Results of Ruminations

The way I take notes in my faculty meetings is via Twitter. It's a very 21st century style way of documenting one's thoughts, I admit, and whether or not it has any permanent value is open to debate and research, but despite its trendy way of recording information, I find it useful. One is that I write faster on the computer than I do by hand. Additionally, my coworkers who are on the hashtag can explore ideas quietly with each other while the rest of the conversation shifts to different ideas. Normally, I'd say it'd be better for us to speak aloud so that others can hear what we have to say, but there are two reasons why I prefer it this way: One, they can see it by looking up the hashtag  themselves, thereby learning what we talked about; and two, we have a vociferous faculty. Meetings always go long because we love to talk, share ideas, and enthuse about our common vocation. If I were to say aloud everything I tweet, we'd never be done. Today, we had a large, l...

Today I stepped down from being department head at my school. It's a normal thing; every three or four years, they cycle the leadership, particularly of large departments (like mine, which is the biggest there). I enjoyed the time, and now I get to have a little more free time, since I have fewer responsibilities for me to ignore, and that's always a nice change. I'll miss being "in the know" with some of the big choices in the department and school, but I have a pretty poor batting average on wise decisions for large scale things, so I'm sure that it's the right step. One thing, though, that I always wanted to do for a department meeting but never got around to was to pose this question to my teachers and see, not only what we came up with, but why we made the choices that we did. The thought experiment is easy enough: What would you do if you could build a school? The details: There's essentially no budget (but it needs to be within practical rea...

I have been talking about dinosaurs here for a while . And since  some rumors  about the new Jurassic World franchise have been floating, I thought I'd revisit what I wrote about Jurassic World  and point out where I would go in completely different directions. For starters, I would skip the horrible concept of "weaponizing dinosaurs", despite it being a large theme in the film. After all, Crichton originally imagined Jurassic Park  because he felt only entertainment would front the money needed to refine the tech and allow the cloning to happen. It's a sad commentary on our world, I think, that twenty years later, we figure the only people who want dinosaurs are those who are looking to exploit them for war. Now, chucking off one of the themes is in and itself problematic. After all, it was clearly an important part to the filmmakers' vision of Jurassic World.  But if you think about it, there' s already precedence for dropping inconvenient plot poi...

A friend tapped me for a project that he knew I couldn't refuse: make a cut of Hamlet  for a BYU student production to produce. Actual video footage of my friend, right before talking to me. ( Source ) The catch? This production was going to be James Bond themed. But not as a gimmick; every instance, word, intonation, and gesture that pointed toward spying had to be included in the cut. The focus, then, was that the world of Hamlet was one in which deception and subterfuge reigned, and it was my job to draw that out as much as possible. Thus I gained the unpronounceable title of dramaturge . My job was to not only edit the play (the longest in Shakespeare's canon, at over 4,000 lines, always requires a hefty cut) but to omit the specific parts of the play that didn't remain focused on the spying. After some back and forth--with me trying to make the piece as lean as possible, yet still putting in all that the director wanted--we finally landed on a cut that is curre...

I finished listening to Me Talk Pretty One Day  by David Sedaris. He came recommended--a former student told me some years ago I should make it a point to read his stuff. I knew it was a compilation of essays, and there's a funny story about an interview with Sedaris in the fantastic film Bad Writing  (which I won't share here so that you can watch the movie and find out for yourself), so I kind of knew he was a good writer. The man's great. But I'm kind of unsure what to think about his work in general. I still have Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls  on my reading queue, so I think I'll put him back on, but...I don't know. There's something about his topics that kind of got to me. Here's the weird thing: His writing  is top notch. The "David Sedaris" character is charming, a little naive, and a lot of fun to hear his wry observations and excellent points. And, since I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, it gave an even more...

