Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to the podcast that never learns!
This week: act of pod; rules of the game; pot meets kettle; infantile dysfunction; full mast; Peanuts gallery; strip mining; Adams smasher; role models; specs scripts; hamburger journey; trip advisor; pro-chicken; syrup sucker; future heads; move it on over; teenage depression; mathological creatures; thinks: school stinks; over-focusing; it’s a gift; French fried; use it or lose it; high school variety pack; novel ideas; the good old bad old days; bully beef; friends in low places; sketchy ideas; big leap; panda-ring; zine scene; excremental music; papa’s boy; great expectations; dis covers; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; band of gold; what price honesty; crazy money; Dave loves Thelma; Talk to Me talks to the hand; Ian finds perfection in Perfect Days; and, finally, exit at the Axis.
Question of the Week: What do you think is the best way to learn?
Sub-question of the Week: What summer movie are you looking forward to seeing?
Thanks for listening.
During the show, Dave couldn’t remember the name of a popular aria, the opera it comes from or the composer. Thanks God for laying in bed where he remember it’s the “Flower Duet” from Délibes’ Lakmé. If you’ve never heard it, it’s pretty amazing and well worth a listen (even if you find opera hard to get into).
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I just spoke about the learning process while I was on the recent podcast “Brush with Creativity”. Learning something new, for me at least, yields better results when mentoring one another. I’ve never been that patient with an online class or following a process from a book, I get far more from sitting down with a co-worker or a creative who can either learn something from me or teach me something new. It happens all the time and if you have a team that is willing to grow together, it’s the best way to share knowledge in my opinion. We’ve had several new creatives hired in the last year and since then shared so many different ways of solving design. I’m kind of the old wizard of the group now who has some tricks up his sleeve and the newbies, who are the same ages as my kids (!!!) come in with new and brilliant ways to approach a project or design problem. Luckily everyone who has come aboard recently has checked their ego at the door and we all benefit from one another’s success. I’ve been on the other end of that before and it’s not a great place when one creative bullies the entire team to make him or herself look good, it alienates everyone and nothing works. Thank God those days are behind us.
About bullying…I had a rare experience in high school and escaped my twelve years of public education without being bullied by any other classmates. In my case, the art teacher was the bully and made it difficult for me to pass with anything higher than a “C”, so bad that my father had to intervene along with some other teachers. I won’t elaborate on that right now. I have to admit that even though our student body had cliques, everyone got along perfectly. I don’t remember any fights or wrong doings of any kind. For myself, I realized early on that I was able to add value to myself, be a student that others needed. I was the class artist and I made it known by helping out everyone when they needed school newspaper illustrations, T-Shirts, spirit buttons for the football games or the big paper run-through that had to be created every week for the football team to tear through at the beginning of the game. Everyone knew me for my value as an artist…except my art teacher. The cheerleaders could be a little snotty sometimes but they left me alone because I knew all the big girls on the girls basketball team. I also did all their championship art when they went to state my junior year, so I was in good with all those gals. I look back on it and realize I was very fortunate compared to some of the other stories I’ve heard about school bullying. As good as I had it I realize it can go pretty deep the other way for some folks.
“Deadpool and Wolverine” is the next big stop for me this summer, after that “Borderlands” and M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap” which both open on August 9th. Do you think M. Night Shyamalan has lost his touch? I’m hoping he gets it back with “Trap.” I’ve thought about “Horizon: An American Saga” to from Kevin Costner which just opened, I love a good western. Then being the OZ-Head that I am, “Wicked” comes in much later this November, I’m very excited about that.
As much as I’m enjoying The Acolyte I still have zero understanding why a writer’s preference in a partner has anything to do the show’s story, I’m at a loss about all that. I’ve heard that Headland is a Star Wars fan and that should be enough. You know, back in 2012 the playing field was level and wide open for anyone to write a Star Wars film or show, the odds were in everyone’s favor. There’s no excuse for anyone to complain against those who took advantage of that opportunity to write something. Sadly a segment of the Star Wars audience takes great pleasure in shitting where they eat with enough manufactured hate to ruin it for the rest of us. I just have to look past all that and be grateful that I get Star Wars every week.
Stay cool and enjoy the California getaway Dave! The Peanuts await!
Ian, are you and Pia getting away anyplace this summer?
Safe travels to all my fellow Sneakers as the summer burns onward!!
Hey guys – staying up late on UK election night and thought I’d drop you a line.
I enjoyed your lively discussion of learning processes. I agreed with both of you – Ian’s point about devoting a decent chunk of time to a subject rings true for those topics that require a certain ‘flow state’, and I can easily imagine a school curriculum being divided into meals, rather than bites of subjects. David, your counter argument also rang true – there’s a natural limit on certain intense mental activity – whether you call it attention span or cognitive load – that benefits from a break from focused activity. My most fruitful time as a student was when I was working half my time, studying half my time, since each ‘break’ gave me time to digest what I’d been doing and develop new ideas.
There has been remarkable progress in schools over the past 20 years. One major change is the acknowledgement that bullying exists, and the establishment of methods for preventing and dealing with it. Similarly, of the idea that children have emotions was largely absent from my school days – nowadays kids are highly emotionally literate.
Lately I’ve been wearing several hats in my working life – in one, I help out at a local primary school to do reading support. This introduced me to Phonics as a system for learning English spelling and pronunciation. This concept (relatively recent to the UK) has been an extraordinary leg-up for many kids: Each of the new crop of ‘Early Reader’ books first introduce letters as sounds, then group of letters as phonemes, before joining them together as a glossary: The result of this preamble is a much easier ‘on ramp’ for learners once they hit the actual story, and it’s striking how quickly kids make progress.
To continue Ed’s point about learning from one another – Universities are finally learning from primary schools that kids learn well in clusters! I was lucky enough to work on a wonderful project at NTU in Singapore, designing a university ‘learning hub’, which flips the script – rather than a teacher standing at the front and pushing information into your brain, students sit in small groups working on problems together, with the tutor in the role of facilitator. The building itself is worth a look – itself a cluster of clusters.
Another thing I like in learning is ‘dual coding’ – or using several parallel channels to get information across – whether through use of metaphor, diagram, video, or guided practice. Tomorrow night I’ll be wearing yet another hat as a dance teacher. Looking at someone else’s body and trying to keep track of ‘left’ and ‘right’ can be a challenge, so a little trick I like to use is to wear different coloured shoes. With these physical skills, if we can bypass the language centre we reduce the risk of anything getting garbled in translation.
Woof this turned into a long one! Ian – please take a drink. I’ll wait.
The summer movie I’m looking forward to has to be the least likely comic book adaptation ever: Robert Zemeckis’ take on Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’, which has actually been made – the trailer is out now!
I’ve loved this book and used it time and again in lectures as an exemplar of how comics can examine time and space – in this case, each double page spread looks into a corner of the same room, jumping around in nonlinear fashion over hours, decades, hundreds and billions of years.
The format of the book cleverly places the corner of the room on the centre crease: similarly, the film is designed so that the camera is looking at one wall of the house – a wall in approximately 16:9 cinema ratio. I can’t believe so much money has been spent on an experiment, and can’t wait to see how it turns out. McGuire has had an amazing career – starting out as the bass player of Liquid Liquid, making a fortune from being sampled for ‘White Lines’, and then creating minimalist masterworks in comics and animation.
Alright, back to the fun of Election Night for me. Sneaky Landslide!
Peter.