Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

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04
May 26

Out here playing games

As a child, I got a bunch of these peg board games from my grandparents. They came as a set, but I guess they didn’t come with a way to store them, because I’ve always kept them in a cardboard King Edwards Imperial Tobacco box that my grandfather gave me. (Fitting them all into one box became a game itself.)

They’ve been sitting in a filing cabinet for a while, and I dug them out this weekend while looking for some class paperwork. (My filing system is a game of another sort.)

It seemed like a good time to not stare at a screen, so I pulled the games out and tried to figure out how they all worked. Most of them were a mystery to me, as a kid. Not that they’re overly complex, but I guess they were just beyond my patience at the time. There’s one game I knew well, because I’d been to a Cracker Barrel. I played a few rounds of that, trying to remember the pattern I devised to win. (I’d devised a pattern, which is a thing I would do, of course, but it’s been decades.)

All of which is to say, I’m telling myself it takes real talent to do this.

The good news is the other games now make sense. I need to play around with them a bit more to see which is the most entertaining.

Anyway, 144 more papers to read and grade. Two finals are due on Thursday. The rest come in next Monday. Suddenly peg board games seem like fun, don’t they?

In September of 2024 I devised a 25-mile time trial. It is a big circle with nine turns. Critically, eight of them are right turns. It involves going down the hill and back up past the haunted house, into town, by the park, through the sheep pastures, and then taking that left turn. Then you go a mile, turn onto a busy state highway, go 2.3 more miles and turn right, to get back into the countryside. Then you eventually get to the downhill that is always in the headwind, which makes the downhill feel like an uphill. You go by the crazy house and then into the woods, until the road ends. You turn right again onto another highway, one which you can absolutely fly on for four miles, before turning into another small town.

You go through three towns on this route. You pass many more warehouses. And I need to rename this. It’s not really a time trial if you’re just getting slower on the thing.

I am getting slower on the thing. Twice I’ve done it so far this year, and these are the slowest times in the series.

Much of that is about me, of course. But I can blame the weather, too. Today I had headwinds from three different directions!

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

If you’d like to go there, ask around for directions to Tulan Strand.

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01
May 26

Rounding spring’s corner

We went back to campus today. The student athletes were doing a fund raiser. They were taking shifts, sitting in chairs, wearing plastic ponchos. Pretty soon they were wearing whipped cream pies.

That’s an All-American. She’s been in both of our classes. She’s a lovely human being and, somehow, that meant she got more pies to the face than any of her peers did during her half-hour shift. I don’t know how much money you raise doing a bit like that, but it was a lovely spring day and they’d set this up in a quiet little corner of campus and people came by in dribs and drabs for an hour or so. The overhead seemed to be a few ponchos, a couple of cans of whipped cream and some paper plates.

Nearby, there’s this piece of public art.

It’s titled Knowledge is Power.

Knowledge is Power is inspired by a quote by Francis Bacon. In creating a visual representation of the verbal statement, Artist Zenos Frudakis thought a book would make an appropriate metaphor, as it has been the traditional form of preserving and transmitting knowledge through the ages.

Always interested in philosophy and the love of wisdom, Mr. Frudakis wanted this sculpture to embody those who are good examples of having powerful ideas. As a compositional element, he has faces and quotes organized around two central figures he considers two giants of thought. On the left page is Charles Darwin, and those around him are of an earlier period. On the right page is Albert Einstein, surrounded by more contemporary figures.

There’s a lot of art around campus, it turns out. I need to see more of it. Maybe something will rub off.

We had lunch at Chick-fil-A. For the first time in a good while, it seemed, we had lunch together and didn’t have to rush off somewhere. It was pleasant, it felt a bit like unwinding.

Something I wrote:

I’ve been developing and teaching a class we call Criticism in Sports Media for the last two semesters. Students are learning to consume and interpret media critically, place it within broader contexts, and examine the structure and meaning of the material. This, I say, gives one an appreciation of sport media’s role in contemporary life, because sports reflect the values of a culture.

It’s a good course, and helpful. Students know there’s a lot going on, and they’re trying to understand the media landscape that surrounds and inundates us all. They are coming to understand that there are some things they don’t understand, and they’d like to try to make some sense of it.

The class spends a lot of time on the printed word and on documentaries, and we discuss social media and, lately, AI content.

Now, at the end of the term, I wanted to leave them with a lasting impression about recognizing and addressing AI.

I’ve got a few more things I want to write soon. But, first, back to the grading. Just 144 papers and exams to go!

That video is from Mullaghmore Head, where we both fell down, separately and hilariously. You’ll just have to read about it.

bespoke / Ireland / memories / photo / Rowan / sports / Thursday / video — Comments Off
30
Apr 26

Suddenly the last day of class

I mentioned, Tuesday, my new custom-made lapel pin. Today I wore the second one I made and ordered. This is what I say at the end of each class, and it’s the last thing I say in my last lecture, which I build to all semester long.

Thanks for coming today. See you next time. Until then …

If that’s the way people think of me in the final analysis, then it’s worth repeating it.

And so I did it twice today, for the last two times. Weird, I always feel like I’m just getting to know the students, and that we’re all starting to feel comfortable in the room, when it’s time for the semester to end.

But it ended in a big way! In Rituals and Traditions we were joined by a colleague, the assistant athletic director for compliance and academic support, and the deputy athletic director for strategic initiatives and external engagement. They heard from five groups who have been working all semester on proposals for things that our athletic department to build traditions, increase student and community buy-in and improve the gameday experience. Those people were not prepared for how well the students did. Everyone was impressed, even the other students. One person said, “I thought our project was pretty good, but I wasn’t expecting everyone else’s to be so great.” No disrespect to that project, but that was a fair read.

