Three dark treats for Halloween

Well, my school's on its mid-term break at the moment, so we won't be indulging in any festivities here on the day itself, but.... I shared this trio of creepy short animations with my English classes just before we broke up for the holiday last week.

The first is Alma, by Rodrigo Blaas - just recommended to me by a couple of young colleagues who teach Spanish. (Alma is evidently the name of the little girl protagonist [well, it's a cutely androgynous character; I had thought it was meant to be a boy!], but also - and significantly, I suspect - the Spanish word for 'soul'.)

That reminded me of Paul Berry's 1991 classic The Sandman, (inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann's story Der Sandmann).

And finally, I couldn't resist adding this early project from animator Dony Permedi (whose Kiwi attracted a lot of attention on the Internet a few years ago) - Pony, one of most truly disturbing comedy shorts I've ever seen. Mr Permedi has a very dark sense of humour - much in keeping with my own!

An exemplar for the assessment task on Film Sound

One of my students, Vanessa Tidmarsh, unearthed this wonderful little exercise on YouTube a few weeks back. The poster took a short clip from an obscure early '60s B-movie, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, and recreated every element of the soundtrack for it (then added insert frames showing how he did it).

This is a useful example to guide and inspire my Film classes, whose culminating assessment task in their current unit on Sound will be to do exactly this (although their 'making of' film segments can be presented as a separate mini-documentary rather than inserted alongside their original clip). I'm looking forward to seeing - and hearing - what they come up with.

And so to... BED

Gosh, this is a welcome little break we have coming up. I have probably never worked so hard in my life as I have over the last three months.

Until my birthday last weekend, when I absented myself from our campus (not without considerable pangs of guilt!) for a whopping 43 hours, I hadn't taken a complete day off in the previous 10 or 11 weeks. Some colleagues have ribbed me about suggesting that I'd been working around 100 hours a week during that time; but in fact, I think that's a fairly conservative estimate: there have certainly been a couple of weeks where I've put in more like 110-120 hours.

What's more, I've been quite seriously ill during much of that time, with a succession of nasty colds and tummy bugs, and horrendous allergies to - it seems - just about everything in our local environment. I've rarely been getting more than 4 or 5 hours sleep a night.

Hence, now that we have a fortnight's respite, I am mighty tempted to try to spend most of it catching up on sleep. Except that I still have work to do....

Results of Halloween Micro Ghost Story Competition

In my role as School Librarian (I wear so many different hats around here!!), last week I promoted a little competition for the upcoming spooky holiday: students were challenged to write a creepy story in 50 words or less.

There were a couple of dozen or so entries in all, and picking winners proved to be very difficult (nearly impossible, in fact: the three colleagues I'd asked to judge the competition were deadlocked for a while).

All the stories submitted are worth a look, but especially our final top three.

I am hopeful that this might become an annual event in our small school.

Helen of Troy

In reading WWI poems with a class on Saturday we came upon some written at Gallipoli, making reference to the legendary Siege of Troy. I was suddenly reminded of this, a bitter jest on female vanity, cherished since my adolescence. I was relieved to discover that, despite not having thought of it for some years, I could still recall it by heart.

“And were you pleased?” they asked of Helen in Hell.

“Pleased?” answered she, “When all Troy’s towers fell,

And dead were Priam’s sons, and lost his throne,

And such a war was fought as none had known,

And even the gods took part, and all because of me alone?

Pleased?

                                                 I should say I was!”

Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany (1878-1957)

Thought for the week

"I enjoy learning; but I dislike being taught."

Some more Foley ideas!

I think this was an April 1st post, and so not to be taken entirely seriously. It is nevertheless a useful introduction to the importance of post-production sound... and to the mischievous creativity required of Foley artists. (I think that thing with the grapes might just work. I certainly want to try it!)

A taiji demonstration

The children at my school (CIS Hangzhou - a newly established year abroad programme for the Year 10 students of the Chinese International School of Hong Kong) have been taking taiji classes on Sunday afternoons for the last few weeks with Master Wang and Master Zhang, two leading exponents of the Chen family style who teach for the Taiji Zen organisation (founded by Jet Li and Jack Ma), which has just opened a centre here in Hangzhou.

