There's a speedy way to get there, to take a peek at what you seek

[austin_dern]

I maybe should mention a side effect of my guest-teaching. My mother --- who, now that I think about it, hadn't seen me filling in the previous times as I'd just replaced her for the whole class rather than coming in a half-hour early --- took the time to compliment me about my pedagogical method. I admit I have a slightly hard time imagining myself as having a pedagogical method, particularly as I just go in with the major points I want to establish and improvise around them, but I realized that I actually did have a method, setting up lots of simple questions so the class saw how to work out the important concepts by easy steps before realizing they got big questions.

Something my mother did volunteer me for was tutoring any of the students who still felt at a complete loss for how to do the mathematics involved. (I should point out my mother explicitly and repeatedly tells the class they are to use calculators or computers to do all the arithmetic and there is no need for them to ever figure out a standard deviation by hand.) She's done this several times and, some terms, someone takes me up on it. Three students spoke with me after class saying they'd like to have tutoring sessions and asking what days I'm available and how to get in touch with me; as of this writing, none of them has actually e-mailed me. Perhaps things will pick up before the next exam; the last exam, which had no mathematics on it, had a mean of 72 and a supremum score of 84.

Trivia: The four Spacecraft Lunar Module Adaptor panels at the top of the S-IVB stage on Apollo 9 were designed to be ejected at an angle of 110 degrees from the centerline of the stage and at a speed of about five and a half miles per hour. Source: Apollo 9: The NASA Mission Reports, Editor Robert Godwin.

Currently Reading: Not Since Carrie: 40 Years Of Broadway Musical Flops, Ken Mandelbaum. The remarkable thing is the attempt to make a musical out of Carrie --- yes, that Carrie --- isn't the most ridiculous-sounding attempt at a musical. Unfortunately the book is more interested in listing great flops rather than talking about why they failed, or what kinds of lessons can be taken from them, past uselessly trite rules like ``don't make a musical out of things that can't be made into musicals''. (It's sharper on why, for example, The Man Who Came To Dinner or Harvey flopped as musicals: the original scripts were tightly plotted enough that establishing any points through a song either slowed the story down or left out information, making the result more sluggish or less coherent than the original, which people couldn't help remembering fondly.)

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

They have a very stern rule at CMU that you can't have family members or other non-approved people take over your classes. I think people have actually gotten in trouble for it. I'm told it has to do with liability.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't know if there have been any such rules anywhere I've taught. Certainly nobody ever told me that I wasn't allowed to have non-approved speakers come in, although it's possible they never thought to tell me about it since how often are you going to have cause for a guest speaker in a mathematics course?

Also I couldn't guess now whether there's a rule this this college, whether my mother knows of such a rule, and whether she gets permission or just doesn't care. (Her department would be a bit put off if they had to do without her, so any controversy would make for some fine academic squabbling if there were.) All I know for sure is I tell the security guard at the front gate I'm there to speak at her class and then I'm let through, so they don't think that implausible or worth calling ... anyone ... to validate. Of course, tiny private schools can grow really weird systems of rules of conduct.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I don't think the rule is that you can't have speakers, I think it's that you can't have them take over your class if you're not present. That's why I was surprised to hear that on previous occasions your mother wasn't there when you lectured. That was definitely the rule when I worked at the community college too -- there was a list of people who were allowed to sub your class and it was generally only other instructors.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Three students spoke with me after class saying they'd like to have tutoring sessions and asking what days I'm available and how to get in touch with me; as of this writing, none of them has actually e-mailed me.

Idly curious if you passed out business cards, or simply wrote our number hastily in the margins of their notebooks.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I didn't. As always I didn't think to print up business cards. But they were the ones writing down e-mail addresses and my mother and I pointed out that if all else fails they can go through my mother.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I've got a nice set of cards from moo.com; who will usually do a 10-pack of them free* with a new account, to encourage you to get more. Encouragement worked for me, ordered 100 later on. The nice part is the artwork-on-the-back aspect with them, so they're very Furry of contact cards (I really shudder to call the business cards) that I have.