I was proud to see their work come to fruition, and excited to see all of this come together in the context of this class I conceived out of my own interests, and then found plenty of literature to draw from will designing and implementing this class which I invented from whole cloth.

The athletic department people learned a lot because of their work, and because of their hustle. We conducted a survey and got 252 responses on the thing. The instrument told our students a lot and they leveraged that well, today.

Perhaps some thing or things that were said today will provide an inspiration or an impetus to the athletic department. That’s the idea. For certain the people that came to visit were impressed by what they heard and saw, which is great. I’m doing this class again in the fall. I hope to make the class even better.

In Criticism we closed the term by watching the almost avant-garde June 17, 1994.

We had just enough time at the end to talk about a few elements of the doc, and I gave them the final lecture, and someone came in to proctor evaluations.

In both classes I asked them, one more time, to be safe and be kind.

Outside tonight I was looking up at the moon and the clouds thinking about how fortunate I am to get to say that to groups of young people, over and over, for three months.

It was 9:22 when I took that photo. And after that I started thinking about how fortunate I am to have, now, the next couple of weeks to wrap up the semester’s work.

We watched that sunset at Downpatrick Head.

Ireland / memories / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Apr 26

Assessing what needs essing

With classes winding down I have less prep to do tonight than I have all semester. With classes winding down, however, I have more grading to do than any mortal man or woman should be asked to deal with.

Late in every semester I make the mistake of counting up how many things there are left to grade. At the start of this week I had 197 things ahead of me. Forty-eight of those things are extremely time-sensitive, so guess what I’ve been doing!

Guess who has been no help! Phoebe has taken over the remote control. It’s birds and aquariums from here on in.

Poseidon, for his part, is just sitting on papers because you don’t need all the papers to get your work done. And that’s true enough.

The kitties are doing great. They just need more pets and treats.

This footage comes from the amazing, beautiful, Downpatrick Head.

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28
Apr 26

A unique piece

I wanted to add to my small lapel pin collection. I have 15 of them, most of which I’ve just collected over the years. About half of them were given to me. I have little case to display them in, and lapels on which to wear them. And so it seemed a good time to add a few to the rotation. This is tricky, I figured, because they should have some sort of meaning to the wearer. How many meaningful lapel pins can you be autobiographical about?

It turns out you can get custom made lapel pins for pretty cheap. So I made and purchased two of them. They arrived late last week, and I’m slapping one on today.

I like the old logos. And the quality of these is pretty good. So it is probably a good thing that lapel pins ought to mean something, otherwise I might be adding more to a medium-sized and growing collection.

But no one needs that. Least of all me.

Today in Rituals and Traditions I wrapped up the last of our lectures. I shared this video, which is all kinds of great. It has just the right amount of spiteful, prideful, “Make me.” What’s more, FIFA deserves attitude, at the very, very least. It’s a shame they won’t get more.

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A post shared by Tailgate Mart (@tailgatemart_)

We also talked about the future of stadium design. No one in my class is in architecture or engineering, so they’ll never do that themselves, but you never know where you’ll wind up working, or what the facility circumstances will be. So today we discussed a recent trend of removing the cheap seats from venues, in favor of more lounges and escalators and clubs and restrooms. The cheap seats are important. They are typically thought of as a gateway into the sport. And we have discussed how fans spend more money inside the stadium — food, souvenirs, etc. — than they do to get in the place. So I asked them to think about how all of these changes might effect the fan experience and stadium choreographies and everything downstream of such changes.

I had a colleague come in to proctor the student evaluation process. I summed up the semester, gave my last little lecture and handed over the room. We’ll get together one last time, Thursday, for their presentations.

In Criticism we talked about this story, Suns’ Devin Booker calls out ref by name in furious NBA playoff rant after baffling call, which allowed us to talk about sources and source credibility. It doesn’t really seem to figure into this particular story, but it is the Post, and it should figure into every bit of their copy.

We also talked about Hailed as a ‘football goddess’ by many, yet sexism, hate and misogyny remain for this soccer trailblazer:

Marie-Louise Eta received a typical German welcome at Union Berlin’s Stadion An der Altern Försterei on Saturday.

“Fußballgöttin!” (“football goddess”) they bellowed in deafening unison.

Eta, 34, was named interim manager of the Bundesliga club last week after the sacking of the under-performing Steffan Baumgart. As a result, her unexpected appointment became a historic milestone as the club smashed through a glass ceiling in men’s professional soccer.

In the April 18 match against Wolfsburg, Eta became the first woman to take charge of a men’s soccer team in any of Europe’s top-five leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain).

Here, we talked, obviously, about representation. This example also let us consider a great deal about the notion and value of context, for the CNN copy omits a lot.

(Update: She was successful. Union Berlin finished 11th of 18th after going 2-2-1 under Eta’s tenure. She will coach the Union’s women side next year, as planned. Tapping Mauro Lustrinelli to run the men’s team returns the club to the old European boy’s club. Pretty much everyone expected that.)

We also talked again about watching out for fake stories. There’s a set of skills involved in that, and we were due a refresher. So we discussed psychological literacy, basically understanding our own psychological biases so that we might be, hopefully, less at risk of manipulation. We also talked lateral reading (check up on the source you’re reading and read others besides, basically).

It sounds better in the lecture. Maybe it sticks with people.

And for me, two more classes to go for the semester.

This amazing video is from An Bhinn Bhuí.