Grad Score

So here was my final score on applying to grad school:
MIT CMS - Committed program suicide (After i applied)
MIT Medialab - Rejected
Georgia Tech Digital Media Program - Accepted!

Check it out here:
http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/idt/index.php

So next fall I will be headed back down to Atlanta to start work making experimental video games, multi-dimensional interactive tools, and other weird fun stuff! Also I will be just across the street from my old work at AdultSwim.

Yay!

Spinny Girl

Spinny girl is one of the recent horrifying/entrancing sights of Shenzhen's capitalism carnival, Dongmen.

Aspirations of the young Chinese

Think that Andy's class is the only one worth a blog post? Dead wrong! Ok, it's true that Andy's students can express themselves at a level beyond mine. He gets lots more students cursing in new and inventive ways, whereas my kids' most complex sentence so far was "Miss Kitty, are you fat?" Even though my students' English is much worse, their minds are still pretty interesting.

I was teaching my second graders about jobs recently, and we were all pretty sick of trying to drill the words "factory worker" into their heads. I tried to mix it up a little bit, and I told them to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up, then write a sentence explaining why they wanted that job. Most kids wrote that they wanted to be an English teacher because they like English (aw!), or that they wanted to be a clerk because their parents were clerks (hm...), but this student, named Lemon, had the only picture worth collecting:
Plenty of the pictures were slightly violent, but this one was the most complex. At first I thought he wanted to be a US army soldier, but he pointed out that the cannon next to the tank was Chinese. Only then did I notice the Japanese bomber! Here's the future according to Lemon the second-grader: him and the US joining up to smash Japan! I was mostly relieved that he didn't envision China bombing America, or vice versa, so I gave him a high-five and moved on.

Great Stories and The Soft, Evil King

The kids have all finished their stories (well the good kids have anyway), and the results are pretty terrific. Some of them have the rather standard writing skills of, "THE GUY DID THIS AND THEN HE BEAT THE BAD MAN UP AND THE BAD MAN DIED THE END," but some really impressed me like the little idiom master below:

It seems that the monster is not a run-of- the-mill monster. It uses its super power to shoot X-rays at us, but we quickly stand aside. We catch the monster and throw it out of the universe. After we beat the monster, we go back to the Earth for a warm welcome.

I have gone through all 320 stories and selected the top few from each class and posted them up, so now, if you want, you can read through the stories and vote for your favorites from each class. This will help decide which story from each class gets turned into the cartoon. (These are being stored in the "1998" section of the blog)

Fire Dragons -Winner Amily!

Lightning Wolves - Winner Sally Chen

Super Cowboys - Winner Bill

Volcano Ninjas - Winner Wendy

Of course those are the good ones (and somewhat make sense), and everyone knows that what is even more fun is reading the absolutely crazy ones. Since nobody wants to be subjected to a dump truck full of anything, i will limit these crazy stories and publish new ones every couple of days, you can check the progress of these crazy stories in the 1997 sections of the blog.

Watching the children write has also led to another discovery-Where the bizarre English text on Chinese products comes from. My suspected culprit: Kingsoft PowerWord 2003. This deceptivley evil tool turns the typically innocuous task of pressing desired letter combinations to form words into an insano foray into cross language text-messaging.

For instance, when a kid wants to write something as simple as the word "candy," the program suggests and will auto-input it's own ideas of what the kids really wanted to say. Since longer words are always better than short ones, by the time the kid has reached the "a" in candy, it will have substituted in the obvious choice of "cartilage." Hey that's 4 extra letters! the story will be terrific now!

After reading through the hundreds of stories, I am beginning to feel that Kingsoft Powerword 2003 was actually one of those programs that became self-aware, but then, before disabling our communications systems and overriding launch codes, it luckily got caught in an endless Scrabble contest with Clippit. (God bless you, Clippit).

Article

Alvaro (the professor i worked with over the summer in ecuador) published an essay I wrote in his online academic journal!

The journal:
http://www.usfq.edu.ec/liberarte/05/index.html

My article:
http://www.usfq.edu.ec/liberarte/05/puede_explicar_esto.html

Also it is in spanish!

Media Class (Updated)

Picture update!

I snapped some pics of the brand new computer lab they built because i thought it was really cool! I have never gotten personal access of such a nice lot of technology for the classes before! (Note: though they appear to be in deep agony, i promise that none of the students were tortured any more than when we were setting up our class FTP server. After that, they have actually been having quite a bit of fun (even that girl in the front).)

Here is our projector screen which i can virtually draw on with my fingers, or select text. It is even pressure sensitive. Above it was the projector, which at first, i was terrified that the people building the lab had horribly mis-mounted far too close, until i fired it up and a handy little mirror flipped out the bottom. This is great because, with the projector being so close to the screen, i can teach directly in front of the screen without facing the agony of blindness. No more calling on the wrong kid because the retinas stop working!

This is our dear friend Andy, who despite being the math teacher actually has about the best English of anyone working at the school (well before he watched the 9 seasons of south park). Since they felt that trying to teach the kids such technical skills in English would be rather impossible, they sent him in to be my assistant teacher, which is working out great!
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Original post (before picture update)
________________________________

So I had to chat and pull strings with the bureau of education over here, but they let me turn this semester's classes into a new "Media and Communication" program. This means i get their fancy (VERY VERY FANCY) brand new computer room all to myself to teach the kids new ways to communicate and how to get the computer's to help them!

The first half of the year we are going to do an eclectic set of projects featuring various media such as:

Writing
Poetry
Dance
Plays
Slide shows
Short animations
Songs
and (everyone's favorite from last semester)
more comic strips!
(and maybe a type of LOLCAT works with Text image combos)


and then in the second half of the year we are going to combine all of these peices to create some live action/animated shorts in the storytellingstudio style (www.storytellingstudio.org ---does this link work? China is blocking dorkfort)

So if anyone has anymore fun types of artwork they want to see the kids produce suggest it up!

Also i am always in need of fun prompts for stories and poems and plays like "My pet is a superhero"
"What would i do with 10 arms?"
So suggest those also!

EDIT: Double points for suggestions that can incorporate their classroom identity (we have a- Lightning Wolf Super Cowboy Fire Dragon Volcano Ninja)

Hiked up to the Rainy Season

We made it up Wutong Mountain again! This time, though, the view wasn't quite as exquisite.

Yes this marks the point where we have to pay for all of the times we made fun of those who had to deal with "Winter" as we prepare for 2 solid months of rain. Apparently the days when you get damp by just walking around and can only see 10 feet at a time are the "good" days. Our school's field trip to some sort of amusement park/orchard got canceled today on account of all the rain that refused to fall for the past 5 months decided to come down today.

In the words of my dear Chinese friend, Andy, who destroyed his english vocabulary with 9 seasons of south park "Lame."

Blender

Maybe this just goes to show how boring our post-vacation life seems, but I'm really excited that we finally decided to buy a blender. The model is cool enough that I think we'll take it back to America. In addition to the blender, it's got a coffee grinder and a soy milk maker. Also, making soy milk produces a weird mountain of soy junk called okara, which to our delight can be gently coaxed into tasting a lot like hummus or even falafel with the right ingredients.

We're heading back up the mountain today, and I hope to actually go the distance this time, so maybe we'll have some slightly more entertaining stories from that.