So I finally decided today that I am going to stay at school this evening until I feel like my classes are under control again. It's currently 6 pm. I may be here awhile. I'm pausing between writing Geometry proofs worksheets and preparing my Sonnets lesson for tomorrow, while singing "Walk On" along with Michael Ball, to make a quick little blog post.

This weekend we had our ACSI conference up in Portland, which meant two days off of school to drive up at five-freakin'-forty-five in the morning and go to seminars and workshops, etc. Here's the thing: (Radical Honesty* warning) I tend to be uber-critical of public speakers--their grammar, their logic, their general public speaking ability--I pretty much always have a running Mystery Science Theatre-esque commentary going on in my head. And when I have tons of grading and lesson plans to do and feel very behind and stressed out and am being forced to sit and listen to a succession of speakers, that commentary might possibly take on a little, shall we say, poison. Now, I've recently been convicted (thanks to our church's current Bible study book, Seeking Him) of the fact that this tendency of mine has its roots in pride, so I've been trying to curb the impulse and consciously replace it with positive, humble statements, such as, "He has good intentions with this point," "I don't have the expertise to dispute this argument," "I can learn something from this person," and so on. (Have you guessed that in my head these statements come in the voice of my mother?) At least that's the theory. What happened at the conference was that I mostly just checked out. Not a great improvement, I admit, but at least my attitude was marginally better that way.

I will say, though, that there was one really good seminar that kept my attention the entire time. It was about teaching poetry in the classroom, and the speaker made me happy right from the start by reading Billy Collins. She gave a lot of really good ideas for poetry prompts, which I'm always on the lookout for, and which I can always use in the Creative Writing Club that we're starting up at East Linn. On the other hand, there was another seminar that fully deserved all the mental barbs I could throw at it. The presenter started off by telling us he had thrown it all together in about two hours, and that he was just offering us up some of his thoughts on something he didn't really have expertise on. Nice. The seminar was supposed to be about "Christian vs. Cultural Beauty," but he spent the first 15 minutes talking about how modern and postmodern art isn't beautiful--the only "true" art is classical art. Which in his head somehow connects to the concept of the contemporary pressure to be beautiful. Whatever. Personally, I'm a little skeptical of a guy leading a seminar about cultural perceptions of female beauty, but that's just me.

Anyway, speaking of beauty, I picked up the fourth book in the Uglies trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. The first three books were excellent and wrapped up the storyline quite nicely, so I was surprised to see that a fourth had come out. Westerfeld starts a new storyline with Extras, though, and it's actually even better than the first few. The series is set in a futuristic universe, after our civilization (called "the Rusties") has nearly destroyed the natural world and caused a new government to begin brain-washing the majority of the population to be compliant and peaceful, in return for which they get unsurpassable beauty. In this second story arc, Prettytime has ended, but the population is on to a new obsession: fame. The main character's city functions on a "reputation economy," meaning, you're wealth is a direct result of your name-recognition. Thus, everyone's obsessed with promoting their own image via their "feeds" (think, Myspace or Facebook), which they do by publishing (or "kicking") hot news stories about technology, fashion, other famous people, or whatever. People who are nobodies are called "Extras," people who post nothing but their own boring lives on their feeds are called "ego-kickers."

You can see how this might possibly make one evaluate one's blogging habits.

However, since I am seeking neither fame nor fortune with my blog, I guess I'll keep it up. But you should all go out and read Extras. It's excellent.


* Extras reference

Labels: books, meta-blogging, teaching

1 comments