Prior to the beginning of the semester, I learned that I was going to have a hearing-impaired student in my class. This person is not completely deaf. He can hear some sounds, but I'm not sure if it is the high or low end of the frequency spectrum. I was worried that I would have to have a sign language interpreter in the class, which seems like a big distraction, but it turns out this person is a speechreader, kind of like a lipreader who has sounds to help out.
Anyway, what it has done so far is to improve the way I teach. First of all, one of my biggest problems has always been that I tend to talk while I am facing the board. I've gotten better about it over time, but it is still a problem. I also sometimes talk in a hurry, and it makes it difficult for those in the back to string together what I'm saying. I'm afraid I get some students tuning out as a result.
With this person in the classroom, I find myself all the time making an effort to face the class when I am talking and to clearly enunciate when speaking. It's like an extra voice in my head reminding me all the time how to properly speak to the class, and I find the state of mind very useful.
I'm teaching all of my classes with this in mind now, and I hope the students find it is an improvement. This student's presence has also prompted me to update some of my (10 year old) videos that I show from time to time, and because I was spurred to look, I found a couple of new ones just released in the past year (closed-captioned and also with transcripts available) that I didn't know about that may turn out to be good. Time will tell.
In other news, we finished season 3 of "24" today. There were some real groaners this season (no matter what the show or the situation, I just cannot suspend disbelief when people are saying, "You've got to focus! Millions of innocent lives are at stake!" and that sort of thing), and lots of gratuitous violence and even torture. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I wonder sometimes if this show (which is very popular) is one of the big reasons people seem to be ok with torture in the "war on terror".
Got to figure out a new series to get from Netflix now. I'm thinking of getting a childhood favorite TV series of mine, "Starblazers", for the boys to watch. It may be a little too dated, but we'll see.
Posted by Observer at January 23, 2005 06:03 PMComments on entries can only be made in pop-up windows while those entries are still on the main index page. Sorry for the inconvenience this causes, but this blocks about 99.99% of the spam the blog receives.
http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/cgi-bin/comic.pl?comic=723
Posted by: Humbaba on January 24, 2005 11:28 AMOops, you have to have the annotations on to get why I posted this here.
Posted by: Humbaba on January 24, 2005 11:29 AMheh... Very cute... :)
Posted by: Liz on January 24, 2005 12:18 PMI can't wait until you read and review Crichton's new book, "State of Fear".
Posted by: Humbaba on January 24, 2005 03:38 PMIt'll be a while. I'm not reading anything new until I finish plowing through Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle". It's pretty good so far, but with a brutal editor, it could've been great (and I might be done with the whole trilogy by now instead of just 2/3 of the way through the first book). Then I may just do the guilty pleasure thing and read some of my Piers Anthony. I've also been wanting to read another Grisham novel or two, as it has been a while.
Posted by: Observer on January 24, 2005 03:44 PMThere's less pleasure to Anthony than you may remember.
Posted by: Humbaba on January 24, 2005 05:02 PMHey, he likes Thomas Covenant. Who's to judge what he finds pleasurable. I'm figuring he's one of those people like Bill Murray played in the remake of Little Shop of Horrors.
Posted by: Seattle Astronomer on January 24, 2005 05:05 PMHa!
Posted by: Humbaba on January 24, 2005 05:59 PMHey, I liked that movie (even own the soundtrack), but I don't remember Bill Murray in it. Are you thinking of Steve Martin, maybe?
I won't bother to re-defend Covenant other than to say, like most of my favorite books, it raised a lot of thorny ethical issues, had a lot of very memorable characters and scenes, and was as original as these things get nowadays (keeping in mind that even LOTR was derived from Norse myths, elements of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey", etc).
Like Humbaba said in the comments to the next post, "Tigana" was a good story but not all that memorable. With Covenant, I still have vivid memories years later of every major scene.
I look at people who don't like Covenant like I look at people who don't like soccer, baseball or football. I respect that there are good reasons not to like it, but I think they're missing out or at the very least missing the point.
Posted by: Observer on January 24, 2005 06:12 PMAs I recall, Bill Murray was the one who came in and *wanted* Steve Martin to hurt him. Martin was the sadist and Murray was the masochist that drove him to exclaim, "You're sick! Get out!"
Posted by: Seattle Astronomer on January 24, 2005 06:26 PMFeff sighs deeply at getting a student in his class this term with bipolar disorder so bad it borders on disabling. He sent me an email 6 hours after the end of the midterm he missed.
Grumble.
Posted by: Feff on January 26, 2005 05:00 PM