Experience

I’ve never really been a listy person. You know what I mean by listy people. At least I hope you do; if you think I’m talking about people who always walk about with their bodies a good few degrees out of the perpendicular then perhaps we should start again.

Semiotics

Semiotics: A Graphic Guide
Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz, 1997
Semiotics: The Basics
Daniel Chandler, 2007
(November 2013)


Well, this all strikes me as being terribly significant.

You Better Not Cry

Japanese lawmaker Taro Yamamoto got himself into a bit of hot water not so long ago, following the most ill-advised letter since the Children’s Television Workshop’s dalliance with Cyrillic in 1983 as part of a well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous attempt to ease Cold War tensions between East and West (“One! One Mother Russia! AHA HA HA HA!”).

Bookmark Two

And so, somewhat improbably, we come to the second annual retrospective of the This Is How She Fight Start Blog About Everything I Read Project, more casually referred to as the TIHSFSBAEIRP, which has a much nicer ring to it I feel. You may, if you wish, view this as nothing more than a contrarily early forerunner of the tide of annual roundup posts heading our way in a month or so.

The Boys Vol. 9 and 10

Vol. 9: The Big Ride, Vol 10: Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker

Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, 2011-12

(November 2013)

This continues to be puerile and slightly guilty fun. In isolation any one of these arcs is everything you’d expect and want it to be, but still. We’re almost at the end of the run here and it’d be nice if things moved forward a bit. Very much marking time until the inevitable final showdown. Get a move on, will you boys?

The Shadowed Sun

N. K. Jemisin, 2012
(November 2013)

The second book in the Dreamblood duology, and I think it might be better than the first.

Conversation Contest 3

Part Three - Execution

This is where we got to last time. The key thing to remember is that we’re trying to place as few constraints on the students as possible. Everything we give them ourselves is something they don’t have to work out for themselves and real communication can't be atomised like that. There is no such thing as ‘context-free’; if it looks like something really doesn’t have context, than you just need to work harder at finding it.

Conversation Contest 2

Part Two - Planning Considerations

So finally we come to the meat of it. Once more, this is tailored to my specific situation; your mileage will definitely vary, and that is as it should be.

Conversation Contest

Wherein I riff gratefully and unashamedly on Chris’ outstanding concept of a Conversation Contest. This is the first iteration. It will not be perfect and there will be flaws, but given the source of the idea going through the process out loud and in public seems like the right thing to do; it might be useful, or at least interesting (or at least amusing), for people to see exactly what kind of considerations can go into a lesson before its actual execution. Putting my money where my mouth is, that kind of thing...

Because money talks etc etc and other cliches.

How The Dead Dream

Lydia Millet, 2008

(November 2013)

  

Obviously metaphorical, and satirical bordering on the polemical. Also quite strange.

  

Very Short Introductions

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction

Catherine Belsey, 2002

Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

Christopher Butler, 2002

(November 2013)

Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, oh my!

Desperate Measures

So I joined twitter. I was going to write a blog post about joining twitter, but then I remembered that I still have some pride. Not much, admittedly, but I’m better than that. So this isn’t about twitter; it’s about choices.