Note: This is the original version of this article.
Recently, I was reading Birdie Jaworski’s editorial in Gallinas (Northeastern New Mexico’s art periodical) about getting “the &*^$! outta town.” She was referring to, of course, Las Vegas, NM--the original! And while she began by listing all of the terrible things one has to deal with in this town during the winter, in the end, she admitted awareness that this was her home, and no place else would do. And that got me thinking about whether or not we remember all the great things about Las Vegas.
Indeed, all I hear are complaints: “This town’s too small”; “I can’t wait to go home next week”; and the one that really ticks me off, “There’s nothing to do here!” I take issue with these complaints mainly because this (in less than three years time) has become my home. And no one likes to hear anyone talking badly about their home. However, as I’ve only lived here a short time, and Las Vegas did, indeed, take some getting used to, I can see where they’re coming from—even if they seem hell-bent against giving the town a chance.
But seriously, Las Vegas is too small? I’ve both visited and lived in smaller towns than this. My wife’s family lives in a town similar to Las Vegas but in South Dakota. The main difference (other than geography) is size. Barely smaller than Las Vegas but further from major cities, their university faced crushing financial burdens until it went bankrupt mid-semester; there weren’t enough students in such a small town. Luckily, the Wal-Mart that opened there soon after saved the town from rampant unemployment. And student I tutored in the Writing Center had to write a paper about her home town but couldn’t give me exact locations of her house, school, etc., because none but the main roads had names.
And what’s so great about big cities, anyway? I lived in those too. In Montréal, Canada, I had to get up nearly three hours before my high school classes started just so I would have time to walk two blocks, take a bus, then get on a train to get to class at 8am. In Memphis, Tennessee, I had a thirty to forty-five minute drive (depending on traffic) to get to my university and back. And that didn’t count the time it took to find a parking space, nor the costs of daily publication, gas, or a new parking pass each semester (that’s right, at most universities, you have to pay to park). Now, all I have to do is grab my stuff, leave my apartment (off campus) and it takes less than a ten minute walk to get to my office—no getting up hours in advance, no traffic, and no costs other than a heavy jacket in winter and a good windbreaker during the monsoon season (and don’t get me started about how much I love the monsoon season).
As for the subject of home, it isn’t that I have a problem with my students, colleagues, and friends, keeping a home outside of Las Vegas. But I take offense when they act as though the prospect of Las Vegas being home is preposterous. Now, I’m not going to wax on about home being “where the heart is” or “where you hang your hat.” If the concept were easy to define, one of my peers wouldn’t be writing her Master Thesis on the subject. But I can tell you that, for me, home is where you make a life for yourself. And if you find it difficult to think of your education or your profession as making a life for yourself, then perhaps you’re pursuing the wrong ends.
Lastly, I’ve written an entire editorial in response to “There’s nothing to do here” already. So I’m not going to get into it too much, except to repeat what I say to my own students: “Is all your homework done? Are you acing all of your classes?” If not, then I don’t think you have much business looking for stuff to do. My wife acts; I blog. When we’re not too tired and have time, we hit the gym or the pool. When the season starts, we referee and/or coach youth soccer. We go to the Kiva to catch a movie (and they have, hands down, the best movie theatre popcorn anywhere). We have video game nights with our friends. And if none of those things hits the spot, Santa Fe is barely an hour away with plenty to do. We don’t wait for something fun to come find us. We go and find something fun, and sometimes the search is half the adventure. And for me, Las Vegas never seems in short supply.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
"Maus": A Class Activity Retrospepective PLUS 3-D Comics!
Last semester, I taught Reading and Writing for College (the first in a sequence of three, core English requirements at my university) as a full-time instructor. All in all, it was an interesting semester--five classes, nearly ninety students, and literally hundreds of pages in essays to read and grade. From the get go, I knew that that first brush with "real" teaching (I'd only ever taught one class a semester as a graduate assistant) would set the tone for my entire career as a teacher. However, the semester was so draining, I did little in the way of looking back at the semester in terms of what worked and what didn't. In hindsight, I'm sort of glad I didn't do it before now, as this semester I'm teaching Freshman Composition I for the first time (the second in the series). Now, I can also look back and see what worked and what didn't in terms of what students will need to take with them into their second semester as college English students.
