Tony Zhou Is My Hero

You only wish you taught film form and grammar like Tony Zhou.

First, a disclaimer:  I get nothing, no money, not one thin dime for this endorsement.  I don't even know Tony Zhou.  But he rocks as an educator.  Videos from his "Every Frame a Painting" series offer would-be filmmakers 3-8 minute lessons  in film form and grammar.  Whet your appetite with his 3-minute essay on screen direction in Snowpiercer.

The Best Edited Films. Ever.

In the June 2012 issue of CineMontage, members of the Motion Picture Editors Guild ranked the 75 best-edited films of all time.  The top 25 appear below, but a statistical summary the entire list may prove instructive for students and teachers of film:

• Most of the films cited are from the 1970s.  None are from the 1930s (which makes sense, given the difficulties of editing which accompanied the changeover to sound).  
• Five Hitchcock films appear as well as four each directed by Spielberg and Coppola.  
• George Tomasini, Dede Allen, Michael Kahn, and Thelma Schoonmaker, are the list's most frequently-named editors.
• Guild choices also commend work of audio editors, with Walter Murch (6) and Howard Beals (5) cited most often.

1999 - Zach Staenberg

A Drop in the Bucket

Mary arrives for her October advising appointment.  Transcript and catalog hang limply at her side.  We look over a grid of offered courses.  She chooses a schedule for her final spring semester.  I skim my copy of her record and commend her for coming so close to graduating cum laude.  "Almost made it, didn't you?" I smile

"Um... almost?  No, I am totally graduating with honors.  I'm getting an 'A' in Spanish and Senior Seminar."  Mary speaks with equal parts confidence and condescension.  She is wondering how a man gets to be a college professor with such a poor understanding of mathematics.  Of course a strong eighth semester will boost her average.

Syllabi: Form & Ownership

Purple Syllabi:  confessions of a mimeograph sniffer.

Jurassic Park (the first one) owned the box office.  I was teaching at a poverty row college.  Our staff retreats too frequently concluded with faculty appeals to gods and donors for the wherewithal to make payroll. 

There’s nothing sexy about a college operating budget.  Folks give to buildings and named scholarship funds, but you just can’t mount a commemorative plaque on a light bill.  So the president unveiled a plan whereby we might “cut our way to prosperity.”  In practical terms:  bring your own coffee to the break room, say goodbye to departmental secretaries, and – for goodness sake – make fewer copies.

The End of Bold Critique

A month ago, a friend of mine had a baby.  I'm happily included in a cluster of folk who bring meals and coo at the fresh human.  The women in that circle compare birth narratives ("...well I was in labor for twenty hours...," "...like pushing a watermelon through a straw...," "...one kid right after another, like a Pez dispenser..." and so on).  And many of them — seldom in the new mother's presence, mind you — say some variation of this:  "Wow, she looks good; she's lost nearly all her baby weight."

It's clear that women (yes, even in this enlightened age) value certain standards of weight loss and ideals of figure.  But they dare not encourage it.  They can no longer ask each other "So, when did you think you might lose those last five or six pounds?"  These women are not Philistines.  Many are educated "crunchy moms" who read and share articles about home delivery, organic foods, and gender empowerment.  They envision and work for a world free from privilege and discrimination.

The Mathematics of Waiting

Always winter.  Never Christmas.  That's how C.S. Lewis describes the reign of Narnia's evil White Witch.  Not a bad metaphor to express the agony of expectation in the concrete language of childhood.  Mathematics offers another language for describing the torment of waiting.

Imagine you're five.  You'll spend one-sixth of your life waiting for your next birthday.  But the life percentage for a fifty-year old is much, much smaller.  Thus, grandparents bemoan the brevity of life while twelve-year olds can hardly wait to get a driver's license.  This offers professors [frequently-untapped] leverage during class discussions.

Scheduling as Pedagogy

Students employ a production schedule they co-created with the professor.

Once you've designed the last thing, let your students watch you back up two weeks before that.  That's right.  Use the semester's first class period to create the calendar with them.  Post a finished calendar on Day Two.  Why?  Because the sweetest words a producer ever heard are "on time" and "under budget."  If you pass out stone tablets on Day One, pre-carved with your venerable recipe, you have thrown away an opportunity to teach production scheduling, an essential task of filmmaking (and, indeed, a valuable life skill). Instead, invite your apprentices to a conversation that will...