Part of the purpose of our programme is to help our students develop a fuller appreciation of Chinese history and culture, and taking taiji as a whole-school activity seems ideally suited to that end, as it brings together the spirituality of the ancient Chinese philosophical traditions, the conceptual framework of traditional Chinese medicine, and the physical cultivation required by the 'martial' arts (and our two teachers like to remind us of the fighting applications of the taiji forms, vigorously demonstrating how some of the seemingly pointless postures we have practised can be deployed to deflect a blow or to sweep an assailant off balance).

Many of the students were sceptical or unenthusiastic at first - largely, I think, because the activity has been made compulsory, at least for the introductory course running through the first half of the semester. However, I would say that the majority of them have warmed to it quite quickly, and are often heard to remark positively on the meditative aspects of the practice, on how relaxed it helps you to feel - while yet providing a surprisingly demanding physical workout. 
[In fact, this impression of mine was borne out by the great pride and enjoyment that a team of 12 of our students displayed when taking part in a local taiji competition in downtown Hangzhou a week later, on the last morning before our mid-term break. And also by a couple of vox pop interviews in this video segment on our CIS Hangzhou activities, prepared by one of our students, Jasmine Topp, for inclusion in the weekly news bulletin of our parent school.]

Last weekend, I asked two of the students in my Film class, Nick Berry and Hannah Hui, to film Zhang shifu giving a complete demonstration of the basic sequence of movements - the 'Eight Forms' of the Chen style - which we have been trying to learn. We shot the sequence twice, with two cameras at 90° to one another, so that we had all-around views: from the front, the left, the back, and the right. You can see the raw takes of these four views on my YouTube channel; (and there's also a sequence of our other teacher, Wang shifu, performing the same routine a couple of weeks earlier, but in failing light). However, the sequence is more readily digestible in this single clip which Nick Berry edited together.

I am trying to go through this routine at least a few times each day - but I haven't quite got it all down yet. It is challengingly intricate in places. And neither my limbs nor my memory are as strong as they once were....

Thought for the week

"A recipe for a cake does not taste as good as a cake."

Beijing 'in miniature'

A friend just forwarded a link to this delightful little film made by Joerg Daiber, showing the Chinese capital - my home for the last decade - looking like a tiny model. This is achieved through a technique called tilt-shift. You can apply effects in Photoshop etc. to achieve a similar look, but the best results come from using a special lens arrangement in the camera. The optics of it is quite complicated, but the effect is basically to flatten the depth of field. Since we are used to there inevitably being a fairly extended depth of field when we are viewing large objects from some distance away, this much shorter depth of field tricks our brain into thinking that we must in fact be looking at something quite small from close to. Ingenious, and rather mind-bending!

There are lots of similar videos posted to Youtube on the LittleBigWorld channel.

Foley in the great outdoors(?!)

Another great video that my students have enjoyed recently about sound design and the art of Foley sound effects is this - explaining how faked sound effects even need to be added to wildlife documentaries. I observed ruefully to one class that this is a bit like having a magician show you how a trick is done; it tends to compromise your enjoyment of the rest of the show. It is an excellent tutorial on the use of sound in TV and movies, though. (And the scene where a cameraman gets cornered by a lioness is priceless!)

This production company, Earth Touch, have several other fascinating videos on their YouTube channel.

Thought for the week

"I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that don't work."

A great introduction to the art of Foley

Foley - the art of creating synchronised sound effects for movie scenes in post-production, often faking them by ingenious and improbable methods (and named after the great pioneer of the field, Jack Foley) - is the main focus of my Film classes during the first half of this semester.

There are scores of interesting videos online illustrating Foley techniques, and the students and I have been sharing many of them over the past few weeks. This one has been our favourite so far.

Reflections on the first 'I Am A Country' Week (2): how did it go?

Well, it went. It happened. Which, given how much else was going on in our little school at the time, was not far short of a miracle. Things have been frenetic for us in these first few weeks. The metaphor our Director has become fondest of using is that "We're building the plane as we're taking off." And - amazingly - we are now airborne... sort of, just about.

But it was very difficult - foolhardy! - to attempt to launch something novel and ambitious like the 'I Am A Country' Week in the midst of such barely controlled chaos, and I have to admit that most of the high hopes for the activity that I outlined in that earlier post a couple of days ago went unrealised.

