I mean it, i love grammar. Although I will admit, my love for it is only in some areas. honestly, as much as i like grammar, i wouldn't go as far as weaver suggests: introducing participal phrases, etc. i don't care about that NOW. very little point in teaching it.
Again, total honesty - i'm a trained playwright, a trained poet. i learned by being shown how the whole looks and in the case of poetry how meter works. beyond that, boring.
and in terms of the complexity that weaver advocates for being a part of the daily lit lessons: not needed. at all. it's bogging things down by asking students to memorize names for what they know. MAYBE, if they become New Critics, they can learn it.
That all being said, what i do advocate and like about grammar is not something i advocate teaching instead of lit. i love the weaver model of it, just not that complex. the car analogy she listed is actually quite apt: i to this day don't know, care, or understand how a car works beyond combustion. i do know how to drive. a student can know the basics of writing without knowing the literary version of a transmission, methinks.
Revision and drafts - i think the only thing I disagree with is the implicit statement about what these authors have used for "revision" and drafts in the past. i've never had this problem with just looking at grammar. i think the difference is i don't ask for revision from a draft as a whole. i make them work in pieces and workshop them. i don't care about spelling/grammar, and i judge content. i feel like it's a big problem to do peer revision ALONE, and it's also an issue to work with entire drafts. too often they don't really listen when they think of it as a big cumbersome paper, and when looking at each other's they're just going to look at the spelling/grammar unless they're asked to look at specific questions.
but that's just me.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
week three reading post for 2/3
I'll be honest: while I definitely got some practical points out of the Dornan reading for this week, the Romano reading just felt monotonous. Yes yes I get it: you like multi-genre papers. All I saw from you here was a ton of small "zomg I love it so much!" Not worthless, not by a long shot. But at the moment..not so applicable.
HOWEVER, The Dornan stuff I've found immediate value in has been a very solid breakdown on different ways to approach different papers. This goes even further in the wiki readings this week. I have a huge background in argument and debate, as well as a love for the practical application of the five-paragraph essay. So I responded pretty well to it...
Kimberely Wesley seems to lack any sense of transitive use. At one point she states something like, "the form is restrictive because it doesn't allow possibly good ideas a student comes up with to come to fruition." There was a tired seed metaphor in there too. Anyway...sure, I can see that if she forces them to put large subjects into a small essay. I think of it like this - the five paragraph essay is just a generalized template. It's the "medium-sized" version of the form. A few years ago, I volunteered in a sixth-grade classroom as they were learning the structure of essay-writing. They started with the "perfect paragraph", which is also known as the paragraph sandwich graphic organizer. We spent a few weeks learning the form of the intro/body/conclusion in a single paragraph, and then we moved onto a full page. A five-paragraph essay using the same basic style. The idea wasn't that it was the end: it's not. they were told this, we know this. But it's a good start to a good form of a thesis, a few points you prove, and a conclusion. Wesley seems to really lack this understanding, and it's unfortunate that she's so willing to toss a good and perfectly valid format just because she doesn't understand that it's not an end to a process. Novick's very introduction is perfect in that regard: it's a severe lack of imagination, and possibly an incredibly reactionary view of "it's been used in the past, and therefore invalid." This causation fallacy is frustrating, to say the least.
Argument ties into this. I view all essays as inherently argumentative. In academic writing, it's largely rhetoric in nature. As unfortunate as I feel it is that people like Wesley abandon a GOOD introduction to logical thought in writing via the five-paragraph essay, I feel incredibly fortunate that someone like Randi Dickson is able to identify the over-arching concept. The form of the five-paragraph essay is good because it's manageable to kids who haven't written an essay before. Optimally, by the time they're in the 9th-10th grade, they're also doing larger essays, but the five-paragraph essay keeps the general form in motion for them. It's not just an exercise: it's an application of understanding the structure of the rhetorical argument, and it's a solid (and, again, MANAGEABLE for them) method to apply their instinctual verbal abilities into a written form. Right now, I'm beginning work on a unit for writing a research paper for the honor's college writing class. My method to getting there? Impress on them the importance of verifying source, the proper use of collected-research, and giving them a solid understanding of logical argumentative processes. This is the backbone to the writing we expect of them. As-is, I have several tentative moments where they will be writing five-paragraph essays. The idea is not for them to be purely summative assessments, but for them to be applications of learned concepts that they can bring into their larger (7-8 pages) research papers.