And the assignment from last semester that most stood out (or the one I've gotten the most questions about) was a diorama I had each of my students do. The assignment was a "Feeder" for the Descriptive Essay (because it "feeds" into the main assignment)--an essay that has students begin practicing close description of the visual elements of a scene. In this case, the scenes were chosen by each student. To help them really "feel" the elements of the scene (hopefully appealing to my tactile learners--thanks, Andy-- the artists in my class, or just the students really nervous about writing) they had to make a diorama of said scene. And the scene had to be chosen from the first book we read that semester--Maus I: My Father Bleeds History.
To start with, the decision to use Maus as a "remedial English" text, came to me as a replacement for the failing Autobiography of Malcolm X of the old curriculum--both are autobiographies but one is a comic. Being such, it allowed me to teach observation and inference to students without critical reading skills. In short, rather than trying to teach them the difference from what they observe in a text and what they infer from it, they could learn the difference by literally observing the story and then inferring from the written word in the comic. Did it work? Kind of. Some students took to the idea immediately, while others got hung up on the characters (arguing all the mice looked too similar to figure out the story) or their European accents. Still, I think the book has strong merits for this classroom; perhaps I simply need more practise teaching comics.
As for the dioramas, the verdict is still out. I came up with the activity after I'd assigned the essay but while we were in the middle of Maus. And it was only after I assigned the diorama activity that it occurred to me a diorama of a scene in a comic might be a bit redundant. However, comic, diorama, or otherwise, most of my students still missed an incredible amount of details in their essays--even some who made amazing dioramas! This leads me to one of two conclusions: 1) those students did not understand the purpose of the diorama or 2) my students were just lazy. And while I acknowledge the strong possibility of the first, I happen to know that most of my students were just lazy. However, this is not a way of shirking blame. It simply means I haven't found the right way to motivate these students. But without getting into a debate (internal or otherwise) about when college students (seeking education by choice) should be accepted as lazy and not worth the trouble to motivate, I've finally put together a slide show of some of the better examples of my students' work:
On a side note, these example are put in order of where their scene appears in the comic. They were also displayed in each classroom as such, creating, in effect, a 3-D comic!
Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?
And the assignment from last semester that most stood out (or the one I've gotten the most questions about) was a diorama I had each of my students do. The assignment was a "Feeder" for the Descriptive Essay (because it "feeds" into the main assignment)--an essay that has students begin practicing close description of the visual elements of a scene. In this case, the scenes were chosen by each student. To help them really "feel" the elements of the scene (hopefully appealing to my tactile learners--thanks, Andy-- the artists in my class, or just the students really nervous about writing) they had to make a diorama of said scene. And the scene had to be chosen from the first book we read that semester--Maus I: My Father Bleeds History.
To start with, the decision to use Maus as a "remedial English" text, came to me as a replacement for the failing Autobiography of Malcolm X of the old curriculum--both are autobiographies but one is a comic. Being such, it allowed me to teach observation and inference to students without critical reading skills. In short, rather than trying to teach them the difference from what they observe in a text and what they infer from it, they could learn the difference by literally observing the story and then inferring from the written word in the comic. Did it work? Kind of. Some students took to the idea immediately, while others got hung up on the characters (arguing all the mice looked too similar to figure out the story) or their European accents. Still, I think the book has strong merits for this classroom; perhaps I simply need more practise teaching comics.