One key tension we struggled to address adequately involved the question of timing. I wanted to do it as early in the term as possible, both to maximise the potential benefits flowing from the activity through the rest of the year in, for example, kick-starting things like MUN or GIN groups at the school, and to avoid being seen as 'disruptive' by subject teachers who would soon have settled into a normal pattern of teaching their regular curriculum. However, that gave us very little lead time to set the thing up.

I had originally been aiming to run it in our Week 3 - which required that students' research and preparation would have to occur during Week 2, and country allocation would have to be completed by the end of Week 1. In fact, our first week was so chock-full of other business that we soon realised we'd have to bump 'I Am A Country' back until at least Week 4. And my colleague handling the country allocations fell behind schedule on that, not starting on the process until the end of Week 2, and not finally getting it finished until the end of Week 3 - which didn't allow the students much in the way of preparation time (although most of them had known which countries they would represent by the middle of the week; and I gave my English classes an extra 'library period' on the Saturday to do research).

I also failed to sufficiently carry along my colleagues - who were preoccupied with their own curriculum concerns at this hectic time and, while applauding the ideals of this exercise, did little or nothing to participate in it within their subjects.

The use of country name-tags fizzled a bit as well. It was surprisingly difficult to get hold of suitable tags in the first place, and I had to settle for quite small ones (which didn't really provide room to display a country's flag as well as the name, and couldn't be read from any great distance); it was difficult to distribute them (another last-minute rush, as the stationery supplier had only delivered them at the end of our Week 3; in China, "48-hour delivery" often seems to take 6 or 7 days!); and it was next-to-impossible to get the kids to wear them regularly (again, the non-participation of other subject teachers was a major problem here; students easily got into the habit of thinking that this was an activity for the English classroom only, and would only put their country-tags on for me).

Nor, unfortunately, are we likely to see the hoped-for pay-off in terms of promoting students' engagement in international affairs - such as through the formation of MUN or GIN clubs, or debating or human rights clubs, or finding expression in student journalism or other forms of student-led publicity campaigns. I think the potential may have been there in some of the students immediately after the 'I Am A Country' activities had finished, but it ebbs away quickly and will, I fear, soon have disappeared. There's so much going on here at the moment, so many programmed activities being thrust on the children, that we're really not leaving them any free time to develop self-led, self-motivated extra-curricular activities. We will try to return to the idea of launching an MUN Club or a Human Rights Club later in the semester, but by then the impact of this 'I Am A Country' experiment is likely to have been forgotten by most.

The distribution of countries also ended up being somewhat non-ideal. I had wanted to exclude the G20, to give the exercise a focus on the developing world; but my colleague handling the allocation only left out the 'big 5', the UN Security Council permanent members.* He also decided to give the students a free choice of countries, contrary to my inclinations. My feeling is that this may work well enough when we have a full cohort of students here in a few years' time: almost every country in the world can then be covered, and many students will have to accept country allocations that would not have been one of their top choices. With only 57 students this year, there were large gaps in our geographic coverage, and it became a little tricky to run some of the activities I'd planned where students would discuss a global problem in regional groups (I had to resort to using categories such as 'small nations', 'island nations', and 'rich nations', rather than relying simply on geographical proximity). Moreover, while there were undoubtedly some benefits in terms of engagement and personal knowledge where students chose a country they had visited or lived in, I felt that on the whole I would have preferred to move them away from the comfortable and familiar, to force them to research a place that was completely alien and unknown to them. The most interesting observations tended to come from students who had been unlucky enough to be assigned a low-ranked choice of country or had just randomly plumped for somewhere like... Rwanda, Nigeria, or Serbia.

Despite all these challenges and disappointments, quite a lot of good work was generated by the activity. In my English classes we had general introductions of the chosen country, mixing social, political, and economic background with a few more quirky 'fun facts' (and a supplementary homework challenge to find one of the country's distinctive dishes); an oral presentation of  'A day in the life' of a typical citizen; a similarly themed piece of imaginative writing describing someone's life in the country; and some round-table discussions on regional and global issues. 

And my Film classes spent a couple of lessons introducing short films they'd found that they felt were interestingly representative of 'their' country. Most chose blandly pretty montages produced by national tourist boards, but a few came up with more unusual and revealing fare - film documentaries, TV programmes, or satirical skits.

