My favorite observation from this week was regarding Edgar (Poor Tom) and King Lear in the forest. I've really enjoyed the actor's portrayal of Edgar, as he's multi layered and very entertaining. The observation that we made during class was that both Edgar and King Lear were crazy, with Poor Tom being crazier, yet Poor Tom wasn't actually crazy and King Lear was on his way to it. While seeing Poor Tom, we saw foreshadowing of what King Lear could become. As we saw King Lear take Poor Tom underneath his wing, it reminded me of a young child caring for a baby doll. Shakespeare shows the various levels of insanity, creating a nice contrast. I'd like to be able to use this technique in my writing, in the future.
Connection: King Lear and Cinderella
As I was sitting in my parent's car, driving home from the hawk's game, I was thinking about what I could connect King Lear to. As I was thinking, Goneril and Reagan came into my mind. There are both pretty distinctive characters, and almost immediately I began to think of the evil step-sisters in Cinderella. While there is not a absolute connection between the four, there are definite parallels to be made. In both Cinderella and King Lear the sisters are pretty mean. They also lie to get what they want, and the other sister gets left out in the dust. Cordelia got taken out of the will, and Cinderella almost didn't get to go to the ball. But in the end, Cinderella did come out on top. Whether it will happen in King Lear, I'm not sure, as it's definitely not a fairy-tale. It's interesting to see how Shakespeare's characters influenced a classic fairy tale that has been told over and over again. In the evil stepsisters and Reagan and Goneril we can kind of see an archetype that has been fairly pervasive through the ages.
Ted Project
To start out with, I'm going to say that the ted project this year turned out way better than the one last year. But it was definitely not perfect. I'm going to start with all the good things I liked about TED, and then the things that didn't turn out so great. To start, I liked the way the google sites worked better than the wikispaces from last year. They were better organized, and easier to understand how they worked. There was also a better amount of collaboration, as with the built in discussion and comments. I also really enjoyed meeting up with everybody else in academy at the end for a discussion. That really gave me a good feeling of community, as it's not often that you'll see all of the academites in one area at every given time.
No I'm going to start talking about some of the stuff that I didn't like. First, the video that I was given was not on my top three list. That took some of the enjoyment out of it, as I wasn't as passionate about the topic I was given as the topics that I chose. I also didn't like how we only had one meeting time built in. I know that is hard to coordinate, but it would have been better if we had more times to meet. I'm still not feeling great about the way that everybody is being graded. I like the rubric for the group grade, but for the individual, I didn't like the tasks and assessment part. I know that I worked on that site a lot more than just what was documented. But how do you create a task when you do multiple little things that take only five minutes each? I feel like it would have worked better if we had maybe a clock in, clock out kind of thing, where you write the times you started working, stopped working, and what you did during that time. I feel like the task's thing was slightly arbitrary. Another thing that I didn't like was how people set out working on the project. Most people didn't start until the week of, when it was like, "O MY GOD!!!! Ted's on thursday!!!". I wish that people would be more responsible, but there's nothing that you can really do about that. Another thing that I didn't like was how our teacher's allocated time for ted. In one of my classes, the teacher would say "Take 30 minutes for ted, etcetera etcetra". But in another all the teacher said was that they cut out some projects, but there was no specific time for TED. One of the areas about this project that I thought could have run smoother was the rooms. The lyceum was perfect for this task, but I was stuck in the emerald city. In that room, the computer along with the internet was slow. It wasn't set up as much for a presentation as for teaching a class. Also, when the computer screen was put on the projector, the screen on the laptop went black, making it very difficult to navigate. I also think that more time would have been better, but that's again logistics.
Overall though, I really enjoyed the project, and though I had a lot of comments, most of them are nitpicky, and I think that this was a good experience over all.