Topic of the Week:

The Gift Of Imagining What We Don't Really See

Junhee Chung's Easter Rabbit appeared in a Macy's advertisement on Sunday, March 27, 2005. It didn't scan very well, and so in the Painting of the Week I tried to recapture it with the feeling that I experienced when I saw it in print. My freebie program can't really approximate it accurately, but I think I managed to get back some of the vivacity that came across in the child's drawing.

A Rabbit I Can Imagine. Can You?

I would never have thought of a rabbit with red ears, shades of yellow to beige to brown, with a deep greenish blue middle section and red rear paws. But I recognized him right away. Of course, there's a rabbit like that in my garden. Is there one in yours? I welcome this child as a kindred spirit, on the basis of the rabbits we can imagine.

And that imagining affects our expectations quite as much as the real world context in which we find ourselves. Children just preserve that freedom of imagination longer that do adults. We seem to forget the red and blue and yellow and green and red rabbits of our youth.

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Famous People and Concepts We Should Have Heard Of, But Often Haven't.

People

• Kurt Lewin - psychologist. Psychological life space.

• Michel Foucault - What is an author?

  Concepts

• The ‘death of the author’ as an instance of theory "Copyright 1996, 2000 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, with attribution, for non-profit purposes."

Jeanne's Lectures for Spring 2005

• Fall 2004 Lectures in Chronological Order
• Winter Break 2005 Lectures in Chronological Order
• Spring 2005 Lectures in Chronological Order

• Seeing What We Expect to See Started lecture on how expectations, including religious expectations, affect our perspective. Added March 16, 2005.
• jeanne's Beliefs as a Starting Point Started on the morning of March 17, 2005.

Visual Sociology:

Find the cat, Edie.
And share the fun with Hargo, of the Somerville gates.

• One of the Somerville photos from benzilla.com blog

• Gregory Colbert - Photographer with Nomadic Museum
  

  • Ashes and Snow Website

  • Have Museum, Will Travel

    "Pier 54
    The Nomadic Museum as seen on February 1. The 45,000-square-foot space opens to the public on March 5.

    While the city marvels at saffron-bedecked Central Park, another massive arts project has been nearing completion downtown, one shipping container at a time. Called the Nomadic Museum, it will take up all of Pier 54, on the Hudson River at 13th Street. But as a museum it’s a rather curious monument: It won’t remain standing for very long. And it’s devoted exclusively to the work of one artist.

    Photographer Gregory Colbert—who travels the world taking pictures of people communing with whales, elephants, and other animals— got the idea (and funds) for the museum after his one-man installation in 2002 at the Venice Biennale’s Arsenale, a vast shipyard dating from the Renaissance. “Ashes and Snow” was the first solo exhibit ever to occupy the entire space. And every last piece of art in it was bought up by the chairman of Rolex, who then encouraged the artist to use the money to mount the show—as is—in other cities. So, Colbert asked the avant-garde Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to design a museum large enough to travel with it. After “Ashes and Snow” finishes its New York run, from March 5 to June 6, the Nomadic Museum will be taken apart and reassembled in Los Angeles. Future stops include Beijing and Paris.

    From Have Museum, Will Travel. At p. 1.

    View from inside the mobile museum:

    
    Rendering by Ombra Bruno/Officina di Architettura

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• Mentoring

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    Syllabus for Independent Study: Religion as a Present Social Issue January 30, 2005.

    Learning Records from Spring 2005 Just started, on the basis of transform_dom discussions. This will take a while. I didn't work on learning records with all the confusion at home this week. Will get back to it shortly. jeanne

  • Most recent list of Learning Records from Fall 2004
    

  • Instructions page for joining transform_dom and transspan

    • Link for joining transform_dom:

      
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    Preparing for Graduate Study:

  • Test Prep Preview Joshua L. Stewart, recommended this site because it has free practice tests. If you're thinking of taking the GRE, the LAST, or any other graduate entry test, this might be a good place to gather some early information. Joshua suggested it for Praxis Practice, but a quick first look suggests they don't mean by praxis what we do. Check it out, anyway, if you have some spare time. jeanne

• Resource Literacy

  • Plagiarism Watch www.streetgangs.com site. The intelligent and effective use of resources means that you have to be careful not to plagiarize other people's material. We have several files on plagiarism, but I think the one that might make the most sense to you is this complaint on streetgangs.com. They give you samples of sites that have taken their material without citation, even at colleges, and they also give you examples of sites that have used their material with proper attribution. I find the irony poetic, and hope that their message will get through to you the importance of attribution. Dr. O'Connor on his Mega Criminal Justice site led me to streetgangs.com and noted that others frequently hack into the site. For that reason I have created a backup copy for your use in case you cannot access the actual site. Please be sure to attribute any citation to streetgangs.com. jeanne Backup.

Using Academic Language Effectively

Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search:

and Careers

• Resumes:

  • College Journal Resume Suggestions . . . Backup

• Letters of Recommendation:

  • Letters of Recommendation: How to get me to respond to your request. Many of you need letters. If you will follow this format, I can do them quickly and make them good.
  • Dog Letters If you do not give me adequate information, but do manage to get my attention, you may end up with a dog letter. That is a letter that says that you work well with people, that you are enthusiastic, that you persist at getting things done, and that everyone likes you. Of course, my dog gets along well with people, brings his ball to them, is enthusiastic, and persists at getting them to take his ball. Everyone likes my dog. That's a dog letter. It's so general it could be about my dog. jeanne

Sneaky Strokes and Flying Good Dogs

Flying Dog is also a painting by Zhang Kai. Best I've every come across to illustrate our site with magic numbers and unicorns and whipped cream cats and now, flying dogs:

Flying Good Dogs: Whenever something happens in class that works out well, that inspires you, that helps in studying, whatever, take a few minutes to send us an e-mail. We'll post it where all of us can learn from it, including other teachers.

You can also send an email to the Who to Take Site:

• Who To Take at Cal State Dominguez Hills
• Who To Take - Colleges in General

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