(no subject)
I guess it’s time for end of the academic year thoughtfulness. My basic nonfiction class is pretty well set, but I am going to add a new lesson on how to sound smarter in English. You all know what I mean, trying to sound scientific when you’re talking about whatever topic is on the table, but a guy named Halliday laid it out systematically so I designed a few exercises using his research as a starter.
It’s my creative writing and debate classes that I am planning to make bigger changes to. In my creative writing class I’m taking out the rather long workshop process in which the class hears every student read their story and four student critiques (and my own) of that story. Instead, I’m going to have more small group critiques, which means no reading of the stories aloud to the class, but my students can write and have critiqued five stories instead of two. The rest of the time saved will be used in discussion of other stories written by professionals.
In the debate class, I’ve found that while the students found debating potential laws rather dull, they seemed to enjoy the team debate representing different countries arguing for the money from a fictional multi-national. I’m not sure if it was the topic or the freer style format. I’m going to guess the latter, and do more of those. It means I’ll have to think of more options for them to argue over, but my job shouldn’t be too easy, should it?
More friends have come and gone. Every year some of my friends return to America, get jobs in other cities, or get married, and thus fall out of my life. It does add variety, which I have to admit was missing from my life in Portland, where I hung out with the same people for five years. Since we didn’t have a team of sitcom writers working for us, it became a rut. I tired of the same basic conversations, including what I was saying. Here at NJU, the rotation of my Western born colleagues also means the rotation of their interests, the changes in dynamics of friendships. I wonder if I should miss them more, if the ease of my shifting into new friends as easily as I start over with new students says I’m independent or too emotionally detached. I like the annual meeting of new people.
I didn’t write at all in the fall semester, but by using my students as regular critiquers I forced myself to write what will probably be a couple of novella length stories and the beginning of a novel. But once the semester ended, I stopped writing again and started sleeping more instead. I’ve been taking notes for a novel, doing some research, but I only wrote one chapter. Lying in bed, learning how to sleep in, became a lot more attractive an option.
I’m greatly tempted to just start e-publishing, since everything I hear about the regular publishing industry sounds bad and getting worse. Yeah, sure Amazon is run by jerks, but HarperCollins was bought by Rupert Murdoch. One nice thing about e-publishing is the openness to length. I’ve also been making some friends at the local art institute, and find myself wondering how useful they might be, or might want to be, in illustrating e-publishing projects. I don’t plan on making much money on these projects themselves, more like using them as a publicity tool to get the attention of people who pay money. I wrote roughly a hundred short stories before I moved to China; I wonder how many of them my new artist friends could turn them into comics. I should reread them.
I am happy to have discovered a good jujitsu club in Nanjing. When I went twice a week (while lifting three times a week), my body weight jiggled up and down: lose a pound of fat, gain a pound of muscle, etc. When I went to jujitsu three times a week and lifted weights twice a week, I lost a pound a week.
On the subject of losing weight, I might go vegetarian for a month in August, since the whole area around my campus apartment will be pretty closed down. Much like the publishing industry, everything I read about the meat industry is pretty bad. Not as bad as back in the days of The Jungle, but bad enough. Of course, I get this information from independent media, which is spreading, thanks to the Internet. I’m starting to wonder if amateur net-izens will replace professional journalists, or are already. When I look at Yahoo, most of the information is either trivial or too distant to matter. What really matters to our day to day lives are the behaviors of corporations, and they are not reported upon nearly enough, and usually only when it’s too late and too obvious. As more and more corporations own each other, I think it’s going to get worse.
Anyway, if I can hack it through August, I might just stay vegetarian until I drop to my goal weight. Then I’ll worry about gaining the muscle to lift my body weight over my head, which was my New Year’s Resolution.
It’s my creative writing and debate classes that I am planning to make bigger changes to. In my creative writing class I’m taking out the rather long workshop process in which the class hears every student read their story and four student critiques (and my own) of that story. Instead, I’m going to have more small group critiques, which means no reading of the stories aloud to the class, but my students can write and have critiqued five stories instead of two. The rest of the time saved will be used in discussion of other stories written by professionals.
In the debate class, I’ve found that while the students found debating potential laws rather dull, they seemed to enjoy the team debate representing different countries arguing for the money from a fictional multi-national. I’m not sure if it was the topic or the freer style format. I’m going to guess the latter, and do more of those. It means I’ll have to think of more options for them to argue over, but my job shouldn’t be too easy, should it?
More friends have come and gone. Every year some of my friends return to America, get jobs in other cities, or get married, and thus fall out of my life. It does add variety, which I have to admit was missing from my life in Portland, where I hung out with the same people for five years. Since we didn’t have a team of sitcom writers working for us, it became a rut. I tired of the same basic conversations, including what I was saying. Here at NJU, the rotation of my Western born colleagues also means the rotation of their interests, the changes in dynamics of friendships. I wonder if I should miss them more, if the ease of my shifting into new friends as easily as I start over with new students says I’m independent or too emotionally detached. I like the annual meeting of new people.
I didn’t write at all in the fall semester, but by using my students as regular critiquers I forced myself to write what will probably be a couple of novella length stories and the beginning of a novel. But once the semester ended, I stopped writing again and started sleeping more instead. I’ve been taking notes for a novel, doing some research, but I only wrote one chapter. Lying in bed, learning how to sleep in, became a lot more attractive an option.
I’m greatly tempted to just start e-publishing, since everything I hear about the regular publishing industry sounds bad and getting worse. Yeah, sure Amazon is run by jerks, but HarperCollins was bought by Rupert Murdoch. One nice thing about e-publishing is the openness to length. I’ve also been making some friends at the local art institute, and find myself wondering how useful they might be, or might want to be, in illustrating e-publishing projects. I don’t plan on making much money on these projects themselves, more like using them as a publicity tool to get the attention of people who pay money. I wrote roughly a hundred short stories before I moved to China; I wonder how many of them my new artist friends could turn them into comics. I should reread them.
I am happy to have discovered a good jujitsu club in Nanjing. When I went twice a week (while lifting three times a week), my body weight jiggled up and down: lose a pound of fat, gain a pound of muscle, etc. When I went to jujitsu three times a week and lifted weights twice a week, I lost a pound a week.
On the subject of losing weight, I might go vegetarian for a month in August, since the whole area around my campus apartment will be pretty closed down. Much like the publishing industry, everything I read about the meat industry is pretty bad. Not as bad as back in the days of The Jungle, but bad enough. Of course, I get this information from independent media, which is spreading, thanks to the Internet. I’m starting to wonder if amateur net-izens will replace professional journalists, or are already. When I look at Yahoo, most of the information is either trivial or too distant to matter. What really matters to our day to day lives are the behaviors of corporations, and they are not reported upon nearly enough, and usually only when it’s too late and too obvious. As more and more corporations own each other, I think it’s going to get worse.
Anyway, if I can hack it through August, I might just stay vegetarian until I drop to my goal weight. Then I’ll worry about gaining the muscle to lift my body weight over my head, which was my New Year’s Resolution.