10 cards might last you a long while.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

::: Unfortunately the book is more interested in listing great flops rather than talking about why they failed, or what kinds of lessons can be taken from them,

I concur in my annoyance at such an ommission. In a short piece I'd expect the author was merely being snarky. In book-length I suspect the author realized s/he didn't actually know why the effort failed, and that prescribing a solution would require additional thought (if the author has the right expertise) or interviews (if not), and hopes the reader won't notice. (The author needn't worry about the editor not noticing, since editors are an expense dropped by modern publishers.)

It's a kindred thoughtlessness to SF/F criticisms: "That's physically impossible and would never work!" Well, obviously it did work in the story, so what are the consequences for the rules? (What's the temporal opposite of a consequence?)

::: past uselessly trite rules like ``don't make a musical out of things that can't be made into musicals''.

Is that trite or a bromide? Or possibly a tautology?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Actually, the book is two decades old, so it wasn't quite in the era where editors were replaced with spell check yet, and is also why the references for star-spangled catastrophe were Carrie and Merrily We Roll Along. I was referred to the book in one of the many, many articles about the ongoing fiasco of Spider-Man: Turn Off The OH MY GOD THE ELECTRICITY'S CONNECTED RIGHT TO MY FLIGHT RIG AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGH.

I should probably make clearer, while there is a lot of writing along the lines of ``Generic Musical Title opened in tryouts to generally warm reviews in Boston and Philadelphia, but a change in lead actors forced hasty rewriting just before the previews on Broadway and with the poorly dramatized central story the show closed after four performances''. But several times a chapter Mandelbaum looks closely at just how a show went wrong, and there are a number of common patterns that seem to turn up. Unfortunately they're not necessarily ones that can be used as guides to making wiser decisions: OK, the attempted production was too ambitious for the budget or time or talent or stage effects achievable. But doing ambitious things sometimes works and marks a new era in what can be done on stage.

Some of the flops are walked through step-by-step, so that there's a clear progression of how Annie 2 managed to take everything that Annie did right, and screw it up, and manage to make some things better and others worse in the rewrites and previews and attempts to salvage what could be done from it. It's no Final Cut (Stephen Bach's excellent review of how United Artists got into making Heaven's Gate and couldn't find their way out again), but the walkthroughs are precious information anyway.

I don't know whether the rules are trite, bromides, or tautologies, but I'd classify them as pretty much useless. For the record here they are; in the book there are examples of violations of each given:

1. Don't musicalize works which can't be musicalized.
2. Don't musicalize works that don't need music.
3. Don't start with a bad/impossible idea.
4. Don't attempt to musicalize a major work if you're not up to it.
5. Don't write shows without an audience.
6. Don't fool around with a good score.
7. Don't do the same thing twice.
8. Don't use old music.
9. Don't do sequels.

I suppose ``don't write shows without an audience'' --- demonstrated with shows such as Ragggedy Ann where it wasn't distinguishable if it was meant for kids brought to Broadway by happy aunts, or adults looking for nostalgic gazes back at childhood, or snarky adults looking for cynical revisions of fairy tales --- is useful. And ``Don't do sequels'' is mostly shown by how sequels flop badly, such as Annie 2 or attempted sequels to Bye-Bye Birdie and Ibsen's The Doll House.

But ... ``Don't start with a bad/impossible idea?'' It'd be easier to write ``Just don't fail''. Perhaps it's not actually plausible to have a romance in which Kate, the ``voice of Dow Jones'' who announces the latest stock market averages, is told by Herbert that he'll marry her when the Dow hits 1000, and she fibs telling the world it has, creating a panic (How Now, Dow Jones, 1967), but is that really so impossible a notion that a romantic comedy/farce couldn't be sustained on it? ``Don't musicalize works that don't need music''? OK, maybe Cyrano (1973) flopped, but I wouldn't be willing to bet it's impossible to integrate a couple snappy songs into the tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, or David Copperfield, although I'd probably grant Henry James as un-adaptable.

Carrie gets detailed attention at the start and end of the book, naturally, and that appears to have been a perfect storm of all the different types of failure detailed in the book coming together, and was at least the exciting and fascinating kind of failure.