Ugh.

Today in my 1101 class, the lesson did not go so well. They were bored. How can I spice up thesis statements and an overview of the writing process? Maybe I don't talk about it at all...it will show up in the course after all. Maybe I just needed more than five hours of sleep to convey excitement about narrowing a topic and devising a controlling idea.

Maybe the students were as tired. Many didn't seem to enjoy the Anne Lamott excerpts about shitty first drafts, a piece usually guaranteed to induce quite a few chuckles. Hmmm...hopefully just an off day.

Regardless, I've noted for next time: more group work/hands-on activities for teaching narrowing and thesis statements.

Digital Dorothy

On this day in 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote:

"The green paths down the hill-sides are channels for streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running bewteen the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams. The garden, mimic of spring, is gay with flowers. The purple-starred hepatica spreads itself in the sun, and the clustering snow-drops put forth their white heads, at first upright, ribbed with green, and like a rosebud when completely opened, hanging their heads downwards, but slowly lenthening their slender stems. The slanting woods of an unvarying brown, showing the light through the thin net-work of their upper boughs. Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the tree show in the light like the columns of a ruin."

Spring is dead-ahead. Must remember that when its 40 below here.

Wordsworth, Dorothy. "Journal, Written at Alfoxden in 1978." English Romantic Writers. 2nd ed. Ed. David Perkins. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

Yoga and Vertigo

Yoga has recently received much attention in the Fargo Forum (a lot of it negative because so many believe it is inseparable from mysticism), so when my colleague sent an email inviting me to participate in a free Yoga session on campus Friday, I was all over it. I went with a really open mind because, despite numerous opportunities to read about it, I never cared to learn what Yoga might include beyond the poses.

I really enjoyed the meditation and focus-on-breathing aspect of Yoga. Some of the movements baffle me. This is not a new experience. I've dropped out of aerobics classes and hated nearly every moment of any non-machine related regime because I don't get the whole "breath in now while simultaneously bending in half" because that is when I want to breath out! I also can't interpret "pull your navel to your spine" chatter or instructions for other complicated procedures that contort my body. I don't GET it.

I tried everything though. I kept waiting for my back and neck to hurt (Past injury. Hit by drunk driver in AZ. Enough said), but instead, I really felt both energized and calm afterwards. I'll go again!

Two very surreal moments in two days: a friend let me us her mat during the Yoga session. I was supposed to be facing downward (the movement is to stupefyingly complex to describe here), and when I caught sight of the bubbled pattern of the mat, I had a moment of, I guess, vertigo. The pattern was swimming before my eyes and kept shifting as I looked upon it. I could not tell how close I was to the mat and was in serious jeopardy of smacking my nose into the floor. I had to break out of the pose to get my bearings. Ugh. A similar thing happened today after playing Guitar Hero III. I stopped the game, looked at my carpet, and it became a rolling, shifting sea right in front of me. I knew better than to get up. I looked at the TV instead. It grew! This is so weird and hard to describe, but it's like those crazy camera shots in movies, where a character stand still and the camera zooms up to him/her, but all the background seems to shrink as the character gets bigger. Can't think of an example now...will add one when I can.

Update: It is called, fittingly, the vertigo shot. Here are some examples from Youtube.