As for the dioramas, the verdict is still out. I came up with the activity after I'd assigned the essay but while we were in the middle of Maus. And it was only after I assigned the diorama activity that it occurred to me a diorama of a scene in a comic might be a bit redundant. However, comic, diorama, or otherwise, most of my students still missed an incredible amount of details in their essays--even some who made amazing dioramas! This leads me to one of two conclusions: 1) those students did not understand the purpose of the diorama or 2) my students were just lazy. And while I acknowledge the strong possibility of the first, I happen to know that most of my students were just lazy. However, this is not a way of shirking blame. It simply means I haven't found the right way to motivate these students. But without getting into a debate (internal or otherwise) about when college students (seeking education by choice) should be accepted as lazy and not worth the trouble to motivate, I've finally put together a slide show of some of the better examples of my students' work:
 |
| "Maus" Dioramas |
On a side note, these example are put in order of where their scene appears in the comic. They were also displayed in each classroom as such, creating, in effect, a 3-D comic!
Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?
Friday, February 13, 2009
Lazy Post: Review of "The Orange Box: Half-Life 2" Series
I finally finished playing through the Half-Life 2 series on The Orange Box last week. But it's been a very busy week, and I just couldn't get around to reviewing it (much as I wanted to). Lo and behold, I'm reading IGN's The Wednesday 10. This week, they listed the ten biggest first-person shooter clichés. So I'm reading this article and realizing that it must have been Valve's checklist for making Half-Life 2! Cheap shot, I know, but the truth hurts. Read their list, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what the series is like. And if that's not enough, I don't think I could say it much better than Yatzee on Zero Punctuation. If you're unfamiliar with his reviews, however, bare in mind, he swears...a lot...probably more than anyone one I know...
And yet...I really liked these games. I can't explain it, and maybe I can just write that off as good game design. The sound in particular is fantastic--the faint echo of rifle shots from a distance, the unmistakable clicking of head-crabs creeping around the corner, ready to pounce your face!
Even still, I'm not sure I would have played them all were they not all collected in The Orange Box. And despite that the final game in the series ended with the best closure and cliffhanger of all three, I'm not sure I'll rush out to get the next installment--whenever it comes out. Still, I'm glad I played them. To be honest, they were my first, traditional first-person shooters since the third Timesplitters came out back on GameCube. And these three games gave me a lot of what I missed during that time.
And yet...I really liked these games. I can't explain it, and maybe I can just write that off as good game design. The sound in particular is fantastic--the faint echo of rifle shots from a distance, the unmistakable clicking of head-crabs creeping around the corner, ready to pounce your face!
Even still, I'm not sure I would have played them all were they not all collected in The Orange Box. And despite that the final game in the series ended with the best closure and cliffhanger of all three, I'm not sure I'll rush out to get the next installment--whenever it comes out. Still, I'm glad I played them. To be honest, they were my first, traditional first-person shooters since the third Timesplitters came out back on GameCube. And these three games gave me a lot of what I missed during that time.
Friday, February 6, 2009
"The Louvre Invites Comics: It's a Trap, Batman!"--"La Mecha" Feb. 6, 2009
Note: This is the original version of this article.
Dateline: Paris--Comics are art!
No doubt, the students who've taken my English 112 class on comics are all saying, "Duh! Scott McCloud's been saying that since the early '90s! And Will Eisner was sayin' it way before him!" Well, now we have irrefutable proof from within the "cultured" artistic community. The prestigious Louvre museum in Paris, host to masterpieces such as Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's most famous self-portrait, opened a new exhibition featuring comics on January 22: The Louvre Invites Comic Strips. Of course, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe only just closed its doors to its own comics exhibit, but this is the Louvre we're talking about! In France! Europe! "Where the history comes from!" I mean, we name an entire cultural period with a French word, and now they're giving comics the legitimacy of art by putting it along side what is widely considered the most important artistic collection in the world! Comic book nerds rejoice in the streets!