They need to understand how to avoid fallacy. They need to learn persuasive argument in a written form. While I'm all for something like Romano's multi-genre project, it's not something to replace a five-paragraph essay. Those who criticize the form, I've noticed so far, simply aren't understanding what it is. And by that measure: the teachers who are teaching the five-paragraph essay as a simple exercise with no further application are showing a similar lack of thought.
My links for the week:
how to win an argument
An overview of the academic essay
These are a little more wordy than my previously-linked sites. They're not really something I'd generally just throw on a student, although they're certainly something they can look at once they're on firmer ground. But they are something to keep in mind. The "essay" is a nebulous form held together by basic principles. Those basic principles are not just present in an academic setting.
HOWEVER, The Dornan stuff I've found immediate value in has been a very solid breakdown on different ways to approach different papers. This goes even further in the wiki readings this week. I have a huge background in argument and debate, as well as a love for the practical application of the five-paragraph essay. So I responded pretty well to it...
Kimberely Wesley seems to lack any sense of transitive use. At one point she states something like, "the form is restrictive because it doesn't allow possibly good ideas a student comes up with to come to fruition." There was a tired seed metaphor in there too. Anyway...sure, I can see that if she forces them to put large subjects into a small essay. I think of it like this - the five paragraph essay is just a generalized template. It's the "medium-sized" version of the form. A few years ago, I volunteered in a sixth-grade classroom as they were learning the structure of essay-writing. They started with the "perfect paragraph", which is also known as the paragraph sandwich graphic organizer. We spent a few weeks learning the form of the intro/body/conclusion in a single paragraph, and then we moved onto a full page. A five-paragraph essay using the same basic style. The idea wasn't that it was the end: it's not. they were told this, we know this. But it's a good start to a good form of a thesis, a few points you prove, and a conclusion. Wesley seems to really lack this understanding, and it's unfortunate that she's so willing to toss a good and perfectly valid format just because she doesn't understand that it's not an end to a process. Novick's very introduction is perfect in that regard: it's a severe lack of imagination, and possibly an incredibly reactionary view of "it's been used in the past, and therefore invalid." This causation fallacy is frustrating, to say the least.
Argument ties into this. I view all essays as inherently argumentative. In academic writing, it's largely rhetoric in nature. As unfortunate as I feel it is that people like Wesley abandon a GOOD introduction to logical thought in writing via the five-paragraph essay, I feel incredibly fortunate that someone like Randi Dickson is able to identify the over-arching concept. The form of the five-paragraph essay is good because it's manageable to kids who haven't written an essay before. Optimally, by the time they're in the 9th-10th grade, they're also doing larger essays, but the five-paragraph essay keeps the general form in motion for them. It's not just an exercise: it's an application of understanding the structure of the rhetorical argument, and it's a solid (and, again, MANAGEABLE for them) method to apply their instinctual verbal abilities into a written form. Right now, I'm beginning work on a unit for writing a research paper for the honor's college writing class. My method to getting there? Impress on them the importance of verifying source, the proper use of collected-research, and giving them a solid understanding of logical argumentative processes. This is the backbone to the writing we expect of them. As-is, I have several tentative moments where they will be writing five-paragraph essays. The idea is not for them to be purely summative assessments, but for them to be applications of learned concepts that they can bring into their larger (7-8 pages) research papers.
They need to understand how to avoid fallacy. They need to learn persuasive argument in a written form. While I'm all for something like Romano's multi-genre project, it's not something to replace a five-paragraph essay. Those who criticize the form, I've noticed so far, simply aren't understanding what it is. And by that measure: the teachers who are teaching the five-paragraph essay as a simple exercise with no further application are showing a similar lack of thought.
