Thought for the week

"That which I cannot build, I do not truly understand."

Thought for the week

"Creativity is having the courage to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

Thought for the week

"Ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory."

Shakespeare in a nutshell

Romeo and Juliet is decidedly NOT my favourite Shakespeare play. I find the contrivances of the plot so extreme as to be ludicrous, and the final double-suicide of the teen lovers leaves me utterly unmoved - indeed I find it more comical than tragic. I also consider it a bit patronising how teenagers are so often expected to find this the most engaging and accessible of Shakespeare's works just because, you know, it's about teenagers (and forbidden love, and not getting on with your parents, and all that). In my experience, most teenaged students forced to study the text share these reactions: they find it a jolly romp, but they are not moved by it. They may appreciate some of the marvellous language and characterization in it, but they do not find it speaks particularly to them or their age group.

Yet I am forced to take this as one of my set texts this year because of a rigid habit established by our parent school (next year I may - shall - rebel!). And so I am determined to rattle through it as fast as is humanly possible (not quite this fast, but very, very briskly), hoping to allow my students to enjoy it as a piece of theatre, as a performance - without getting into too much analysis.

Luckily, I find assistance in this endeavour from the admirable John Green, who has compressed all the analysis of R&J you could ever want into two 12-minute Youtube clips in his occasional CrashCourse series of tutorials.

Part II can be viewed here.

Thought for the week

"The secret to serendipity is keeping your eyes open."

Caught on camera

A couple of months ago, my Film students were getting their first practice in filming some short interviews with staff or peers, as a preliminary exercise in their new unit of study on 'Documentary'. Three of them - Yudo Wong, Abi Yee, and Ciara Jacob - decided to do me.

Thought for the week

"What is now proved was once only imagined."

Thought for the week

"There is no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end."

It's opera, Jim, but not as we know it

The school took a trip out to Yellow Dragon Park on Sunday afternoon to see a couple of short performances of excerpts from Chinese opera. I think this is the Kunqu school of Chinese opera, but I couldn't absolutely swear to it.

The popularity of the form does seem to be waning amongst the younger generations of Chinese. There was a large and enthusiastic crowd turned out for these open-air matinee performances, but they were almost all well over 70 years old.

Here are a couple of short clips I filmed from an extract the troupe performed from the convoluted local Hangzhou story, Legend of the White Snake.

Though the screeching quality of the vocals can become a little wearing (and the lyrics, it would appear, are largely incomprehensible even to native Chinese speakers), the performance is still a pleasing diversion. This piece involves a lot of broad comedy, which is quite engaging - even though the characters' motivations remain completely impenetrable to me.

Thought for the week

"Education is what's left when you've forgotten everything you were taught in school."

Two great songs about the First World War

To round off our study of WWI poetry, I shared with my students today a couple of favourite songs about WWI by the folk singer Eric Bogle. I saw him play at the Anzac Club in Toronto in 1998, while I was working there as a lawyer (quite possibly on Anzac Day - pretty close to it, anyway). He told an amusing story about how the then UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had recently professed that one of Bogle's songs, The Green Fields of France, was his favourite 'poem' about the First World War, but had gone on to mention that its author, like so many of the War's great poets, had died in the fighting. This is a dumb mistake to make - a lazy error on the part of one of Blair's speech writers, no doubt - since the piece is pretty obviously written long after the War, from the perspective of someone visiting a war cemetery.

Bogle got further free publicity from the incident when one of his formidable Scottish aunties wrote to The Times newspaper to point out to the careless Prime Minister that the poet he admired was in fact very much alive and well... "and to prove it, here are his upcoming tour dates."

As we can see from the photo montage accompanying this recording, Bogle's song was inspired by an actual grave, that of a Pte. William McBride, who was killed in 1916, at the age of 21. (This is one of the best montages of this kind I've ever seen: the images, mostly contemporary photographs, are very appropriately matched to the lyrics.)

