Google me: Can I get a witness?

I was wondering if my other blog showed up when someone might Google me. Under “images,” these are the ones that popped up.

When you Google me--this is what you get.

I’m the one in the middle. NOT my favorite photo by any measure, the smile doesn’t seem as genuine as I like, and I have on the dark corporate blazer thing–no accessories at all. My eyes look beady and criminal. Dull. No wait, I don’t look so very bad with shifty beady eyes–or at least, it could be a lot worse. Interesting grouping, though, don’t you think?

I cannot understand how such an arrangement could happen. But then I watched this talk at Ted.com recommended to me by my friend Trish–the talk is by Eli Pariser: “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles.'”

"Beware Filter Bubbles" from Eli Pariser

You must watch this talk about invisible editing of the web to filter information that is tailored to your search result. Google and Facebook personalization… different people get different things, so the internet believed the people I was linked with are these folks in this particular filter bubble. Kinky.

Good lesson on how we request and share information from or of the interweb/cybersphere and beyond–it’s a question of convenience, perhaps, but whose convenience? Transparency is the thing  we need to help us learn and grow from the experiences of many.

Rhetorical savvy isn’t just about what we are creating on line for our readers, for ourselves, it’s also about what the life of the text (or image) takes on after it leaves us and lands in the hands of strangers. Or how it takes flight. Watch something with rhetorical velocity take off.

Then, duck.

Daffy Duck (free for personal use)

 

War and WAC: When I was a senior in college

For a modern American drama class I had to take my senior year (and this is SO not my area, and I SO did not want to take this class–AT ALL), I created a semester-long course that paired music that was written to support war efforts from WWI and WWII, then took a harsher turn in the 1950s and 1960s to protest war. I based my work on my grandmother singing me songs she grew up with as a teenager during The Great War and what my mother sang to me from WWII when she was a teenager and what I listened to growing up. And I linked in MGM and RKO musicals set in war locales from both the big wars, and I ended up with something about Hair.

Original poster for *Hair*

I set up a series of “reading” assignments based on listening to various songs and and watching various films and reading some plays about war (linking to the drama thing)–and threw in some scholarly essays as well. I also suggested students in my “class” would want to interview people who had been alive at various points to chronicle something personal; oral histories always rock. The culminating project was a lesson students had to “teach” the rest of the class about a particular songwriter or film director and suggest an alternative time/setting for the original work (Anchors Aweigh set in Ancient Greece, or On the Town set in Medieval London–see what I mean?) and why that time/setting was apropos. There was an insane amount of writing and high high high expectations for engagement. (I know you’re not shocked.) It was based on the idea that to learn something, one has to write about it a lot: thinking, conversing, thinking, revising, and so forth.

Poster for *On the Town* (1949 film of the eariler musical)

I am sure now it was utterly brilliant work (I wish) but TOTALLY UNTEACHABLE.

What I haven’t mentioned thus far is this: I was working in the Financial Aid office of the university about 20 hours a week, doing bookkeeping for a grocery store down the street three nights a week, and taking 17 credit hours of all English classes with the world’s nicest and craziest English profs who all believed their classes were the most important and that I had to devote every single moment of free time to my work for them.

I didn’t always juggle very well, but juggle I did. Stressed out, I was. (Channeling Yoda a bit there.) And occasionally, I’d take an all-day lunch.

I’d never really taught before and had no idea what I was doing for this particular project, but I knew this: the class I created was a class I would have taken and loved. I just had fun with it.

And I can see I was leaning towards WAC even then–so much writing and writing across curriculum, too. What a fun class that would have been. I don’t remember a lot of work I did as an undergrad, and certainly not from that semester (because I was six feet under at the end of that term), but I do remember this project, because: 1) I love musicals; 2) I love history; 3) I love oddball off-the-wall things; 4) I love music; 5) I love dancing; 6) I loved my mother and grandmother; 7) I grew up very aware of war and what it can do (I am a Vietnam era child).

I also knew this: the professor for that class hated these things: 1) musicals; 2) historical/biographical/non-Marxist/non-feminist approaches to literature (she was a Marxist/feminist); 3) humor in any form; 4) dancing. Once she even said something very like this: “I abhor musicals–they are an abomination and a taint on the good name of American dramatic theatre.” I could have chosen to do a regular academic paper, but she said we could opt for something else, including creating a class on whatever about 20th century American drama might move us–AHA. She had me at “whatever.” I still remember the look on her face when I said what I wanted to do–it was that look people get when they whiff a cheese that smells like feet. I thought: “well, what’s one bad grade out of 17 credit hours? I can take it.” I even remember recalculating my overall GPA to see what would happen if I got a B, C, or D in that class.

I got an A on the project (and in the class)–probably because it was 30 pages long, and after page 25, the prof just caved in to get out of it with her mind intact. Sometimes you just have to wear down the opponent.

So I did what I loved, had no real idea what I was doing, hit for the fences, and prayed… and it was so much fun. I enjoyed doing it, though I was exhausted afterwards. I kid you not–I was so sick during final exams–fever, chills, hacking, achy. Ah well, I hardly remember that awful part. I totally remember the joy I felt making this War/Musical/Music course-thing happen. Though I’d never teach that class, I learned so much from doing it, and still remember what I did.

I often wonder if what I learned from that work inspired me to want to teach, though I wouldn’t teach for another five years after that. It certainly helped me rethink how I wanted to learn, and certainly, that had to have an impact on how I wanted my students to learn when I finally did start teaching.

“Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell said; and I say, “If you follow your bliss; bliss will follow you.” Sort of like a stalker maybe, but still, bliss is bliss.