Of course, that was my initial reaction to the news. But upon further study, I was disappointed to find out that this didn't mean I'd be finding a rare issue of Detective Comics #27 hanging across from the Venus de Milo. In fact, were I to check out the exhibit, I wouldn't find any comics I knew by any familiar artists. Indeed, the five artists who've been asked to display work for the exhibit are creating comics specifically for it. Their only instructions--the works should feature their long-standing comic strips' characters but the Louvre itself must play a central role in the stories. And that sort of got me thinking about what this exhibit really means for the comics supporters like myself. Here we've been teaching comics, using comics in lesson plans, drawing and writing comics, pushing the limits of the medium, only to have it taken out of our hands by a snooty French museum!
But perhaps I'm blowing things out of proportion. In fact, most people (comics aficionados or otherwise) don't even seem to know (or care) about this exhibit. It was so hard finding news about it, I eventually had to go to www.louvre.fr, download the official press release (in French only), and translate it for myself (nearly three years since I finished my French degree, but it finally proved useful). So who knows, by the time April 13th comes along, and the show closes, no one may know about it on this side of the pond. Regardless, it begs the question, is this what should happen to comics--relegated to high art status and placed within the confines of artistic and academic elitism? Honestly, I'm not sure. And that doubt is primarily what has stopped me from revising every comics related research paper I wrote as a grad student for submission to scholarly journals--I don't know if that's what I want to do with comics. And I'm not sure if that's what should be done with them.
Let's say it works, and comics become the new high-brow form of art. On the one hand, art (any art) is only as good as the standard by which you judge it. Without getting into a debate in who decides what the standard is, film profs compare a modern thriller's MacGuffin to those of Hitchcock's; Shakespeare profs judge poetry on its use of iambic pentameter; and art profs use masterpieces the likes of which one can only see in the Louvre. And at last, comics (visually) have a standard. We don't have to like them, just like I rarely like the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. But not every film has to win an Oscar for us to enjoy it. The point of the standard is to advance the medium, push it beyond its comfort zone, give us something new.
But on the other hand, there's the inevitable bitterness felt by those who were fans even when comics weren't considered high art. You know the feeling. One of your favorite bands is some indie group that no one else knows about. You went to their little concerts in basements of bars! And suddenly, they sign a big record deal, and everyone's jammin' to their new lyrics, when only you know what they really mean, what it was like to follow their music from the beginning. The newbies start emulating the culture of the band, making you (who were once an individual) just a part of the crowd. The same thing will happen in a couple of months when the Watchmen movie comes out! I've already seen the hoodies and Ts at Hot Topic: the big yellow smiley face with a streak of blood over the left eye and and the big yellow letters in Abadi bold. They'll be worn by kids who weren't even alive when the comic came out, and most of them won't even have read it--only seen the movie and partially understood it. And don't get me started on how I feel about one of the greatest comics of our time being equated with the hypocritically Goth/Emo culture.
But is that where comics is headed with this exhibit? A new generation of comics readers will be shown comics that are high art at the Louvre, and suddenly they'll know what to look for in "good" comics? And when they're having a conversation about how comics is just the continued human tradition of telling stories in pictorial form, and I add that Superman is just the continued human tradition of telling stories about great heroes, they're likely to roll their eyes. Because Superman wasn't in the Louvre.
Dateline: Paris--Comics are art!
No doubt, the students who've taken my English 112 class on comics are all saying, "Duh! Scott McCloud's been saying that since the early '90s! And Will Eisner was sayin' it way before him!" Well, now we have irrefutable proof from within the "cultured" artistic community. The prestigious Louvre museum in Paris, host to masterpieces such as Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's most famous self-portrait, opened a new exhibition featuring comics on January 22: The Louvre Invites Comic Strips. Of course, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe only just closed its doors to its own comics exhibit, but this is the Louvre we're talking about! In France! Europe! "Where the history comes from!" I mean, we name an entire cultural period with a French word, and now they're giving comics the legitimacy of art by putting it along side what is widely considered the most important artistic collection in the world! Comic book nerds rejoice in the streets!