My links for the week:
how to win an argument
An overview of the academic essay
These are a little more wordy than my previously-linked sites. They're not really something I'd generally just throw on a student, although they're certainly something they can look at once they're on firmer ground. But they are something to keep in mind. The "essay" is a nebulous form held together by basic principles. Those basic principles are not just present in an academic setting.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
post for 01/27/11
For this reflection, I'm focusing primarily on Atwell's chapter on writing workshops.
There are so many "what-if's" here, it's hard to claim viability. Ideologically I agree with much of what is here, although it's difficult to agree with the statement, "anyone can write", at least creatively. It's a nice sentiment, but after several years of teaching it, and a lifetime of working on it, I'm fairly confident that teaching *good* creative writing is an impossibility...at least in the age groups I've worked with. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if you could take a group of four-year-olds and work with them regularly for a decade, fostering an entire generation of good novelists/poets/playwrights. Academic writing is another matter: you can teach a template and give room for students to experiment and learn from it.
But you can give a group of students room and time, as well as a few skills, to foster any abilities in creative writing. That's where this chapter comes in. After a bit of hunting around I found a few resources that can provide specifics on how to create space and provide direction for it. They're linked at the bottom.
But there is so much "what if" in this article. Atwell seems to be describing a magical classroom space unlike most of what i've been in. There's room in the center for the desks, room in one corner for privacy in writing. Room along walls for "conference areas" that are isolated enough that the conversation doesn't bleed across the rest of the classroom. The ideals are noble, but where's the space? I'd love to see the space. Otherwise, we're looking at something more along the lines of several classrooms...which isn't an impossibility. At the High School I'm at right now, students are more or less free to go where they please, even during class hours, so long as they don't cause problems. An environment like that would allow students to move between classrooms as needed, but would destroy some of Atwell's advocation for moving amongst students and asking questions/checking in.
Again, I love the ideal; her advocation of 3 hours per week of dedicated writing workshop is not only great, but also conservative. I'd argue for more hours, especially if the class isn't her year-long layout but instead a semester. But where does that time come in? Does "English writing workshop" become an elective class, or in the high school are we going to be trying to claim this to be a substitute for language arts/english literature instruction? As lofty as it is to spend a year doing this, I have a hard time believing not only that the administration will buy it that this is a good substitute for that instruction, but also that a teacher can pull off that substitution successfully.
I do buy it (on a practical level) as an addition. Another class going on with in addition to norm curriculum that is a writing workshop. Or a unit within a broader year (even though that may very well castrate the long-term abilities of the very ethos at play in this) could be workable.
And what is being taught? Pure creative writing? That may very well frustrate some students over an entire year, unless you're playing it purely hands-off and never offering any critical statements to their work. If you're not, and you do allow other students who read peer work to state critically what works and what doesn't, you're left with a few students who know very well by January (at the latest) that they're not very good at creative writing. They get to sit there, frustrated, while a few students who are good at it get to reap benefits.
Or they become the Dan Browns of the future, and society as a whole will hate us. The world is filled with bad writers who just aren't told they're bad writers. I'm not advocating merciless cutting...more of a Christensen model of criticism.
But we're still left with groups of kids who aren't very good at it, stuck in the class.
Is it academic writing? That's far more teachable. But can you justify spending an entire year on it? I'll be honest: I have very little DIRECT experience in writing workshops/labs, but I do know a few people who built, in the last five years, some of the more acclaimed/successful workshops. They do not operate on a daily basis all year. They exist as a supplement for students (college students at Missouri State) to come in as needed. Yes, kids are different than adults. Kids are more honest in saying, "this is boring" than adults are.
In the end, the article strikes me as a lot of noble rhetoric, but you can't really use it as it's stated it needs to be used...not blanket across an entire grade or school. Pieces of it are definitely workable, and my supplemental resources for the week illustrate ideas on how to use those pieces in part of a larger unit woven throughout a more traditional language arts year.