I think there is a lot of potential in this activity, and I'd like to try to make it into an annual event for us in this school. Next year we will do it better. With a little more lead time (and without the bothersome distractions of trying to fly a half-built plane!), I think I should be able to get more colleagues on board with the idea. We need to try and plan and timetable each subject's contribution to the week before the start of term, promote the activity more heavily to students a little in advance, and make more effective use of our Coach Mentors to encourage the students to regard it as a 24/7 activity rather than something that is confined to the classroom. If we can manage that, I believe 'I Am A Country' Week could produce some profound and lasting impacts.

* I wanted to avoid any explicit connection between this activity and MUN. The discussion exercises were entirely free form, not modelled on UN procedure, and avoiding topics that have been high on the Security Council agenda. I was worried that even the decision to exclude the five permanent members of the Security Council might call the United Nations too prominently to mind. One of my objects in this exercise was to give students a taste of - and perhaps a taste for - MUN by stealth. MUN demands intensive background research by its participants, and the complex procedural rules that it follows can be rather intimidating, alienating to the uninitiated. Hence, it tends to have rather limited appeal to students of this age, and is typically the preserve of a nerdish minority. In our small community, such a minority might be only two or three people - not nearly enough to support an active MUN group. So, I was hoping that a week of consciousness-raising about global issues, and a week of imaginatively entering into the national perspective of an unfamiliar country, might help to make MUN seem accessible and intriguing to a much wider spectrum of students. We have yet to test how successful the inaugural 'I Am A Country' Week may have been in this regard.

Reflections on my first 'I Am A Country' Week (1): what were we trying to achieve?

Last week we ran our 'I Am A Country' exercise at my school from Monday to Saturday. Each of our students was assigned a country for the week, and given a lapel badge on which to display the name and/or flag of their country. They were encouraged to fully identify with that country 24/7, to try to imagine the perspective of someone from that country in any situation they found themselves in. Heads of Houses and Coach Mentors (recent graduates who live in the boarding houses, supervising a set of mini-dormitories and acting as big brothers - or sisters - to a small group of students), in particular, were asked to help promote full engagement in the activity. Class teachers were asked to throw out occasional random questions to test students' research on their given countries in the context of their own academic discipline - Who are the most famous writers/artists/sportsmen/scientists from your country? etc. - and to address students, at least sometimes, by the name of their country - What does Sierra Leone think about this?

The activity was conceived of as a genuinely "inter-disciplinary" programme of study, with every subject easily able to create one or two lessons, or at least one or two short activities within a lesson, in keeping with the theme, while English and Geography, and perhaps also History and Drama, would devote themselves to it full time. Lasting just a single week, and coming early in our first semester, I didn't think it would cause too much of a clash with the unfortunate imperative of meeting other curriculum objectives for the year. And since our school follows the Middle Years Programme of the International Baccalaureate Organization, which has a key focus on the promotion of "international-mindedness" in its students, this seemed to be an initiative that everyone might reasonably prioritize for this one week.

But above all, I hoped it would be fun for the students - that they would enter into the spirit of it, fool around with the idea... perhaps start jokily quizzing each other about matters such as how common smartphones were in 'their' country, or teasing each other about whether the Muslim countries ought to be abstaining from pork for the week (hard to do in a Chinese school, where it is a central feature on the menu almost every day!).

A key ulterior motive underlying this initiative (aside from the positive learning experiences that the activity might engender of itself), unstated but not so very hidden or surprising, was to try to nurture more potential interest and enthusiasm amongst our students for extra-curricular activities such as Model United Nations (MUN) and the Global Issues Network (GIN). It is a particular challenge for our school - isolating a small-ish group of 14- and 15-year-olds from the rest of their school community in Hong Kong - that activities like these, which depend so heavily on training, mentoring, and organization by senior students, are unlikely to prosper here. Moreover, these activities tend to have rather limited appeal to teenagers: in our parent school - and in most schools of its ilk - only a relative handful of students become regularly involved in them. The 'I Am A Country' Week was planned as an experiment in whether it might be possible to inspire a much higher proportion of interest and participation in these activities within our very small cohort of students.



PS  It also provided the inspiration for the first of the 'Thought for the Week' quotations that I've begun writing on my board each week - a line commonly attributed to the great film director Stanley Kubrick, though I haven't been able to find a source for it.