Living Backwards

At the end of each semester an audience of 300 gathers for the Media Showcase.

Having calibrated your level of expectation, what assessment evidence is appropriate?  As in earlier posts, I'm going to offer my syllabus calendar for Intro to Video Production as an example, annotating it here with my reasoning.

Students in my orbit have often heard me tell them to "live backwards."  It's a mantra meant to express an understanding that the afternoon plan for a picnic motivates a morning of sandwich-making.  Similarly, a film's premiere motivates a back-timing of tasks from editing to scriptwriting.  This seems self-evident.  Yet many, many students wait until the last week of the semester to ask:  "Is the final cumulative?" or "How high must I score to pass?"  These underachievers are (and I use the term pejoratively) "forward-thinking."

Syllabi: Production Schedules

Some people actually make money from production scheduling.  But first, reasonable goals.

An earlier post dealt with creating calendars for knowledge-based Media Studies courses, the pace and division of which are arbitrarily determined by the whim and interest of professors.  Media Production classes are importantly different.  Professors in these are apt to offer project-based skills training.  They are attempting to make of their students practiced, competent, or masterful editors and scriptwriters.  The adjectives are important and should mirror the Course Objectives section of the syllabus. 

Attendance Isn't Roll Call

Do they even give out these awards in the adult working world?

I don’t suppose you can ever guess what will turn someone’s crank.  Witness the explosion of interest in an essay about something as vanilla as attendance.  The questions swelling my inbox after this post boil down to two issues:  the burden of mandatory reporting and student athletes.

A few readers reminded me that retention isn’t the only reason they’re compelled to report attendance figures.  Some financial aid – especially that which benefits veterans – is contingent on (sometimes pro-rated according to) attendance.  I do not live in a universe free from governmental information gathering.  I’m sorry if I made it seem otherwise.  Yes, I report those statistics, too.  But I collect the data from quiz scores (meant to spar review and discussion) and from (what I hope are) pedagogically meaningful assignments and exercises.  I do not “call roll.”  Calling roll is an empty throwback to elementary school.  It constitutes a missed teaching opportunity.

Screenwriting: Empathetic Listening

Are good scripts written by people who listen to others... or by people who listen to iPods?

A new friend of mine complimented a favorite scriptwriter as "having an ear for natural dialogue."

"How would you develop one of those?" I asked him, over hanger steak at the Brewing Company.

"Eavesdrop," he said. "Listen to people."

Important Attendance

"Iron Man" Cal Ripken, Jr. was awarded the perfect attendance pin on 06 Sep 1995.

In 1980, A.K. Verma got a job with the Central Public Works Department as an assistant executive electrical engineer.  A decade later, he requested some of his accrued leave days.  He hasn’t yet returned to work.  In fact, he was finally fired Thursday.  Thursday, January 8, 2015.  The Indian civil servant remained on the payroll but hadn’t been to work for a quarter century. 

Verma’s sacking coincides with my recent meditations on course policies and syllabus construction.  Some colleagues have been reading along and asked why I haven’t really addressed the issue of attendance. 

Syllabus Policies

Yes, it's available at amazon.com.  And, yes, you want one.

My experience with syllabi changed in grad school.  I think it had something to do with taking full financial responsibility for my education.  I also had a clearer vision of my intended career.  While a B.A. in Broadcasting & Cinema might simply have extended my adolescence, I enrolled in UNCG’s M.F.A. program aiming very specifically for a career demanding time both behind a camera and in front of students.  Thus I stockpiled syllabi from the grad courses I took (and those undergrad courses in which I served as teaching assistant) thinking them templates for the future.  

All too suddenly, graduation moved me from one side of the desk to its obverse.  After a summer of freelance filmmaking, I was an author of syllabi.  But I was an amateur.  I am still an amateur.  Most professors are.  With scant exception (students of Education seem an obvious special case), we are taught about our discipline, but not about the craft of teaching.  It is the dirty secret of our profession. 

Syllabus Memories

Jorge Cham at phdcomics.com

I never saw a syllabus in high school.  On the first day of any grading period, I had no idea where we’d be on the last.  Some of the better teachers wrote the day’s topic on the board.  But in general, our knowledge of any future beyond that was limited to the next assignment (printed in a corner of the board under the words “Do Not Erase”).  If the class were governed by policies unique to the teacher, they were conveyed by word of mouth.  These usually had to do with the proper use of unwieldy bathroom passes or returning scissors to a shoebox covered in contact paper.

