You don’t know how far away it is. How high it is. You don’t know what’s on the back side of it. You could eyeball it, but you’re not really good at that. Most people aren’t very good at that, actually. You can train the eye and a long period of experience would help, but most people don’t devote themselves to that, which is understandable.
Then, most of us don’t have the knowledge to hazard a guess about the mass involved, either. How do you estimate the weight of something that’s a bit far off, that you’re not used to assessing, that you probably don’t understand, not really, something you’d perceive differently if it was up close, anyway.
How large do you suppose that cloud is?
Saw that on the way home today. I think we were talking about the news at the time. Anyway.
We went to campus together today. Mostly because we both had to be there, and also because I dropped my car art the mechanic’s for an oil change and some TLC. I had a class today, then we had a faculty meeting. And after that I spent the evening emailing replies to students. Somehow, it made for a full day that started late in the morning.
In class, I had students do a library book project. It’s important to introduce people to the wonders that take place there. So, since it is the beginning of the semester, I sent them out with a simple assignment. Go pick up a book about media in any other part of the world. Your choice. (It’s a class on international media.) Start reading it, bring the book to class and come tell us about it.
Tell us why you picked it up, and what it is about so far. Tell us what you like about it. Sell the rest of us on checking out that book. And tell us why we might not want to check out the book.
In my mind, this assignment served several purposes. It sent students to libraries, either a local library or the campus library. The library experience! Some people don’t have a lot of those. Of course our campus library is currently under renovation, so their process, while effective, does not offer a true library experience just now. It made the students start talking, which is useful because I intend this to be a talkative style of class. It gave them some momentum in the form of easy points. And it introduces everyone to 16 new books.
We’ll do it again at the end of the semester, when I’ll narrow their choices a bit, when the class has crystalized it’s focus. And we’ll all have even more new books to consider. Someone is going to get beach reading out of this exercise, I can tell.
Me, that someone will probably be me. Four or five of the books I heard about today are books I now want to read.
When they’d all talked a bit about their books I shared one other little thing. I’d run across someone in Chicago who found at her library a family archival kit you could check out for free. Gloves, acid free folders, picture holders, tips on how to start preserving your family’s history. That, I thought, was a really thoughtful idea. So I quickly ran through what the local library here offers beyond all of those wonderful books. You can check out a book club in a bag, for you and seven of your friends. They have a seed bank. They have museum passes for some truly terrific places in the area. There are, of course, movies and music, but also board games and yard games. Different branches run different sorts of workshops all of the time. They have a makers space, with 3D printers and laser cutters and more. Libraries, I told my class, are magical places.
No one disagreed.
After class there was a faculty meeting. We, as faculty, met. There is an agenda, a shared Drive, a tight schedule, and our chair, an altogether fellow who has it all together, runs a good schedule. Somehow, how we always get out right on time, which was 4:45 today. Then the drive home, that cloud, the many emails, and now a late night effort to catch up on the day’s news.
Shoulda stuck with the cloud.
