Final project: Website and a Journalism Framework

Good readers, hello.

For my final project I decided to continue work on my website, which is aimed at helping me get a job in a few months. Specifically for this project, I created the framework of a 9-week journalism course. I did not plan individual lessons, waiting to see what students I might end up teaching. But I did create assignments and goals for the course, the idea being that if the course is planned top-down, I can fill in the bottom extended from this framework.

Perhaps over break, I will add to the film/media studies course. But for now, run with the journalism course.

Thoughts on film adaptations

I have long pined for the day when I can integrate films into my English classrooms. Pining might be too strong a word, but I have at least wanted to since I imagined becoming a teacher. Film adaptations can accomplish a few goals. I will focus on three: Explaining the text and its features (like humor, for example), creating an alternate text with altered/tweaked themes, or moving the action to a new place and time to say something a bit different about society.

Rockin' the Suburbs music video - on the spot

In a note related to the previous post on Whitacre almost solely by the fact that I like both performers, I looked at a Ben Folds music video (mostly because choral pieces don't really do the whole music video thing). I chose Folds' "Rockin' the Suburbs" because I know a bit about the backstory that makes the song funnier. As it turns out, that story also makes the video funnier. Essentially, Folds wrote the song in mockery of the group Korn, who once called him out in a magazine (that's what I remember from the story Folds told at a concert five or six years ago).

Whitacre's music, me, and teaching it

For this activity, I considered playing it safe by picking a song that is less obscure, but then I realized that the point of this is to talk about a song that I care deeply about, so I went with "Sleep," by Eric Whitacre. It is a choral piece, and the specific version I have of it was performed by the group Polyphony, directed by Stephen Layton. Whitacre was born in 1970 and has become one the pre-eminent - if not the eminent - composer of this generation. I have been privileged to perform two of his pieces before, both in high school and college, and they are among the most challenging and rewarding works I have sung.

Whitacre's pieces stand out in their choral layering - sometimes a dozen notes in a chord - and "Sleep" is no exception. Dynamically, it builds toward a climax that gives me shivers, and the lyrics are gentle and lulling. Originally, Whitacre had set the music to Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" but discovered that he could not obtain the copyright. Instead, he asked poet Charles Anthony Silvestri to write words to match the music, and they work beautifully.