Thursday, August 25, 2005

Assescement

If you seek thorough notes on today's Fall Teaching Conference, you might be disappointed.  The four-hour conference covered several interesting and important projects: Syracuse community-based writing courses, upcoming service-learning initiatives, and the annual address from the chair of the department.  The featured speaker--a professor from Vermont--gave a talk on "Assessing Diversity," a topic which, you might agree, is both vast and complicated--tangled politically and theoretically.  The talk worked through asking the right questions, devising alternative models, mixing methods and identifying subtle (if isolable) variables.  All of the presentations were held in Hall of Languages 500, the top floor of the building I wrote about earlier this month.  Here's a photo I snapped about fifteen minutes before the sessions started this morning; it's a north-ward look from the place we gathered.

Ironically, the featured talk included a clip from the movie Addams Family Values: the part where young Wednesday breaks from the script in the Thanksgiving play-performance at summer camp. I'd never watched the movie before, and its involvement in the talk made sense, was appropriate and smart.  Of course, I couldn't help being mildly distracted by a second Hall of Languages/1313 Cemetery Lane coincidence in three weeks. I kept it to myself; nobody else appeared to be chilled by the unlikely loop: watching a clip from a 1993 movie based on a television program, the house-set for which has been rumored to be influenced by the architecture of the building (Hall of Languages) in which we sat, watching a clip....  Uncanny.

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 25, 2005 9:38 PM to Rhetorico-Geography