Monday, January 26, 2004

Sexing the Colosseum

During a 4.5 hour meeting today, I daydreamed for just a few minutes about this:

Dream-thought One | Phillip has teamed up with a friend for a social studies project: a two-page essay and a model of the Colosseum (then or now?). Due Wednesday. Rome wasn't built in a day. Fine. But can a replica of one bit of Rome (clay, tooth picks, styrofoam!) come together in 1.5 days? Working like fine modern architects, they've planned, plotted for two weeks, then forced the material "making" into the final 36 hours. I, for one, feel worn down by school projects. I vowed to take on a lesser role ever since our salt dough map of Missouri (delivered in a Papa Johns box, greenish-dough-hardened with flags and labels, Ozark Mountains and so on) scored a B.

Dream-thought Two | Finished reading Winterson's Sexing the Cherry on Saturday. Slow for me to start, but really picked up in the latter half. The notion of grafting in the book got me thinking about metaphors for mixed-mode or hybrid pedagogies, although it's not a book on teaching, per se. It's not explicitly on sexing either, although the beast-woman romps through at least one scene. Intercoursing space and time, perhaps.

Postlude | From STC: "A map can tell me how to find a place I have not seen but have often imagined. When I get there, following the map faithfully, the place is not the place of my imagination. Maps, growing ever more real, are much less true. And now, swarming over the earth with our tiny insect bodies and building houses, it seems that all the journeys are done. Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only very little has been discovered" (88).

I left the session--a bureaucratic upside down cake--with 3/4 of a page of notes on strategic planning. Lots of talking, so, accordingly, I feel I've used up my allocation of Monday words.

Posted by Derek Mueller at January 26, 2004 5:06 PM to Under a Bushel