Resources for the week:
Writing Fix Writer's workshop
OWL 7-12 writing workshops
There are so many "what-if's" here, it's hard to claim viability. Ideologically I agree with much of what is here, although it's difficult to agree with the statement, "anyone can write", at least creatively. It's a nice sentiment, but after several years of teaching it, and a lifetime of working on it, I'm fairly confident that teaching *good* creative writing is an impossibility...at least in the age groups I've worked with. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if you could take a group of four-year-olds and work with them regularly for a decade, fostering an entire generation of good novelists/poets/playwrights. Academic writing is another matter: you can teach a template and give room for students to experiment and learn from it.
But you can give a group of students room and time, as well as a few skills, to foster any abilities in creative writing. That's where this chapter comes in. After a bit of hunting around I found a few resources that can provide specifics on how to create space and provide direction for it. They're linked at the bottom.
But there is so much "what if" in this article. Atwell seems to be describing a magical classroom space unlike most of what i've been in. There's room in the center for the desks, room in one corner for privacy in writing. Room along walls for "conference areas" that are isolated enough that the conversation doesn't bleed across the rest of the classroom. The ideals are noble, but where's the space? I'd love to see the space. Otherwise, we're looking at something more along the lines of several classrooms...which isn't an impossibility. At the High School I'm at right now, students are more or less free to go where they please, even during class hours, so long as they don't cause problems. An environment like that would allow students to move between classrooms as needed, but would destroy some of Atwell's advocation for moving amongst students and asking questions/checking in.
Again, I love the ideal; her advocation of 3 hours per week of dedicated writing workshop is not only great, but also conservative. I'd argue for more hours, especially if the class isn't her year-long layout but instead a semester. But where does that time come in? Does "English writing workshop" become an elective class, or in the high school are we going to be trying to claim this to be a substitute for language arts/english literature instruction? As lofty as it is to spend a year doing this, I have a hard time believing not only that the administration will buy it that this is a good substitute for that instruction, but also that a teacher can pull off that substitution successfully.
I do buy it (on a practical level) as an addition. Another class going on with in addition to norm curriculum that is a writing workshop. Or a unit within a broader year (even though that may very well castrate the long-term abilities of the very ethos at play in this) could be workable.
And what is being taught? Pure creative writing? That may very well frustrate some students over an entire year, unless you're playing it purely hands-off and never offering any critical statements to their work. If you're not, and you do allow other students who read peer work to state critically what works and what doesn't, you're left with a few students who know very well by January (at the latest) that they're not very good at creative writing. They get to sit there, frustrated, while a few students who are good at it get to reap benefits.
Or they become the Dan Browns of the future, and society as a whole will hate us. The world is filled with bad writers who just aren't told they're bad writers. I'm not advocating merciless cutting...more of a Christensen model of criticism.
But we're still left with groups of kids who aren't very good at it, stuck in the class.
Is it academic writing? That's far more teachable. But can you justify spending an entire year on it? I'll be honest: I have very little DIRECT experience in writing workshops/labs, but I do know a few people who built, in the last five years, some of the more acclaimed/successful workshops. They do not operate on a daily basis all year. They exist as a supplement for students (college students at Missouri State) to come in as needed. Yes, kids are different than adults. Kids are more honest in saying, "this is boring" than adults are.
In the end, the article strikes me as a lot of noble rhetoric, but you can't really use it as it's stated it needs to be used...not blanket across an entire grade or school. Pieces of it are definitely workable, and my supplemental resources for the week illustrate ideas on how to use those pieces in part of a larger unit woven throughout a more traditional language arts year.
Resources for the week:
Writing Fix Writer's workshop
OWL 7-12 writing workshops
Thursday, December 9, 2010
how would I INCORPORATE IT!?
I don't want to be overly glib about it, so I will...and then clarify.
The short answer: literature/writing doesn't exist for me without using film/tv/internet as a major part of it. So I'd use it all, and it would be daily.