Of course, that was my initial reaction to the news. But upon further study, I was disappointed to find out that this didn't mean I'd be finding a rare issue of Detective Comics #27 hanging across from the Venus de Milo. In fact, were I to check out the exhibit, I wouldn't find any comics I knew by any familiar artists. Indeed, the five artists who've been asked to display work for the exhibit are creating comics specifically for it. Their only instructions--the works should feature their long-standing comic strips' characters but the Louvre itself must play a central role in the stories. And that sort of got me thinking about what this exhibit really means for the comics supporters like myself. Here we've been teaching comics, using comics in lesson plans, drawing and writing comics, pushing the limits of the medium, only to have it taken out of our hands by a snooty French museum!
But perhaps I'm blowing things out of proportion. In fact, most people (comics aficionados or otherwise) don't even seem to know (or care) about this exhibit. It was so hard finding news about it, I eventually had to go to www.louvre.fr, download the official press release (in French only), and translate it for myself (nearly three years since I finished my French degree, but it finally proved useful). So who knows, by the time April 13th comes along, and the show closes, no one may know about it on this side of the pond. Regardless, it begs the question, is this what should happen to comics--relegated to high art status and placed within the confines of artistic and academic elitism? Honestly, I'm not sure. And that doubt is primarily what has stopped me from revising every comics related research paper I wrote as a grad student for submission to scholarly journals--I don't know if that's what I want to do with comics. And I'm not sure if that's what should be done with them.
Let's say it works, and comics become the new high-brow form of art. On the one hand, art (any art) is only as good as the standard by which you judge it. Without getting into a debate in who decides what the standard is, film profs compare a modern thriller's MacGuffin to those of Hitchcock's; Shakespeare profs judge poetry on its use of iambic pentameter; and art profs use masterpieces the likes of which one can only see in the Louvre. And at last, comics (visually) have a standard. We don't have to like them, just like I rarely like the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. But not every film has to win an Oscar for us to enjoy it. The point of the standard is to advance the medium, push it beyond its comfort zone, give us something new.
But on the other hand, there's the inevitable bitterness felt by those who were fans even when comics weren't considered high art. You know the feeling. One of your favorite bands is some indie group that no one else knows about. You went to their little concerts in basements of bars! And suddenly, they sign a big record deal, and everyone's jammin' to their new lyrics, when only you know what they really mean, what it was like to follow their music from the beginning. The newbies start emulating the culture of the band, making you (who were once an individual) just a part of the crowd. The same thing will happen in a couple of months when the Watchmen movie comes out! I've already seen the hoodies and Ts at Hot Topic: the big yellow smiley face with a streak of blood over the left eye and and the big yellow letters in Abadi bold. They'll be worn by kids who weren't even alive when the comic came out, and most of them won't even have read it--only seen the movie and partially understood it. And don't get me started on how I feel about one of the greatest comics of our time being equated with the hypocritically Goth/Emo culture.
But is that where comics is headed with this exhibit? A new generation of comics readers will be shown comics that are high art at the Louvre, and suddenly they'll know what to look for in "good" comics? And when they're having a conversation about how comics is just the continued human tradition of telling stories in pictorial form, and I add that Superman is just the continued human tradition of telling stories about great heroes, they're likely to roll their eyes. Because Superman wasn't in the Louvre.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Paula Dean Smacks Down Scott McCloud!
This past Saturday, I was invited to present at the first annual "Leap for Literacy!" literacy fair here in town--a joint effort between Tome on the Range (a local book shop), the United World College, and the Literacy Council of Northeastern New Mexico. I was invited along with a grad student to present on "special topics" in college English--since I teach a Freshman Composition II course centred on comics, and she teaches one on food. The overt purpose of the fair was to get kids excited about reading; the covert purpose was to fish out parents who may not be able to read. And the main goal of our little kiosk specifically was to get middle and high school kids excited about college English, by assuring them that there would always be classes that fit their particular interests--it naturally follows that the twelve page research paper the composition sequence ends with (quite daunting for the average freshman or sophomore) becomes less so when you know it's on a topic of your liking.
