians reflect on the state of their own souls and on their relationship with God. Our pastor used the Vonnegut letter to bring in this new liturgical season.
I have a couple of confessions to make. One confession is, I haven’t been practicing much art at all even though it is one of my most favorite things. A year ago last Christmas our family got a new electric piano, and I spent weeks playing on that thing. Now it’s probably been a year passed since I was last on it. I’ve started up sketch books, journals, watercolors, blogs, etc. etc. but life gets so busy I don’t keep them up. So this Lent, I hope to do a little more of these favorite things and a little less of things that are distracting but ultimately time-wasters.
Another confession, I’ve not read Kurt Vonnegut before. That is before last night, when I downloaded an e-book of Slaughterhouse-Five. Something about that title I suppose that didn’t attract me. But once I started reading, I was hooked. He was talking about the Bombing of Dresden in WWII. I’d never heard about that part of the war, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Incredible. Unbelievable. Tens of thousands of people killed in a few days.
And in reading Vonnegut, it sounded like he’d actually been there. He was. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden, and survived the bombing by hiding in a meatlocker of the slaughterhouse where he was being held prisoner. I haven’t read a lot of the book, but I get the sense that maybe this is a book that all war veterans, such as myself, should read.
I know Slaughterhouse-Five is a classic and I should have read it before now. But better late than never, right? Like I said, over the next several weeks, I hope to be doing lots of things that help nourish and grow my soul. It’s about time.
Our Canvas CMS has been out for half of the day today. This is where student assignments, grades and course content are stored for our whole university. I knew it was bigger than K-State when I saw a faculty friend from Mizzou wondering if others couldn’t use Canvas.
I soon learned that Canvas is hosted on Amazon Web Services or AWS, and that was the source of the difficulty. This is a service that is normally very reliable. So I started searching on Twitter to see what people are saying. And I found these memes about it already.
My kids have attended school their entire lives under No Child Left Behind, and more recently the Common Core. They are now in 7th and 9th grade. Each spring they undergo a barrage of preparation and testing assessments. It is easy for a young person to equate these measures of academic ability with a measure of their value as a human being.
I’ve seen it in my own kids. They encounter a baffling question in homework or a practice test, and they feel dumb. If I happen to be there when these questions come up, I don’t feel dumb and I don’t think they should either. I know better. Sometimes the questions are way off base. They are ill-conceived or even just plain wrong. They simply don’t measure what they purport to measure.
These test questions were just made up, and tragically, incomprehensibly, kids’ futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to made up questions.
How is this kind of testing fair to kids and their teachers? I’ve tried to teach my kids not to put too much weight into this stuff. I teach them coping mechanisms. I teach them to simply do the best they know how to do and to not worry about individual questions that are troubling. I tell them the tests are composed by semi-literate monkeys and they shouldn’t worry what the monkeys think. I tell them if they don’t know the answer, just say “potato.” Or on a multiple choice test, they can use the four finger test by slapping four fingers on the desk, and whichever finger hurts the most denotes an A, B, C or D for the answer.
Mostly we just joke around about it and I tell them not to worry too much about the tests. But they still worry. I think it’s sad that kids go through their entire education with this cloud of this testing hanging over them. And I have to wonder if this testing environment isn’t at least in part to blame for my college students’ obsession with getting the “right” answer, instead of having a curious mind willing to ask questions and think deeply?
If I had a magic wand, I would wave it and compulsory standardized testing would stop. We would respect teaching as a profession. Educators would be responsible for the assessment of their pupils, not for-profit businesses who put the bottom line ahead of kids.
A number of years ago, I heard about the so-awful-it’s-good movie Birdemic. It has been on my watch list ever since, and over the Christmas break I finally got a chance to watch it. The movie has been billed as “The worst movie ever made” and justly so. It is truly bad.The screenplay is bad. The acting is bad. The directing is bad. The editing is bad. The special effects are bad.
Here is an excerpt to give you a taste of how deliciously awful Birdemic is:
Now why would I want to see such a disaster? Well, for one thing, I teach digital media technology. In our program, we learn about film editing, digital storytelling and special effects. With Birdemic, I was thinking we could analyze a film that someone spent time and money to produce, discussing the things that went wrong, and how could things be improved. After seeing it, I’m imagining there won’t be enough class time for a comprehensive analysis unless we devote an entire semester to it. However, we can look at some excerpts and explore the possibilities presented to digital film makers.