Bogle was born in Peebles in Scotland in 1944, but emigrated to Australia as a young man. This, And The Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda'..., perhaps his most famous song (certainly in Australia, where it has become hailed as a national treasure), was written in the early 1970s, shortly after he moved there. At this time, many veterans of the 1915 Gallipoli landings were still living, still able to turn out for annual Anzac Day parades, even though they would have been mostly in their 70s and 80s. You can hear Bogle himself sing this song here; but my favourite of the many cover versions that have been made of it is this one by Shane MacGowan and The Pogues (a crazy Irish punk-folk group who enjoyed major worldwide success during the 1980s). Again, there is an excellent photo montage accompanying the music.

As an extra little musical treat in my second class, I asked one of my students, Sophia Chan, an outstanding musician, to preface this by playing Waltzing Matilda for us on her violin. She had challenged me on Monday - in reference to my latest 'Thought for the week' on my desire to share enthusiasms in the classroom - to allow her a chance to share her enthusiasm for music with the English class occasionally, and I was delighted to agree.

Thought for the week

"I try to do as little 'teaching' as possible. I prefer to be a sharer of enthusiasms."

How language changes

A colleague tipped me off to this a week or two back - an amusing animated canter through 'The History of the English Language' from the UK's Open University. The narrator (also, I suspect, the author of the piece) isn't credited on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure it's Clive Anderson.

I think I might use this in the mini-class I have to do next week for a visiting group of Year 9 students from our parent school in Hong Kong.

Foley everywhere

I think I've been having even more fun with my Film classes' current study unit on 'Sound' than my students have. The craft of Foley - adding in sound effects in post-production, often by means of ingenious fakery - is endlessly fascinating, and easily grows into something of an obsession.

At the weekend, rattling knives and forks in a tray of cutlery in my kitchen, I discovered that I could make a pretty fair approximation of the clatter and tinkle of glass breaking this way - especially if I used a small glass bottle to rattle the knives, giving the right 'glassy' note for the initial impact. Finding a way for my students to create a breaking glass noise, without the mess and waste and danger of actually breaking glass, has been a preoccupation of the last week or two!

Yesterday I found on the floor a strip of plastic backing from the index stickers we use in the Library. I picked it up to put it in a bin, but when I heard the scrunch it made when I rubbed it gently between my fingers, I put it in my pocket instead, thinking, "This would be great for a crackling log fire noise!"

And tonight I was just passed by an old lady on a bicycle, one of our cleaners, I think. It was a battered and ancient bicycle, and it emitted a loud, rhythmic rusty wheeze as it trundled along - I swear it sounded just like the honking of a goose. I wanted to run after it with a microphone...

As I say, this is a dangerously obsessive topic!

Thought for the week

"You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed."

Getting things in the wrong order

Our hard-working headmaster has become fond (perhaps a little over-fond) in our first few months of operation of invoking the image of what we are seeking to accomplish here as "building a plane after it's taken off".

It may have become a rather over-used cliché this past decade or so, particularly in the business world (indeed, it appears to have first arisen in Silicon Valley), but.... it is an undeniably potent - and often all too painfully apposite - metaphor.

Given the very tight time schedule within which we have had to try to plan for, and build, and staff this school, to furnish and equip it, to frame its policies and devise a curriculum for it... well, it's no surprise that a lot of these essential preliminaries are still ongoing - even as we become consumed with the day-to-day responsibilities of looking after our students and trying to create valuable educational experiences for them.

It's not the way one would ever choose to do things, in an ideal world.... but it is oddly exhilarating!

I discover that one of the first - and certainly most striking - illustrations of the analogy appeared way back at the start of the Noughties, in this TV commercial for EDS (Electronic Data Systems, a business services subsidiary of Hewlett Packard).

Thought for the week

"Nothing that really matters can be measured; it can only be felt."

Dancing statues!

Last week I found myself with about 35 browser tabs open on different - tenuously interlinked - pages of BrainPickings. That darn site always seems to do that to me - drop in for five minutes, struggle to tear myself away hours later!

One of these most recent discoveries of mine on there was this, a charming little film from animator Nina Paley, constructed using ancient artifacts she photographed in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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!)