2006 2007
Thank You.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
I think I’ve talked about this before, but I used to have a very anxious relationship with the blank page. That is, I wanted all the ideas to be perfect in my head before committing them to paper. And this meant that I was always late with my papers in high school and college. And of course, that just caused more anxiety for me. It was awful.
I found this image that captures that feeling for me, chained and raw, unable to do what I needed to do and unable to walk away from it too.
So it’s kind of a funny thing that I’m writing a screenplay now.
Now there are a million reasons for my journey from paralysis to something like fluidity of motion. The relevant piece for now, though, has to do with some teachers I had a very long time ago. And I was led to that realization by some of my actual screenplay research.
The main character in my script is utterly closed off to his emotions. He’s consumed by his work and sees everything else in the world as a distraction. My writing partner and I think he’s a great character, but we’re also left with the problem of trying to express this fellow’s internal life. How do we show what he’s feeling when he doesn’t share any of it with the characters around him?
Another interesting aspect of the character is that he was something of a prodigy. He’d read all of Charles Dickens by the time he was 12 years old. And he has a Shakespearean quote for every event that happens during his day. The sad thing, though, is that for a long stretch, his life was a real disappointment. It isn’t until the last third of his life (the part we’re writing about in the script) that he actually becomes who he was meant to be all along.
What does this have to do with games? Learning? Teaching? Anything?
Well, in thinking about this character, I remembered a book that my high school English teachers gave me. It’s this one, “Caligari’s Cabinet and other Grand Illusions” –
I knew this book contained an example of something I could use to express our character’s internal life and his history. It’s this wonderful inscription that my teachers wrote on the first page:
It’s a little hard to read (it has been 29 years after all), but the inscription says:
“May the future give you as much as you have contributed to us.”
I remember when my teachers gave me this book – I was so grateful and even then I felt like they were the ones who’d given me so much, not the other way around. I didn’t fell like I’d given them anything at all really….
So now we’re including a couple of scenes in our script where our main character looks at his old books, and his books will have inscriptions very much like the one in my book. Hopefully, these scenes will help to show what our character’s teachers thought of him; what they hoped for him; and the set of great expectations they gave him to carry through his life. This device will help us express some of what’s going on inside our character, even when he doesn’t talk about it.
And if our movie gets made (and the chances are realistically a gazillion to one…), I hope that these scenes can be my quiet way of thanking the teachers who gave me hope that there was something bigger and better out in the world and that I deserved to someday be part of it.
I don’t envy today’s teachers with all the work they have to do around standards and testing, etc. I can’t imagine that many of them (if any at all) went into teaching so they could help kids become better test-takers.
So it’s important, especially in this educational environment, to remember that the greatest things a teacher can give students are hope and the confidence to turn those hopes into reality. Whether teachers use books or lectures or cool learning games as their tools doesn’t seem to matter all that much. The key piece is that the best teachers give kids the confidence to fill the pages of their lives with who they’re meant to be.
My life as a lunch lady, or ... am I still a Newbie?
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
So here’s a quote from my very first entry in this blog:
“I try a few different solutions and nothing works. I don’t like being wrong. I try some more. Again, nothing works. I wonder what age group this game is geared toward. I look at the box, but it doesn’t say. After awhile, I go make a cup of tea and start in on some other work.”
Funny, huh? I was describing my experience playing a game called “Crazy Machines.” As a Newbie, I had absolutely no idea what was going on with the game. The whole thing might as well have been in another language - and I guess in a way it was - as far as I was concerned.
Now it’s almost a year later. And I sometimes still have some of those same feelings around playing digital games. But the truth is… well, maybe I’m no longer really a “Newbie.”
I began contemplating this when I recently played the prototype for the Learning Games to Go game. This is the digital game around which our entire LG2G project is built. And it’s very, very cool. The folks at MIT and FableVision have done an amazing job of building the prototype, and I’m sure the game will only get better as it goes through the testing and evaluation process.
Here’s a screen grab from the game:
This particular puzzle is called “The Cafeteria.” The idea is that the player takes on the role of a lunch lady who must figure out what kinds of food the monsters want to eat for lunch. Sounds simple, right? But the tricky thing is that each food item is labeled with a number. Players have to figure out the correct ratios among the numbers in order to know which food items to place on each monster’s tray. I have to say that it’s very satisfying when you get it all right. The monsters slobber away at the food and make a mess that would have made John Belushi (in his “Animal House” incarnation) very, very happy.
Now when I started working the puzzle, I had no idea how to “get it all right.” And I had that horrible “Newbie” feeling again. It’s that kind of lost feeling where I can’t even imagine any possible point in the future when I might be capable of understanding the game (see first blog entry above).
But it didn’t take long before I cracked the code. And then I had that wonderful feeling: I couldn’t imagine not understanding the game. It all seemed so very obvious to me. The game revealed its inner workings and I was savvy enough to use the data it provided and make sense of it. Things clicked in my mind and I understood the language of the game.
And it didn’t take very long, either.
Now you may say that this doesn’t seem like such a noteworthy accomplishment. After all, the game’s intended to be played by middle-school students. And here I am, a well-educated 46 47-year-old man.
To which I reply – a year ago, I would have walked away and been lost.
I just have to accept it. I’m not a “Newbie” anymore.
Wheels Down ...
April 30, 2007
So now what? I’m not a “Newbie” anymore.
Well, folks, it’s time to lower the landing gear and bring this bad boy in for a landing.
This indeed will be the last post on the “Newbie” blog. I’m going to continue my work on the LG2G project, creating podcasts, producing video, writing articles, taking on challenges where I become a “Newbie” again….
But it’s time to let go of this lovely blog.
I’m so grateful to the people who’ve read the blog and especially to those of you who’ve taken the time to send in comments. It felt great to know you were out there. And I pretty much always learned something from what you had to say. Thank you so very much.
And I definitely encourage you to follow the progress of the Learning Games to Go project, of which this blog is but a miniscule part. It really is an amazing initiative, and I think it’s going to have a huge impact in our classrooms.
It’s been a total blast writing this blog. Learning new stuff, as I’ve written many times, can be a very difficult process. The cool thing, though, is that we can actually steel ourselves against the potential embarrassments. We can learn to keep our eyes on the ball (or in my case, the cursor…) when we know in our guts that the risk of embarrassment is nothing… nothing that is, compared to what we might gain by taking on the adventure.
Learning new things can indeed be hard.
But not learning new things is a silent killer. It can deaden us without our even noticing it, especially as we get older and start to think we know everything we’ll ever need to know.
So have an adventure.
And thanks for coming along for the ride.