Top industry professionals lead a focused and comprehensive study of key typeface design principles: technique, technology, aesthetics, expression, history, and theory.
Students explore the foundation of typography in depth by creating their own typefaces in hands-on workshops, while developing a broad understanding of the field through lectures, discussions, and research. A series of guest lectures round out the curriculum, allowing students deeper insight into specific relevant topics. Electives are offered each term focusing on topics such as pen and brush lettering, Python programming, and non-Latin alphabets.
Participants leave the program with the specialized skills to design professional quality digital typefaces and lettering.
It’s offered weekends and evenings this fall, but sadly, you actually have to attend the New York campus of the Cooper Union college for 10 weeks. Why can’t it be offered online? Although, hmmmm, 10 weeks in New York ….
I love books. And I have a thing about librarians, too.
You know what I’m talking about: the tied back hair, the glasses, the stern looks… I need a minute here. While I pull myself together, check out this video (thanks to Christopher Moore for the heads up. Yes, THAT Christopher Moore):
Yes, they are all real librarians (or librarians in training). The entire video is made up of the faculty and students from the University of Washington’s Information School.
I think it works as a student recruitment tool. Example: “They would be my professors? They’re awesome!”
Over the past couple of weeks, the big international story out of Manitoba has been two teachers at a Winnipeg high school pep rally — filmed on cameraphone, one giving a simulated lapdance to the other, then faking some oral sex. Classy, right?
I’m not going to post either of the two (!) videos known to exist of the event, but if you want a rundown of it, plus all the furor surrounding it, plus some great commentary, you literally can not do better than JHH’s take at Slurpees and Murder. I fully agree with the point of his post: the teachers were stupid, but they didn’t expose the students to anything that students aren’t already steeped in. I present proof:
But, since this is unarguably the biggest story to come out of Manitoba since a certain bus beheading a couple of summers ago (and we wonder why it’s so hard to attract tourists) every media outlet is jumping all over the sex! students! angle.
Now the Winnipeg Free Press has unearthed a school division policy that says students can be punished for using cell phone cameras in schools. In this brief story about a school board meeting, “school board chairwoman Jackie Sneesby refused to rule out punishment for the students.”
Well, of course she refused to rule it out. Fearing the loss of their scoop, I can only imagine that Freep education reporter Nick Martin (who also runs an excellent blog, by the way) posed her the question of student punishment right out of the blue. I’d bet it hadn’t even occurred to her until someone asked.
But it is a question that bears asking — if the students broke code-of-conduct rules, shouldn’t those rules have consequences? It’s Parenting 101 that you enforce your own rules, and teachers act in loco parentis, right? (That’s a phrase which is much funnier in this context if you read it with the Spanish “loco” instead of the Latin.)
So students broke the rules. But so what? This is a clear-cut case for whistleblower legislation, right? The students exposed a wrong, and their oh-no-it-broke-the-rules behaviour should be excused because of the social good that it’s doing.
Except Canada doesn’t have any whistleblower legislation, neither federally nor at the provincial level, a fact which astonished me when I just Googled it. Sorry students, no protection there. No First Amendment defense, either, for us Canucks.
Of course, the whole prohibition against cell phones in schools is ridiculous in the first place. Like airports, school authorities seem to think they can engineer behaviour by banning things.
There are tons of good reasons to allow cell phones in schools — communication with family members, emergencies, even the calendar and calculator functions.
If teachers find that cell phones and related devices are causing issues in class, make the students responsible for them. They are going to have to grow up and be responsible adults in just a few short years, and they’re going to have to deal with cell phones and other devices at work, at home, and in social situations. They should know how to turn them to vibrate, or turn them off.
If a student with a cell phone causes a distraction, go ahead and punish the behaviour. That punishment may even include taking away the offending device. But don’t issue a blanket ban. Because you won’t be able to keep up.
Banned cell phones, did you? What about iPods? What about Game Boys? What about calculator watch from the ’80s? What about laptops? Can I bring a laptop to class if I only take notes? What about a Kindle — which can only be used to read books? What about books?
Ban it!
You know what? If a student was reading Stephen King in class, hiding it under the desk, the teacher would take it away. (I know, because I did this in junior high.) But the school wouldn’t out-and-out ban books, for crying out loud.
This is all, I think, a desperate attempt by teachers and administrators to make school today more like the school they think they remember.
But school ain’t like that anymore. Students don’t take typing class, they have computer class, to cite just the most obvious example. And a progressive division would embrace technology like cell phones, and find a way to incorporate it into the curriculum.
However, it is much easier to be reactionary and disciplinary than it is to be thoughtful and progressive. And, since schools these days are basically human-rights-free gulags, students have about as much access to technology during their schoolday as the average North Korean.
Consider the story that I heard about a Brandon high school, which decided on the basis of no evidence that they needed to search the school for drugs.
Students were put in lock down — I shit you not, confined to classrooms — while the division brought in drug-sniffing dogs — again, I shit you not. And, even though you may think that because there is a lock on it, and you have the key, you may think that the locker is yours (I guarantee you that if a students broke into another student’s locker, there would be hell to pay) but no, that locker is not your private space, it belongs to the school, so we can search it whenever we like, and I hope you’re not keeping anything private in there, like birth control pills you don’t want your parents to know about, or notes from a boyfriend or girlfriend, or a prescription for depression, or perhaps your diary. Heaven forbid that something you have put under lock and key be actually kept private.
But the drug-sniffing dogs didn’t detect any drugs in the lockers. So, girls, yes, you’re in lockdown, but please put your purses outside the door and in the hallway, so the dogs can sniff them, and if we feel like it, we can root around in them, too.