With commencement behind me, I have a week of training, then the full summer of 2017 sprawling before me. Despite my best efforts, I'm unable to hold down school-year schedule sleeping patterns, but I do want to make the most out of my time off, so I thought I'd jot down some of my ideas for what to do for a daily routine. This is likely overly optimistic, but I figure that if I have something put down, it'll help motivate me. A little. Maybe. Anyway, here's my idea of a typical day this summer, excluding vacations and other responsibilities: 7:45 am Alarm goes off 8:10 am Get out of bed I like to silence my alarm. Sue me. 8:15 am Go for a walk/jog (unlikely)/bike ride 8:45 am Start breakfast all stinky like 8:46 am Tell the boys, likely for the third or fourth time, to put away the iPads and make themselves breakfast 8:50 am Watch an informative YouTube video whilst eating 9:25 am Shower 9:45 am Start the daily essay 10:30 am Gently (read: loudly) tell ...

Why do I feel like I'm dying? The end of any school year is difficult. There are grades to turn in (late), awards to hand out, yearbooks to sign. And, of course, commencement. I enjoy commencement exercises. I sometimes listen to commencement speeches online. I'm not even graduating, I just like the inspirational thoughts that the speaker drops on a very inattentive (or, if you're Mike Pence , non-attending) audience. I've been in school, in one form or another, for approximately twenty-six years. It's my career and my passion, and I learn in order to teach better. So learning from the wisdom of the speakers--gaining motivation and inspiration from them--is a natural part of not only the end of the year, but of how I try to become better. So why do I feel like I'm dying? At our school, we have an annual tradition in which the faculty challenges the students' quidditch team. I coach the team all year long so that we're ready for this finale. (For ...

I may be a lord , but I'm not a master. That is, I don't have my master's (or Master's or Master or master...okay, I'm kidding, this is the rule ) degree. I've been longing for one ever since I graduated (though not the day of...my son had been born two days before I graduated, and I was more worried about him surviving with only half a heart than another degree), but I've never done more than occasionally and idly hoping for the chance to get an advanced degree. The thing is, I don't know why. It's strange, because I'm not interested in being a doctor. After all, why be Doctor Dowdle when I'm already Lord Dowdle? (Though Lord Dowdle, PhD sounds pretty cool.) So it's not as though the advanced degree qua degree is what appeals to me. Then again, maybe if I earned a master's, then I'd want the next step, too. There's also a question of what I would study. My first impulse is to say MFA, since that's kind of the thing th...

I think I'm approaching my mid-life crisis. I'm not likely to want to buy a Corvette or get a divorce so that I can date someone significantly younger than I am, and I certainly hope that I'm not at the actual  mid-point of my life (I'd rather live beyond 68, thank you very much), but I'm feeling a certain level of panic when I think about how much I still have to read and write before I die. Is that weird? While I know it isn't a competition, I feel like I'm losing to...well, most everyone when it comes to knocking down titles. There is so much  to take in: volumes and tomes and treatises and film and music and video games and...and...and... I feel a bit like Veruca Salt when it comes to intellectually ingesting as much as I possibly can. I don't care how: I want it now. This is the only version of the story, aside from the book, that I accept. ( Source ) The direct corollary to this has to be my job. Over the last nine years, I've been le...

I wonder if Nephi did the wrong thing by killing Laban. Okay, so if you're familiar with the story from the Book of Mormon, you can skip to the next part. If you're unfamiliar, here's the quick version, taken from 1 Nephi chapters 3 and 4 : A prophet, Lehi, told his son, Nephi, to go with his brothers and retrieve a genealogy from a man in Jerusalem named Laban. (Lots of proper nouns, I know. Bear with me.) Laban is a bit of a dirt bag and, after Nephi and his brothers try to reason with him, he steals their money and tries to kill them. A little later, Nephi sneaks into Jerusalem at night, and finds Laban, drunk and asleep. And I was led by the Spirit , not knowing beforehand the things which I should do. Nevertheless I went forth, and as I came near unto the house of Laban I beheld a man, and he had fallen to the earth before me, for he was drunken with wine. And when I came to him I found that it was Laban. And I beheld his sword, and I drew it forth from the she...