It's just a huge part of who I am. Many of my cohort comes at all of this from a literature perspective, and I certainly am not naive to literature. I've seriously studied the super-idea of "literature" since about 12 years old, and I know play-writing/screen-writing and poetry incredibly well, but not to the detriment of prose. However, my first experiences with the artistic experience is through film. Without equating what I read to what I've seen, I have serious problems generating interest in myself. So my lessons by their definition default to webpages that might equate, films that better show the themes, etc. It all works as allegory for our own experiences, but film simply speaks to me in its own "better" way. As a result, when I come up with lessons, I default to what movies or tv I could use with it, or what websites would help make the understanding easier for students. Even something like Shakespeare, Shelley, Donne, or Eliot, all of whom I've loved since I was a kid...I always look at the text as one part of a much larger picture. The unsung hero to all of this is games, which I also view as a huge part of educational understanding.
So there's my strength. My default is to incorporate this all together in a lesson, and without a computer and dvd-player to help me along, I'd have some huge adaptations within myself to make. That's my weakness. My weakness isn't in incorporating all of this. It's in finding myself in situations where I can't.
My DREAM class (one of two) is teaching a year-long class on screenwriting/shooting/editing.
The second dream class is debate, but there's another story.
My default, FYI, is the honor's/AP route. Hopefully my education/background helps me there.
so that prime dream class of teaching video production and screenwriting can't exist without my defaults, and it certainly can't exist without specific modeling/scaffolding using a hundred different programs. I really enjoyed our imovie assignment, specifically the part about using photos to do it. I'd love to make that an early component: giving students cameras and telling them to shoot pictures. still photos. make a short montage of it. Something like flickr and imovie combined would also work really well: asking them to pull available images and tell a story with them isn't too far off from early directing projects i've done in early directing classes. by the same token, digital comic books would be a good primer for storyboarding.
The short answer: literature/writing doesn't exist for me without using film/tv/internet as a major part of it. So I'd use it all, and it would be daily.
It's just a huge part of who I am. Many of my cohort comes at all of this from a literature perspective, and I certainly am not naive to literature. I've seriously studied the super-idea of "literature" since about 12 years old, and I know play-writing/screen-writing and poetry incredibly well, but not to the detriment of prose. However, my first experiences with the artistic experience is through film. Without equating what I read to what I've seen, I have serious problems generating interest in myself. So my lessons by their definition default to webpages that might equate, films that better show the themes, etc. It all works as allegory for our own experiences, but film simply speaks to me in its own "better" way. As a result, when I come up with lessons, I default to what movies or tv I could use with it, or what websites would help make the understanding easier for students. Even something like Shakespeare, Shelley, Donne, or Eliot, all of whom I've loved since I was a kid...I always look at the text as one part of a much larger picture. The unsung hero to all of this is games, which I also view as a huge part of educational understanding.
So there's my strength. My default is to incorporate this all together in a lesson, and without a computer and dvd-player to help me along, I'd have some huge adaptations within myself to make. That's my weakness. My weakness isn't in incorporating all of this. It's in finding myself in situations where I can't.
My DREAM class (one of two) is teaching a year-long class on screenwriting/shooting/editing.
The second dream class is debate, but there's another story.
My default, FYI, is the honor's/AP route. Hopefully my education/background helps me there.
so that prime dream class of teaching video production and screenwriting can't exist without my defaults, and it certainly can't exist without specific modeling/scaffolding using a hundred different programs. I really enjoyed our imovie assignment, specifically the part about using photos to do it. I'd love to make that an early component: giving students cameras and telling them to shoot pictures. still photos. make a short montage of it. Something like flickr and imovie combined would also work really well: asking them to pull available images and tell a story with them isn't too far off from early directing projects i've done in early directing classes. by the same token, digital comic books would be a good primer for storyboarding.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
videos!
I apparently sound REALLY geeky when I say it, but the below video is something I imagine hearing at a werewolf bonfire.
