Mountains Made Low

I’ve just noticed it, so I’ve gotta ask.  Can I pull off “w00t”?

I’ll be teaching two classes today. The 1:00 class, the one full of mostly good students, prevailed upon me over the weekend to cancel our meeting today. Which I’m much more inclined to do when the good kids ask. So, on Monday, we met, we talked it over, and I did. Then there was a snow day. So Monday ended up being our last class meeting before break.

What’s interesting, though, is that I think a number of the students in my other classes have also decided to, or for other reasons sort of have to, bag it early. I’ve had several of them admit it—they planned on being in class for the workshop on Wednesday, but then not being in class today. And they’re keeping those plans even though the snow day pushed the workshop back to today. I’ve had three admit that this was the case—that they had already made plans to leave early this morning for break. Additionally, one of my classes has four members of the men’s volleyball team in it, and they’re leaving for a tournament this morning. The funny part is, the three that have admitted to planning to leave early, and who wanted to make alternative arrangements for submitting their work to me, are also in that class. So I’ll be down seven for sure. I wonder how many others haven’t admitted it.

But I’ll be done by 1, and have the rest of today and all of tomorrow to get ready for my spring break trip (w00t!), which I’m looking forward to, greatly. Hopefully I can get everything done that needs doing before I go.

Did I mention what the weather on days surrounding our wintery mix-induced snow day here in the mountains has done and is slated to do? Yeah, it’s un-freakin-believeable.

Today is the snow day, and I’m loving it. I got my day this week for endless coffee and pajama pants! I’m so happy. It’s supposed to keep snowing pretty much all day, with a high of about 25°. Just the perfect snow day!

Yesterday it was in the low fifties most of the day. On Monday, though, it was like Spring here. While the official report for Banner Elk (where I work) said 59°, I myself saw a reading (on the thermometer in my truck which is usually pretty accurate) of 68°. And tomorrow it’s supposed to be about 40°—a sloppy, soupy mess, in other words.

Should be fun. But for me, today, it’s all pajama pants, slippers, and hot beverages.

As I was writing last Friday about the winter storm that was pretty much taking care of shutting down the Northeast, I reflected that, here in the mountains, we hadn’t see a winter storm—or really any winter weather—so far this winter. Well, overnight that all changed. Yesterday’s rain turned to freezing rain, to sleet, and then to snow, and there are probably about 5 inches on the ground here at my house, this morning.

And I’ve got a snow day!

The roads probably aren’t exactly “impassabale,” but they don’t seem like they’d be a lot fun to drive on, either. It’s, over all, a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Let’s go the snowfall map:

You see that little tiny patch of “more snow” (white) at the very north edge of the North Carolina-Tennessee line? Yep, that’s where I live. If it keeps going like it is, though, 3-6” may be somewhat conservative as an estimate.

It makes me think, though, about what happened when a snowstorm whistled down the Shenandoah Valley on the Wednesday before Spring Break in 1994, my freshman year. Because that part of Virginia was so ill-equipped to handle that much snowfall (it was only about three inches, but still), and it seemed like the snow would shut things down for more than one day, my roommate and I got the hell out of dodge and went home for spring break on Wednesday. I hope this storm doesn’t give my students too many ideas—or that their idea is to head up Beech or Sugar for skiing and snowboarding, rather than heading down the highway and declaring break early. I guess we’ll see on Friday.

The embedded weather map image is from weather.com—and, yes, I remembered to save it and re-upload it this time, so it won’t change…well…like the weather

Remember, a while ago, when I said that I’d built Tuesday into my schedule this semester as a “day off”? Or at least a day to work at home with no need to change out of my pajama pants if I don’t want to? Yeah. Hasn’t so much worked that way.

There was no Tuesday in Week One of the semester (classes started on Wednesday). In weeks 5, 6, and 7 (yes, today is the Tuesday of week 7), I’ve had meetings to attend on campus on Tuesday morning. In week 5, I had on-campus events in the morning and the evening. It’s been a hoot. Add to this the all-faculty meeting called by the president and the provost for tomorrow at 3:30, and the out-of-schedule because spring break is next week Faculty Senate Meeting on Thursday @ 10, and this is turning into one phenomenal week.

Not in a good way.

And I agree wholeheartedly with this video—both the sentiment expressed in the lyrics and the attitude which this rendition brings.

Let it fucking snow!!

Embedded video, once again, from youtube.com

Hold on to your hats, kids. This story truly earns its “how bizarre” label.

Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, apparently feels that a lot of popular music these days has randomish lyrics. Lyrics that almost make sense, but not quite. He dared the readers of the Dilbert Newsletter to submit snippets of such lyrics, and a German band Rivo Drei took the best of these snippets, strung them together, and set them to music. The result, the consensus seems to be, is better than a lot of the music on the radio today, though many seem to believe that the instrumental bridge is reminiscent of Bruce Hornsby. Oh well; neither here nor there.