To whom it may concern, I am, officially, a lord. There is a micronation called Sealand  that's located a handful of miles off the eastern coast of the UK where a small family has declared sovereignty. Though there are some legal quibbles--enough to make it "depends on how you look at it" whether or not it's a real micronation--it manages to keep itself afloat (pun!) on its abandoned WWII-era, water-based fortress by selling off titles of nobility, pieces of land, and even jerseys for their football team.* Yes, I want a jersey of the Principality of Sealand. I'm a lord of Sealand, after all. I ought to support my team. (I don't know if I have the $60 to buy the jersey, though. I'm not a rich lord.) Anyway, being the anglophile that I am, I confessed to one of my classes a while ago (I can't even remember when...probably during the unit on Pride and Prejudice ) that I wanted to be a sir or a lord, and that Sealand was basically my only chance. O...

A friend sent me a copy of this essay by C.S. Lewis, in which the world-renowned novelist and essayist opines about the power of Story and puts his significantly-smarter-than-mine brain to the task of analyzing story qua Story. It's left me a little underwhelmed. I know that part of it is that I don't understand what he's getting at. Not being familiar with Lewis' work (I've read Screwtape Letters  and a Narnia book or two, but that's about as far as I got), I'm also not familiar with his allusive tendency or repetitious manner. I found his particular style somewhat disdainful of that which he didn't like, and some of his conclusions were, at best, underdeveloped.* That being said, he brings up a couple of really good points that reminded me to be a little less judgmental of people's tastes. For example, he mentions the tendency to underestimate another's intellectual ability because of what one chooses to read about. But if I am right i...

A YouTuber named Nerdwriter--whose eclectic video essays span a gamut of fascinating topics, from how to read art to linguistic analyses of songs to deconstructions of film--has a great video about how Batman v. Superman  in particular, but Zack Snyder specifically suffers from eye-catching and memorable scenes, but fails to deliver on genuine moments. I rewatched Man of Steel  tonight, and I think Nerdwriter's points apply to the first foray into Snyder's take on Superman. I still like that movie. I'd never argue that it's well written (some of the dialogue is horrible, and their aversion of the word Superman  throughout almost the whole thing is weird) or not rife with problems, but I still enjoy the film. Part of it stems from my unapologetic joy at "building punching"--sequences where people throw other people through buildings. It can be monsters versus robots (like Pacific Rim , or, as I like to call it, Robot Monster Punch Punch ), or monsters vers...

At the eager age of 21, I married my high school sweetheart. We had known each other since we were 17, she had waited whilst I served a mission in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and was willing and happy and hoping to get married when I returned home. Because I took a two-year hiatus to my education, I was behind her in studies. She graduated a couple of semesters after we wedded, taking a job at a school in the Jordan School District while I rounded out my final year or two of coursework. She had a miscarriage in the summer of 2006, and our first born child came two days before I graduated as part of the class of 2007. Throughout the entirety of our time together as a married couple, we've both worked. In fact, I've never financially supported her. We've worked together to make sure we had enough money, and though I've occasionally earned more than she, it's always been the case that Gayle has provided for the family. Soon after the birth of our first child, I was un...

I'm listening to All the Single Ladies , a tracing of feminism in America. I'm only a couple hours into it, so I'm not really reviewing the book, but listening to some of the struggles that women have had to deal with in the United States reminded me of another book about important steps in the feminism movement: Wonder Woman. The book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman , is an interesting read that's focused more on the bizarre, somewhat eccentric life of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator. With the new movie (please be good, please be good) on the horizon, now's a great time to get into what was happening in the background, before the comic became one of the mainstays of the DC brand. The book, however, treats the personal, familial dynamics more thoroughly than as an analysis of the character, which is fine (though I was hoping for more of the latter when I read it), so there were a lot of different pieces that were unexpected in the story. Fo...

At the school where I teach, we have an annual tradition, spanning five years now, in which we have the senior class write a "Last Lecture" about their time at the school. Because I teach at a charter school that serves kids from 7th through 12th grade, some of the students who speak have spent a third of their lives in those hallways. They've accumulated a lot of experiences, taken a lot of classes, and heard me a lot, bellowing about uniform violations in those selfsame hallways. The lecture gives them a chance to reflect not only on those times, but the other tendons, fibers, and connective tissues that have built them into the young men and women they are on the cusp of becoming. This time of year is always enjoyable for me. While it can be stressful to finish all of the administrivia of being a teacher (which, I am quick to point out, is not so much as the administration has to do), this is one of my favorite times of the year. Emotionally, I've put my most imp...