This first video is a Finntroll song, "Trollhammeren". Any metal from this region not about burning a church will be about a celebration of some kind...you just have to remember that we celebrate with more violence than you'd think. The entire point is celebration, and every shot furthers the speed of the song - count, if you dare, the amount of times someone pulls from a skin or a stein as he dances. I DARE you. There's very little linear progression to the video, it's more about expanding on the feeling of the song, and the song itself is fairly typical of finntroll in that it extols successful celebration. If it were being used to sell the music, I'd say it would do a great job among audiences not familiar with metal: rather than subject us to the norm of seeing closeups of everyone playing and make the video entirely about them playing the song, it constructs an optimal venue, and it does so in an aggressive, but non-violent way. To the metal-virgin, it says essentially that they're just about having some fun. The sound is primal (especially the use of drums throughout the song to create the bones of the song) and it's about addressing the primitive part of ourself.
This next video is a little different.
This is an older video, it's from Morbid Angel, the album is "Domination". They're a much more "typical" metal band in that they focus entirely on death metal and their goal is to scare the hell out of you. The video's pretty old, it was the official video for the song way back when Mtv used to play music. It focuses on everything the Finntroll video doesn't: it highlights the band, from the intro shot of the drummer's foot to the guitarist solo at the end. It is made solely to sell a very dark (but cool-sounding) product.
Contrast all of that to this:
This is "The Serpentine Offering" from the Dimmu Borgir album "In Sorte Diaboli". Great album. Fairly horrid videos when you look at the bluescreen work they do. They do a sort of amalgam of the two styles shown above. They present a narrative framework for their song: that of a feudal village inundated with primitive christianity, until they're brought to task by their old "gods". This is a common thematic motif in metal, that of the old gods we've forgotten still being relevant, and still watching us. The band also throws themselves into the video as musicians, with occasionally-hilarious results. You can see this even more clearly in the video "The Sacrilegious Scorn", which I will not post here, but highly suggest you look for it - in the video the band is on a bad blue screen of a storm front where they roll dice on an old frying pan and threaten each other. The goal here is a little more simple: they're doing wish-fulfillment, placing themselves in an environment they want to actually live in. The music on the posted video has the repeated lyric, "My descent is the story of every man, I am hatred, darkness, and despair." They insert that song into the imagery of the old scandinavian christian village in order to illustrate exactly what they're talking about...
This first video is a Finntroll song, "Trollhammeren". Any metal from this region not about burning a church will be about a celebration of some kind...you just have to remember that we celebrate with more violence than you'd think. The entire point is celebration, and every shot furthers the speed of the song - count, if you dare, the amount of times someone pulls from a skin or a stein as he dances. I DARE you. There's very little linear progression to the video, it's more about expanding on the feeling of the song, and the song itself is fairly typical of finntroll in that it extols successful celebration. If it were being used to sell the music, I'd say it would do a great job among audiences not familiar with metal: rather than subject us to the norm of seeing closeups of everyone playing and make the video entirely about them playing the song, it constructs an optimal venue, and it does so in an aggressive, but non-violent way. To the metal-virgin, it says essentially that they're just about having some fun. The sound is primal (especially the use of drums throughout the song to create the bones of the song) and it's about addressing the primitive part of ourself.
This next video is a little different.
This is an older video, it's from Morbid Angel, the album is "Domination". They're a much more "typical" metal band in that they focus entirely on death metal and their goal is to scare the hell out of you. The video's pretty old, it was the official video for the song way back when Mtv used to play music. It focuses on everything the Finntroll video doesn't: it highlights the band, from the intro shot of the drummer's foot to the guitarist solo at the end. It is made solely to sell a very dark (but cool-sounding) product.
Contrast all of that to this:
This is "The Serpentine Offering" from the Dimmu Borgir album "In Sorte Diaboli". Great album. Fairly horrid videos when you look at the bluescreen work they do. They do a sort of amalgam of the two styles shown above. They present a narrative framework for their song: that of a feudal village inundated with primitive christianity, until they're brought to task by their old "gods". This is a common thematic motif in metal, that of the old gods we've forgotten still being relevant, and still watching us. The band also throws themselves into the video as musicians, with occasionally-hilarious results. You can see this even more clearly in the video "The Sacrilegious Scorn", which I will not post here, but highly suggest you look for it - in the video the band is on a bad blue screen of a storm front where they roll dice on an old frying pan and threaten each other. The goal here is a little more simple: they're doing wish-fulfillment, placing themselves in an environment they want to actually live in. The music on the posted video has the repeated lyric, "My descent is the story of every man, I am hatred, darkness, and despair." They insert that song into the imagery of the old scandinavian christian village in order to illustrate exactly what they're talking about...
