First of all, i probably need to forewarn everybody that i may soon become more of an insufferable a-hole than i already am. The reason? i'm blogging this to you from the linux operating system. My hard drive crashed last week and i may have decided to go all shareware for my os.
Problem is, i'm not sure i know how to do some of the more important programming bits. And then there's Quicktime media player, which i don't think is even available for linux. This is a problem because...well, because some of the things i find so very appealing about computers and the internet use Quicktime.
Anyway, if this linux thing works out, get ready! I figure i'll be preachin' the gospel.
Also: i'm getting ready to go up for a teaching review tomorrow. I was thinking about what i need to do to get ready for that as i prepared my morning bowl of oatmeal and thought of something: There was a point in school when both Alison and I asked our committee professors: "Okay. Just tell me the hoops you want me to jump through, and i'll do it." And both of us recall said professors becoming very irate at this question.
Problem is, Alison says that she now totally understands why they got angry with that question. I don't.
(number of times i used the phrase "problem is" in this post: 2)
10 years ago
4 comments:
try thinking about it this way -- I think they were angry out of an assumption that a hoop is bullshit and useless, when it might just be the case that the hoop is understood as part of a process that can seem opaque to those not in the game. So what you want to ask (or figure out) is what do these people look for in order to evaluate this work. You do the work (teaching) and my guess is that you do it well. So give them the understanding of what your hoop looks like (ok, the metaphor is going to fall aprt here). I find that when I am observed teaching that I spell out why I am doing what I am doing -- not for the benefit of the students who have already clued into this simply by seeing me do it (I never told them the system, they just pick it up)-- But the observer needs clues to what is going on. This is not cheating (my concern) -- it is like giving footnotes or liner notes or the translation in movies (and I have just forgotten what that is called). The hard part (I think)is recognizing that you do have a system and working to articulate that system without feeling like you are just: jumping through some hoop.
Re: Quicktime
I don't know if this will work, but try typing these 2 commands on the command line. I don't know exactly how to get to the command line in Ubuntu, but I'm sure you can figure that out.
sudo apt-get install mplayer
sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer
Has no one picked up on Biffle's subtle reference to "some of the things i find so very appealing about computers and the internet"?
Alison, um...I think some of us just assumed that's what he meant and was being clever. Or does Walter have a new obsession with podcasts of old Sesame Street clips that I don't know about.
Did someone need to say it? :-) (or are you being proud of his subtlety?)
-djl
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