Without further ado, I give you, “She Amazed Me,” as performed by Rivo Drei.

She had runaway eyes and marshmallow kittens / My heart heard her dream like 10,000 mittens / Whoa! / A tear in her hand she spread / déjà vu all across the land / She spins round and round with a frog in her ear / whispering fountains and rocks she couldn’t hear / Oh she amazed me / with her love she tazed me / Oh she amazed me / and it escapes me / how she outer spaced me // Too many times I’ve seen the thunder / flashes of sound, soul-rending sunder / Whoa! / a letter colored blue / now the nine bells are ringing and singing it too / She spins round and round with a frog in her ear / whispering fountains and rocks she couldn’t hear / Oh she amazed me / with her love she tazed me / Oh she amazed me / and it escapes me / how she outer spaced me // Little did she know that they were coming too soon / both those kittens ran off to the moon / oh she amazed me / with her love she tazed me / oh she amazed me / and it escapes me / how she outer spaced me / Oh she amazed me / with her love she tazed me / oh she amazed me / with splendid reprisal / she took to the sky / teardrops asunder / no shadow, no cry / apple core, ostriches, dancing like fairies / and it escapes me / how she outer spaced me ///

The images in the video are all “found.”

And, oh yes, I feel a comp class activity coming on…one designed around this video for dealing with the steady diet of word salad that the students seem to insist upon feeding me.

First, I want to offer an explanation for yesterday’s lower-than-average quality post—not an excuse, just an explanation. I was, at that time, trying to blog discreetly from near the back of a large lecture hall where I was sitting with my colleagues, listening to the umpteenth presentation of the day—the umpteenth presentation with no information that was particularly new to me and the umpteenth presentation accompanied by a bad PowerPoint.

If you’ve been reading in the past week or so, you probably understand, at least in part, why bad PowerPoint is so disturbing to me. In 2003, I published a multimedia article in Computers and Composition Online entitled, “Mixing Media: Textual, Oral, and Visual Literacy (and Then Some) in Teaching with PowerPoint”. It’s about what students tend to believe PowerPoint does, what the creators of PowerPoint (both Micro$oft in general and the particular designers of PP) seem to encourage us to do with it, what seems to happen in the “real world” with PP, and what we as teachers of writing, information, and, in general, literacy can do about all of this. In my youth and enthusiasm (I was still in grad school, remember), I recommended an alternative software package, Flash (then by Macromedia, now by Adobe), as a way to make visible many of the information, design, and presentational decisions that PP makes transparent. I stand by this assessment, though I realize now that: (a) Flash is a daunting thing; (b) Flash has a steep learning curve for general use; and (c) the same things can be taught in terms of PowerPoint, if it’s done right.

But I digress.

That’s why bad PowerPoint is particularly alarming to me…in general. But in this context, it was even worse. And it was made even worse by the fact that these folks were presenting at an event put on by a major research foundation and a consortium of higher education institutions. Not only that, but the focus of the event was Information Literacy. That is, the primary question was, “How do we develop a plan for instilling the skills, processes, and means for critical consumption, analysis, integration, and production of information in our students?”

Do you see why bad visual presentation strategies might be a problem? Particularly when the people presenting this information are meant to be experts on the topic, offering the rest of us insights on strategies for answering the question we posed by participating at all—a question that our very involvement indicates we are committed to looking for an answer to? And all of the presentations, save one (the very last one of the day), were like this. They poured content into the mindless mold offered by PowerPoint, never seeming to consider how visual presentation tools can be used to their best effect. The fact that a number of these people were billed as instructional technologists, and others (mostly librarians) as experts in information literacy, yet they blindly followed a Micro$oft model of presentation, information design, and information architecture, seriously bummed me out, man.

When you add to this the fact that they weren’t saying anything new (to me), that they were dumbing down a lot of important and emergent theoretical ideas about information from the past five years or so, and that I—and apparently the rest of my institution’s team—didn’t really learn anything that’s going to help us answer that all-important question, the question that was our raison d’etre in terms of this workshop at least, it’s just sort of depressing. When I was sitting there thinking that my time would better have been spent in the classroom yesterday, it becomes more than sort of depressing.

But I learned to know several of my colleagues better. I learned that Abingdon, Virginia, might be a nice place to visit recreationally at a later time. And I learned more about Bristol, Tennessee, and it’s annual NASCAR bacchanal than I really ever cared to know. But that’s about all I learned.

Still, I hope when this team reconvenes on campus, we can find a way to develop a plan that can actually do our students some good in terms of Information Literacy, because (again, something else I already knew) they’re hyper-informed and media-saturated, but they have a hard time differentiating the various types and levels of value encompassed in the media-storm they daily inhabit. And that, more than bad PowerPoints and watered-down, stale ideas, is a problem that must be addressed.