sharing of music
What I listen to most: a lot of metal lately. It's really hard though, after the age of 15 or so, to try and define yourself based on music, and I say I "metal" simply because it's the one I play most often lately. I switched over from cd's maybe six years ago, and when I put it all on an external drive the count was something like 120 gigs of music, that number's now at over 200. I listen to most of it fairly regularly, and it follows the basic trends of blues, jazz, polka, classic rock, instrumental, and metal. There's just...a little bit more metal than the rest. My primary reason for listening is simple in that it's loud, violent, and shows an incredible amount of artistry/musicianship that a lot of other genres tend to lack. Almost all of the metal I listen to is scandinavian black/death/doom/progressive metal, and the latter especially (progressive) is more experimental than anything, portraying very few of the stereotypical metal-tendencies. They'll incorporate any number of instruments to a song, so long as it sounds right in the end.
Concerts - almost entirely metal. I get bored otherwise. I've only been to one non-metal concert in the last six years, and it was an acoustic by a metal band. I just really hate having to sit still and just listen to some song, and metal doesn't really do seating. There's just a large pit in the center, and everyone roams freely.
It's the anger, aggression, and cynicism that really turns me on. The entire point to black and death metal is that everything is not all right, the symbols of our society are boned, and it's appropriate to fight against it. 60's folk metal has nothing on the guy who burned a church down because he decided that christianity is the greatest evil to befall norway EVER. Yeah...he's in jail. I don't really condone the violence obviously, in terms of physical action, but I appreciate the ethos. ESPECIALLY since it's often driven by that scandinavian paganism (note that's lower-cased, pagans are not organized. idiot wiccans) that appeals to my childhood misconceptions where the myths were real...that's a whole 'nother story.
The song I'll be bringing in for this: what I'll show in class largely depends on the mood. I don't really have a singular favorite, and I don't really have a singular favorite genre. So I'll play whatever seems fitting at the time, and this also depends on whether or not I can play NSFW songs. Options:
Vintersorg
Morbid Angel
Diabolical Masquerade
Opeth
Tom Waits
Mac Wiseman
Finntroll
Sepultura
How I would teach this in the classroom: first, I don't know if I could. IF I did, it would be either from a historical perspective using tribalism as a moniker, and use something like Sepultura or Finntroll for that, or else I would do it from the perspective of creative soundtracks to personal movies, using Vintersorg as an example of symphony.
It's all very primal, and a lot of it depends on a more tribal structure. They often rebel against large governments with any kind of malicious power over them. It's sort of like the Norse version of rap in terms of what it accomplishes. And just like rap, there's a lot of commercialist crap on the market. So I could also use this in the classroom as a sort of media literacy/awareness unit and ask students to dissect different examples in order to determine why it's made. Is the music made only to be sold (a very american thing generally) or is it made for its own sake or some greater artistic purpose? What does it say when entertainment is packaged solely for consumption?
Historical context of the genre...or at least the sub-genres I listen to: oftentimes they're started in a ludditical fashion. Swedish/Norwegian/Germans who have no interest in the prevailing ethos of the modern world, and work towards a fusion between what came before and what ought to be. Oftentimes this boils down to paganism/religious freedom and a fully democratic-socialist government. I recently learned there is an actual group of knuckleheads who claim to do christian metal. That...doesn't really work. It flies in the face of everything.
In contrast to genres of metal such as american thrash, black/death metal tends to look for old sounds and infuse them into modern. Example: Finntroll is a metal band, it's also a polka band. More specfically, it's humpaa metal, using the darker and faster scandinavian version of polka as a basis for its sound.
Diabolical Masquerade or Dimmu Borgir tend to go in a different direction, using full orchestras as a spine for their songs.
