Are you that special "one in three hundred"?

Never thought much about it before, but so many of my exceptionally talented colleagues are goal-orientated, intolerant of policies and practices that are illogical and counter-productive, have an exceptional eye for detail, are highly intelligent, often viewed by workmates as "a bit odd" (and sometimes downright weird), achieve "the impossible"; creative, original thinkers ... is there a common factor?



Just something to think about. You know how to find more information.

The Great Picture Book Lesson ...

... is on tomorrow with Year 7. The MS PowerPoint is ready to go, as is the trolley ("cart" to many) full of exemplar tomes. I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself, after working out a great segue from "types" of visual texts to the visual elements of the same.

I'd intended to speak briefly about the history of Beowulf; show a scan of one page of very dense text from a verrrry old edition; view a short - as in nine seconds - clip from the movie where the dragon comes over the parapet, then sprint into the graphic novel cover and talk about the use of colour, line, etc in depicting the dragon. Sounds all pretty engaging, huh?

The first nine seconds of this clip was going to be the introduction to the "artistic elements":



But the movie has a M rating; the policy being that M-rated multimedia cannot be used with under 15 years of age. So instead, the kiddies will get 9 seconds of Jurassic Park with the T-Rex shredding real live "familiar" stuff in a contemporary setting. But it's OK, Jurassic Park is rated PG.

So there you go! Sigh.

Human Rights and Civil Liberties

There's been a few television shows on introducing some 'kultchya' into the lives of what may be most kindly described as "rough girls". Our grandmothers' generation may have called them "trollops", but they weren't talking about Anthony.

Indeed, a number of charitable institutions have adopted this same cause. Even in some of our educational institutions, there are significant attempts (OK, a few half-hearted policy documents and a bit of lip service for the sake of PR) to be proactive in this area.

But I say we should let zygones be zygones.

________________________

Speaking of which, the Response to the Allegations has been submitted. A response to the Response has not yet been forthcoming. As usual, it will probably be necessary to respond to the Response to the Response, particularly as I wasn't really satisfied with the way I addressed one of the issues.

In my own defense though, I'm completely at a loss to understand how to respond to the charge that I neglected to ask myself permission to use my own work. Maybe there's a pro-forma somewhere that I didn't complete - and submit to myself. To follow the usual protocols, I guess I'm going to have to discipline myself, but you know what? I'm not that much into the whole SM thing ...


Divider graphic used with permission of Steve R. Morris of U.Florida