Random Take Offs: February 2007

Presentation Video

Velario's Cow

Velario is a friend of mine who is an artist. He painted that cow and many other such amazing pieces. We met through my friend John Paul and I ended up teaching him English while John drew a caricature of me. Velario is highly intelligent, but doesn't speak English very well. He rang me today to ask if I wanted to give him another lesson (the last time, we read from an Elvis songbook and criticised Elvis for his bad grammar). He is frustrated because he has many ideas but cannot express himself to his friends because of the language barrier - it's probably also not helping him find like-minded inviduals.

This has got me thinking. It's hard to find like-minded people even though I speak the language. I find it ironic how confusion gets even more confusing when two people having a conversation understand each other perfectly. It takes a lot of patience to have a conversation with someone who is struggling with the language, but if you are patient, you can really learn a lot from them. Maybe it would be better if we all didn't speak a common language well - that way we'd all have to pay a lot more attention to each other. More and more people are substituting listening attentively with waiting to speak - which is frustrating, but in fairness (depending on your station in life), not easily avoidable.

Yesterday was Iwan's 21st birthday. The theme was gods & goddesses. Would have been heaps of fun but several fights broke out, people got thrown out of the club, and then some more fights. It was surreal to see a fight between gods! This goddess stood silently by not knowing what was going on/to do though --->

I dream.

I tried looking for photos to show you what today looked like since I didn't take any of my own, but I didn't find any good ones. Then I figured, what's the point of showing you images that will always be of inferior quality when compared to those in my mind? Suffice to say, days like today are rare and I am very lucky.

I have put up a images of the future instead. I'm not sure what those will look like, but i'd sure like them to look a bit like these.

Log update

I spoke to my lecturer, and apparently the template was for people who needed it and I had free reign all along. She said "Your brain seems to be all over the place - not a template person"

:P

Log rant

For one of my modules, I am "required" to write a reflective log after each workshop, detailing what I liked or didn't like about that session. The whole set of logs for the year is worth 10% of my grade. On the face of it, this might seem like a perfectly acceptable part of learning, but I must further inform you that we have the choice of keeping our logs confidential.

At the end of the last term, we had to submit all our logs, as well as one "end of term" log. I decided to just send the end of term one because I think the whole idea is rubbish. What is the point of asking me to fill in a form that has "What did I feel good about in this workshop?" and "What did I not feel so good about in this workshop?" when you've already told me that the logs may be confidential? I know they're part of the module, but the whole point of doing a module where there are few rules is to encourage the mind to roam - to think of new and creative ways to learn. As long as methods are effective, nobody actually cares. I'm learning. You can see it through my work and performance in class. I don't feel the need (or want) to tell you through some 'one template for all' method, leave me alone.

My lecturer approached Kevin, Dr Phil and myself when she was returning the end of term logs to everyone. She asked for permission to publish our logs and said that she really enjoyed reading them because it showed that different people wanted/expected/learnt different things from what was actually being taught.

well DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.