And our nifty little science fair poster board detailing our course descriptions, exercises, etc., featured portraits of the primary authors we read in our subjects courses: the food class uses Paula Dean's autobiography and I use Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, of course. And whose picture do you think garnered more attention--Paula Dean! Practically a household name (especially in the south) way more people were interested in Paula Dean and a class using her book than comics. Sadly, I sat next to our display, while my colleague compared recipes with excited parents. Even the laptop next to us, showing interviews with comics creators garnered no more attention. My friend was quite uplifting, however, by pointing out that while no one was walking around with clothes depicting fried chicken, plenty of kids were wearing superhero T-shirts, hoodies, and caps. Score one for comics!
Of course, I also had a covert goal going into this fair--to convince as many educators as possible of the usefulness of comics in the classroom. To that end, I came prepared with a few articles from teachingcomics.org and (to drive the point home) a comic about teaching. For the later, I printed up a few copies of Andy Wales' Curriculum Comics #1: The Teacher as a Reflective Practitioner. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, not too many people came by to discuss comics with me--though, I'm proud to say there were two teachers who stopped to discuss their (brief) use of comics in their classrooms. So I didn't have too many people to hand this out to...except the Director of Composition from our university, who was also there presenting. As the prof whose job it is to teach the rest of us how to teach composition, she's always on the look out for new materials for her Methods of Teaching and Tutoring English graduate class. So she snatched up a copy and poured over the thing! I'd pointed her to Mr. Wales' other Curriculum Comics in the past, so she was familiar with his work on teaching to students' individual learning styles. But I think she liked this one a bit more.
All in all, I guess you could say the fair was a success. I definitely got kids excited about reading--especially the younger ones when they realized they could read comics in college--talked to a few high school students about the wealth of subjects for study in college English, and further demonstrated the use of comics as a teaching device...if only on a minimal scale. Regardless, I already have ideas for next year.
And our nifty little science fair poster board detailing our course descriptions, exercises, etc., featured portraits of the primary authors we read in our subjects courses: the food class uses Paula Dean's autobiography and I use Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, of course. And whose picture do you think garnered more attention--Paula Dean! Practically a household name (especially in the south) way more people were interested in Paula Dean and a class using her book than comics. Sadly, I sat next to our display, while my colleague compared recipes with excited parents. Even the laptop next to us, showing interviews with comics creators garnered no more attention. My friend was quite uplifting, however, by pointing out that while no one was walking around with clothes depicting fried chicken, plenty of kids were wearing superhero T-shirts, hoodies, and caps. Score one for comics!
Of course, I also had a covert goal going into this fair--to convince as many educators as possible of the usefulness of comics in the classroom. To that end, I came prepared with a few articles from teachingcomics.org and (to drive the point home) a comic about teaching. For the later, I printed up a few copies of Andy Wales' Curriculum Comics #1: The Teacher as a Reflective Practitioner. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, not too many people came by to discuss comics with me--though, I'm proud to say there were two teachers who stopped to discuss their (brief) use of comics in their classrooms. So I didn't have too many people to hand this out to...except the Director of Composition from our university, who was also there presenting. As the prof whose job it is to teach the rest of us how to teach composition, she's always on the look out for new materials for her Methods of Teaching and Tutoring English graduate class. So she snatched up a copy and poured over the thing! I'd pointed her to Mr. Wales' other Curriculum Comics in the past, so she was familiar with his work on teaching to students' individual learning styles. But I think she liked this one a bit more.
All in all, I guess you could say the fair was a success. I definitely got kids excited about reading--especially the younger ones when they realized they could read comics in college--talked to a few high school students about the wealth of subjects for study in college English, and further demonstrated the use of comics as a teaching device...if only on a minimal scale. Regardless, I already have ideas for next year.
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