Their videos...
let's just say they're not the norm. They are very esoteric, oftentimes constructing a visual narrative out of the song's narrative. If you've ever seen the show metalocalypse, you've seen a pretty good parody of this in the first season (i believe it's the second episode), where they show almost the entirety of a song called "thunderhorse" before their lead singer pulls the plug on it. The video in the episode shot for using all of the stereotypes in a bad metal video: apocalyptic, feudal system, main character as a mighty old-school warrior who beheads everyone in his way, etc. They're rarely made to be sold, often only up on the band/artist's website as an extra for fans.
Concerts - almost entirely metal. I get bored otherwise. I've only been to one non-metal concert in the last six years, and it was an acoustic by a metal band. I just really hate having to sit still and just listen to some song, and metal doesn't really do seating. There's just a large pit in the center, and everyone roams freely.
It's the anger, aggression, and cynicism that really turns me on. The entire point to black and death metal is that everything is not all right, the symbols of our society are boned, and it's appropriate to fight against it. 60's folk metal has nothing on the guy who burned a church down because he decided that christianity is the greatest evil to befall norway EVER. Yeah...he's in jail. I don't really condone the violence obviously, in terms of physical action, but I appreciate the ethos. ESPECIALLY since it's often driven by that scandinavian paganism (note that's lower-cased, pagans are not organized. idiot wiccans) that appeals to my childhood misconceptions where the myths were real...that's a whole 'nother story.
The song I'll be bringing in for this: what I'll show in class largely depends on the mood. I don't really have a singular favorite, and I don't really have a singular favorite genre. So I'll play whatever seems fitting at the time, and this also depends on whether or not I can play NSFW songs. Options:
Vintersorg
Morbid Angel
Diabolical Masquerade
Opeth
Tom Waits
Mac Wiseman
Finntroll
Sepultura
How I would teach this in the classroom: first, I don't know if I could. IF I did, it would be either from a historical perspective using tribalism as a moniker, and use something like Sepultura or Finntroll for that, or else I would do it from the perspective of creative soundtracks to personal movies, using Vintersorg as an example of symphony.
It's all very primal, and a lot of it depends on a more tribal structure. They often rebel against large governments with any kind of malicious power over them. It's sort of like the Norse version of rap in terms of what it accomplishes. And just like rap, there's a lot of commercialist crap on the market. So I could also use this in the classroom as a sort of media literacy/awareness unit and ask students to dissect different examples in order to determine why it's made. Is the music made only to be sold (a very american thing generally) or is it made for its own sake or some greater artistic purpose? What does it say when entertainment is packaged solely for consumption?
Historical context of the genre...or at least the sub-genres I listen to: oftentimes they're started in a ludditical fashion. Swedish/Norwegian/Germans who have no interest in the prevailing ethos of the modern world, and work towards a fusion between what came before and what ought to be. Oftentimes this boils down to paganism/religious freedom and a fully democratic-socialist government. I recently learned there is an actual group of knuckleheads who claim to do christian metal. That...doesn't really work. It flies in the face of everything.
In contrast to genres of metal such as american thrash, black/death metal tends to look for old sounds and infuse them into modern. Example: Finntroll is a metal band, it's also a polka band. More specfically, it's humpaa metal, using the darker and faster scandinavian version of polka as a basis for its sound.
Diabolical Masquerade or Dimmu Borgir tend to go in a different direction, using full orchestras as a spine for their songs.
Their videos...
let's just say they're not the norm. They are very esoteric, oftentimes constructing a visual narrative out of the song's narrative. If you've ever seen the show metalocalypse, you've seen a pretty good parody of this in the first season (i believe it's the second episode), where they show almost the entirety of a song called "thunderhorse" before their lead singer pulls the plug on it. The video in the episode shot for using all of the stereotypes in a bad metal video: apocalyptic, feudal system, main character as a mighty old-school warrior who beheads everyone in his way, etc. They're rarely made to be sold, often only up on the band/artist's website as an extra for fans.
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