What is this, Shawshank? (They still found no drugs by the way, which proves absolutely nothing about drug use in our schools and youth, but may happen to prove that the students are learning, at least about concealment.)
So now I know why cell phone cameras are banned. Because an enterprising group of students might actually be able to make a compelling case that high school these days is hell — and it ain’t the jocks vs. nerds. No, overbearing teachers and administrators have set themselves up in opposition to the students. And that’s a recipe for chaos.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t want to tar everyone with the same brush. When I was in high school, there were great teachers and awful teachers. But by and large, the most effective ones were kind of permissive, letting us get away with some youthful exuberance while simultaneously guiding that energy into a mildly productive course. We felt they were on our side, even if they had a job to do that we didn’t always want to follow.
Sure, some students need hardcases on their ass. But mostly, students just want teachers who respect them. I did. And in return, we mostly offered respect right back.
Two teachers giving each other a lap dance, though? It smacks of trying to be co0l — and trying much too hard. No one’s going to respect that.
And how do you treat someone you don’t respect? Maybe by mocking them? Pointing and laughing? Making fun? Or, in the modern vernacular, by posting a video of their embarrassing behaviour to YouTube.
All of which is good, because it exposed some stupid staff behaviour that wouldn’t have been exposed otherwise. I happen to believe that there is a lot more stupid staff behaviour going on — including overly harsh drug and technology crackdowns — that should be exposed.
I have no doubt that, had the authorities found drugs in their fruitless but invasive search, they would have trumpeted it in a news release that they were Keeping The Students Safe. Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Students! Produce more videos of your schools. You’ll do more for accountability than the division ever will.
Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers …. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.
…
What is usually said is that you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft. What counted as craft for James, though, was very different from what counted as craft for Hemingway. What counts as craft for Ann Beattie (who teaches at the University of Virginia) must be different from what counts as craft for Jonathan Safran Foer (who teaches at N.Y.U.). There is no “craft of fiction” as such.
I’ve snipped just two bits from the lengthy article, which I found interesting, but also lacking. It spends almost no time dealing with the number-one benefit that a creative writing class offers to the aspiring writer: it gets you writing. Once you’ve paid to enter the program, writing becomes homework — it becomes something you must do, something that can no longer be put off, something more than a hobby. A lot of people, I imagine, find that it takes a pleasurable pursuit and turns it tedious. In creative writing classes I’ve taken, I’ve really enjoyed the fact that writing becomes necessary — something I can tell other people that I have to go do. And I’ve benefited from an explosion of creativity when I’m forced to sit down and write and write and write.
University administrators would be forced to ask for the same kinds of ‘bailouts’ that banks and financial institutions are getting; the provinces would have to choose between handing it over or seeing universities that support tens of thousands of students collapsing into bankruptcy.
Increasingly since the late-80s, universities have operated along the basic principles of capitalist enterprise – keeping production costs down and maximizing surpluses …. With decreased funding from the state, universities have come to rely more and more heavily on user fees – student tuition – for their basic operating budgets.
…
In this context, it is no surprise that students increasingly view themselves not as participants in an intellectual pursuit, but as consumers who have paid for a service and expect adequate return on their investment …. Universities simultaneously present themselves less as places of learning and more as places where job requirements are fulfilled; the universities’ job then is simply to find the most efficient way possible to help their customers complete the necessary steps for their later employment.
Although I’m not sure Canadian society is ripe for a general student strike along the lines of what Shipley envisions, it’s at least refreshing to hear someone advocate something a little bit radical.
I also have my own thoughts on university education (ie. high tuition rates and student loans are a great way to keep students focused on getting a degree and getting the hell out of Dodge, not sticking around and being activists).
Shipley, you may recall, was one of the leaders of the York University strike last year, but he is also the driving force behind rabble-rousing rock-and-rollers The Consumer Goods. And they’re a heck of a good time. Buy their albums. Here’s one of my faves:
Eliot Spitzer — yes, that Eliot Spitzer — now has a rehabilitate-my-reputation gig with online magazine Slate, and he’s using the soapbox to put forth interesting ideas on things like CEO pay and “creative destruction.”
His latest column tackles the thorny question of how much students pay to get their post-secondary education. The answer: a lot. Even in Manitoba, where tuition fees were frozen for almost a decade, it’s hardly affordable to go to school. It’s even worse if you want a master’s or other post-graduate degree.
For years, it was hard to get people to listen to this problem, since so many of the baby boomers attended college when you could pay for the whole year’s worth with a good summer job. They just didn’t grasp how unaffordable it had become.
Now, though, as Gen Xers start to take over society’s discourse, there’s much more awareness of the huge burden that student loans can represent. Spitzer thinks he has a solution:
Instead of paying upfront or taking loans with repayment schedules unrelated to income, students would accept an obligation to pay a fixed percentage of their income for a specified period of time, regardless of the income level achieved. Suppose a university charged $40,000 a year in annual tuition. A standard 20-year loan in the amount of $160,000 (40,000 times four) would produce an immediate postgraduate debt obligation of $1,228.50 per month, or $14,742 per year, not sustainable at a salary of $25,000 or anything close to it. Under a smart loan program, the student could pay about 11 percent of his income, with an initial payback of $243 per month, or $2,916 per year, which is feasible at a job paying $25,000. If, after five years, the student’s salary jumped to $100,000, payments would jump accordingly and move up over time as income increases. After 20 years, assuming ordinary income increase, the loan would be paid off.
Even if your eyes glaze over at the numbers, the idea is simplicity itself: let’s not penalize students with sky-high loan payments as soon as they enter the workforce. Instead, let’s tailor the repayment to the student’s actual income.