Then came college and the syllabus – an unfamiliar Latin scripture in which each teacher declared himself god.  Office hours defined the time/space boundaries of his universe. A grading scale enumerated sins and their respective punishments.  A calendar prophesied the future.

Try Something. ANYthing.

How do we teach students to fail honorably?

Phone calls punctuated my dinner as students discovered the file server intranet had crashed the night before projects were due in two of my classes. I sensed an educational opportunity in the tide of panic and sent the following e-mail:

Excellence by Default

"Asking students to evaluate their professors anonymously is like Trader Joe's soliciting Yelp reviews from a shoplifter." -- Rebecca Shuman, education columnist for Slate.

An exhausted alternator took out the truck's electrical system.  I coasted to the side of the road and called AAA.  Six hours and $1100 later, I was back on the road. 

Please, don't give me grief for going to the dealership.  I do know better.  It was the closest service garage.  Yes, $1100 is an outrageous price to pay for an alternator and a new battery.  But the waiting area had a fireplace, a coffee bar, and a concierge.  Well, the coffee bar was really a trio of thermoses.  And the concierge was a secretary who relayed customer questions to mechanics.  But the fireplace was real.  Well, it was a real gas fireplace.  So the flames were real.

You're Doing It All Wrong

Stanford's Andrea Lunsford (L), one of five writers proving Everyone's An Author.

You know the place.  The vacant lot.  The backyard.  The driveway with a basketball hoop.  That neighborhood venue where kids congregate to play. Then along comes an adult who figures out the game isn't being played by FIFA or NCAA rules.  With the best of intentions, this mom or dad steps in to "improve" things.  They want leagues and brackets and sponsored jerseys.  Over time, 4th graders are playing for "sportsmanship" and "most improved" trophies.  And the fun of the neighborhood pick-up game is gone, stolen by people who invited themselves.

The Train Wreck of Hate Watching

The moment of impact at the famous Crush, Texas train wreck in 1896.  Many of the 40,000 onlookers were injured by debris.

Some of the best-attended spectator events of the 19th century were staged train wrecks.  Decommissioned locomotives intentionally smashed into each other at high speed before grandstands of onlookers.  Perhaps this love of calamity constitutes an antecedent for the phenomenon of “hate watching.”  Yes, our species is so reliably bitchy that NBC strategically presumed a certain percentage of this week’s Peter Pan Live! audience would be snarky tweeters hoping for something to go wrong.

That reminds me of a few too many college committee meetings.  You know how they are.  Somebody presents a new idea.  Maybe a curriculum upgrade, maybe the renaming of a course.  And those around the table offer criticism.  They almost always offer criticism.  They offer criticism because it demonstrates they’ve read the agenda or studied the proposal.  Much less often (in my own experience) do they say, simply, “I like it,” “Count me in,” or “Let’s move forward.”

Digital Poop

ISS Commander Barry Wilmore displays the first object 3-D printed in space

This week, NASA tested a 3-D printer in space.  An on-demand machine shop is a pretty incredible tool if you want to get to Mars.  A couple of years ago it was widely reported that we'd all have such devices in our homes by now.  Turns out it was a little ambitious to think we'd be fabricating toaster replacement parts in the basement.  Still, you can probably have a decent one out of the box and working for about $1000.

The obstacle to ubiquity isn't affordability.  It's creativity.  Jessica Banks, CEO of RockPaperRobot says "it might be that many people get their 3-D printers and they're like 'This is going to be awesome.  I can make everything in my life.' And what do they do?  The make a spoon."  Spoons are the sorts of objects Banks refers to as "digital poop."

The Half-Life of Facts

Stephen Fry of the BBC's Quite Interesting reminds us of the eroding certainty of knowledge.

Easily my favorite game show is the BBC’s Q.I. (a.k.a. “Quite Interesting”), hosted by the planet’s honorary ombudsman, Stephen Fry.  I guess you’d call it a trivia quiz.  But really the object is for the four panelists, usually comedians, to be interesting, to be witty – even more often than they’re correct. 

A recent episode was themed around the Half-Life of Facts.  Essentially, the program’s creator, John Lloyd, went back through the show’s earlier seasons and collected knowledge which has since been proven inaccurate.  Once, for example, the host reported that there was no way to accurately tell the age of a lobster.  But by the time of this Q.I. retrospective, marine biologists had learned that the lobster’s eye stalk was the key to dating it.