One recurring theme in the courses that I teach is that of “working digitally” or doing digital work professionally. Because it is an emerging field, the possibilities are endless. I want students to begin to imagine the kinds of work that can be done using digital media technologies.
Birdemic was created by James Nguyen, a silicon valley software engineer with a dream. Through persistence and audaciousness, his film became a reality. Using social media and publicity stunts at the Sundance film festival, the film was picked up by a distributor, screened in several cities, released on DVD, and by all accounts became far more successful than what should normally be expected. So count Mr. Nguyen as a visionary of what “working digitally” looks like.
I also have a second example of how “working digitally” is associated with the Birdemic film. I’ve been aware of the Rifftrax comedy website for several years. The business model for Rifftrax is to create comedy sound tracks to play along with commercially released DVDs. If you are familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3000, aka MST3K, you know how this works – basically it is a group of wise-crackers joking around about movies they are watching. After the MST3K television show ended, the Rifftrax website was launched. Below is a sample of how Rifftrax works with the Birdemic film. We see scenes from Birdemic together with the jokes by Rifftrax.
Normally, one buys, borrows or rents a dvd to watch, and downloads an MP3 joke soundtrack to play along with the movie. Over the break, I got the Birdemic film, downloaded the Rifftrax mp3, and had a great time watching this awful movie. But I think it is a perfect example of people doing digital work, creating a product that no one could ever even imagine before computers and the internet.
I try to live by this principle when it comes to teaching. Don’t say or do anything in classes you teach that you wouldn’t be proud to have made public in the news media. This is sometimes easier said than done, because after all, I’m human. I make mistakes from time to time. I’ve probably already made one today, and it’s only 5am as I’m writing this.
But I am reminded of this principle as I read the news out in California in which a student recorded the rant of a professor about president-elect Donald Trump.
Every student carries a mobile recording studio in their pocket. Yes, it is probably bad manners to record someone secretly. And it might even be illegal. But if you need lawyers to keep students from recording and sharing what goes on in your classroom, you are probably doing it wrong.
If I think carefully about who my “influencers” are with respect to my teaching and my philosophy of education, probably the most influential are Postman and Weingartner and their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity. My own experience as a student, particularly before college, was frequently one of suffering. Some of my friends liked going to school, but for me it was painful drudgery. I enjoyed learning, but I did not enjoy school. While the suffering subsided in college, there were still a number of times when it arose again.
What was the root cause of the suffering for me in school? The inauthenticity of the experience. Those times when the teacher was able to “make it real” for the learners were the times that I was at my best as a student. I never bought into playing “The Great Trivia Game” that Postman and Weingartner describe:
It’s a kind of rigged quiz show. And it seems to work only if the participants value the “prize.” The “prize,” of course, is a “grade.” An appropriate grade permits the participant to continue playing the Trivia game. All the while, very little, if any, substantive intellectual activity is going on.
Examples of times the learning for me was not authentic:
Taking a public speaking class in which most of the time was spent listening to the teacher talk about public speaking
Taking a computer networking class in which the teacher read to us straight from the textbook
Taking a teaching methods course in which the teacher lectured to us 99% of the time.
Instead, I preferred to be involved in something that seemed important, interesting and real—something I could really sink my teeth into. Something where the students were actually doing something. Some examples from my own education experience when learning was authentic:
In 6th grade, social studies students (taught by Mark Treaster) were arranged into three groups, Europeans, Mestizos, and Indians/Slaves. The slaves worked their rear ends off doing academic drudge work – worksheets mostly. The mestizos worked less, and were supervisors of the slaves. The europeans assigned the work to the slaves and mestizos, but did no work themselves. I was a slave. By the end, I was angry, because the europeans kept moving the goal posts by which we could secure our freedom. When the tables turned, and the slaves became europeans and vice-versa, we really socked it to our former masters.
In Navy electronics service school, we were taught with lectures and with hands on labs. We had practical tests, usually each week to show what we had learned, using the exact equipment we would work on in the fleet.
In college, I had a history professor who engaged us in critical thinking. We had only one date to memorize – 1066 – the year of the last successful invasion of England. He made us think about all sides of an issue using evidence. We participated in many class discussions and we never knew where he personally stood on particular issues because he was fair in exploring all points of view.
While I am far from perfect in my own classroom, I do take pains to actively engage my students. It is something I am continually working on. It also varies on class size and topic how much I lecture and how much we are involved in activities.
