Tour and Guest Lecture at the Globe

I'm promising to keep this short and not too detailed because I really should attack some of the newly written papers before I head down to the Globe Theater to see Henry IV, part 1 tonight.

We've had our third official meeting, which was a little strange because the first part of it was out on the esplanade between the Thames and the theater, followed by a rollicking and informative tour / guest lecture by an actor-director, Nick Hutchison. Our first drizzle necessitated a bit of imposition on the café there, as my class wrote a quick blue-book journal-entry on the concept of "honor," so important to the history plays and especially this one; having the mini-class first was also an effective way of getting my class over to the theater at 9 AM for the tour / lecture which began at 10: there's some method to my madness.

Nick is an amazing guy, voluble and witty as so many of these highly educated Brits can be, with an actor's ease combined with a director's confidence and an erudition devoid of academic stuffiness. I have to go back and see what role he played in About a Boy, and other films that one might not have noticed yet another great non-star. After the two combined classes walked into the theater--with two other groups being toured in different locations of "the great O"--he regaled us with factoids from the capacity of the original theater (probably 3000) to the architectural compromises (wider stairways and more stairways), both of which were dictated by modern fire codes (just like the sprinkler heads peeking out over the thatched roof).

During the short break where students were allowed to roam a little, I checked in with him and discovered that he was at Worcester when I was at Oriel, and that many of that gang were still good friends. Small world. We then proceeded to a lecturer-space in the bowels of the building, where he gave more insights into just how little rehearsal time Elizabethan actors actually had to learn their parts (sometimes a day, sometimes longer), just how many plays they might learn in a single season (12 or more) and just why he thought the dramatic term "role" meant "role."

He got students up and reading, gave some more insights into the business of being a playwright in Shakespeare's day (humorously addressing both the strengths and weaknesses of Shakespeare in Love), and told some anecdotes of disasters he had experienced as an actor and director, before finishing to a rousing round of applause.

After that, I headed next door to the Tate Modern, marvelling at the giant power plant turned into a stunning museum space, with the Turbine Room itself--seemingly the size of a blimp hangar--becoming in its unadorned way a form of maximalist-minimalist art. Of course, I confess in my philistinism to being as confused about much of the pieces in the museum as I am about many of the musical offerings early in Berkeley Symphony Orchestra concerts--the stuff they put at the beginning, before the more accessible stuff that a graying audience even in our "sophisticated" town really wants to hear (and which that audience might bail out after hearing, if the jarring "educational" stuff was at the end).

I ran into my colleague John Boe as I walked past the Globe, and tagged along on his mini walking tour of Shakspeare's London (I will return tonight to sample the chorizo and arugula sandwich he so ardently recommended at the Borough Market).
In return, I bought him a beer at a bankside bar, before we went our separate ways. We met later on that night at the Old Vic, where he had an extra ticket for As You Like It, which I watched instead of the World Cup semifinal. Once a Shakespeare geek, always a Shakespeare geek I guess.

Too smart a board for its own good

This morning I taught my second class in the Freddie Mercury room (I can't help hearing "He's just a poor boy from a poor family" whenever I set foot in there, thank you Bo Rhap), and once again was flummoxed by the high tech display board. This time I typed up prompts on the laptop for in-class writing and reading in advance, but then when it came time to display them--sometimes nothing happened. The projector would poll the available devices and wouldn't find "Computer 1." Then eventually it'd come up--but after a rhythm-destroying gap.

So I ponder this example of a teaching technology that perhaps solves a problem while creating many others. I suppose what makes it strange is that, at least at Davis, these projection systems are piggybacked onto either whiteboards (in computer classrooms, to avoid chalk-dust) or conventional chalkboards, with the result that instructors always have a low-tech back-up plan (something I preached when I was Coordinator for Computer Assisted Instruction, back in the day).

The screen is also much smaller than a conventional board, meaning that in practice one has to either erase or tile / mask previous screens, instead of shifting to a different part of a board, or pulling down a windowshade board, or whatever. Yet in a writing class or even a lit class, I often would return to what I had written earlier in the class session, making connections and elaborations in an iterative process that mirrors the actual writing process (of re-vision, seeing again). This is much more difficult with these electronic touch-boards--or if they do facilitate it, the documentation is either missing or too turbid to be useful.

I suppose such a board is perfect for the mode of "teaching" that I loathe the most: PowerPoint presentations, with their short bulleted lists, their tendency to oversimplify, and their hostility to subordinated and complex layered answers to real questions. Ah, progress.

Bus tour, noodles bar, tourist theater(re)

As of now I've met the students, done our bus tour, had our welcome dinner, and had our first class; this evening we had our night at a West End theatre, seeing The 39 Steps, included as part of our fee to FIE. Don't even want to think about the kickback possibilities, as the show seemed to me to have a bit of a worn-around-the-edges feel to it.

We had some adventures getting started, with a couple of folks coming late to the orientation after airplane adventures (including missing luggage, and cancelled connections), and this whole phase was made slight more complicated by the coordination by FIE itself: they take care of a lot of things, including a little walking tour, and their own little orientation, and of course there's some overlap / miscommunication possibilities at every turn (e.g., they switched the orientation at the residence from 7 PM to 6 PM, and though each student was told the new time as they checked in, what do you know, a couple of students showed up at 6:45 for the old time. Nothing tragic, and the Kensington / Queens Gate Terrace location is hard to beat, even if the place is a bit of a warren.

The bus tour yesterday was pretty good, with the usual stops at Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and St Paul's, and the Sunday traffic was a little heavy on our way home; luckily Ian the driver showed surgical skill and awareness of just how wide the coach was, and Angie the guide mostly calibrated her spiel correctly so that none of the jetlagged ducklings fell asleep.



After that it was off to Wagamama, an ear-piercingly loud noodle bar / fusion restaurant in South Ken, certainly less touristic than last year's Olde Englishy trap in Covent Garden, and more edible as well (salmon teriyaki beats steak-and-mushroom pie in my book, and in 95% of my students' books as well). I'd actually consider going back there, which is more than I could say for anywhere I ate last year.

I spent the rest of my evening trying to tie up loose ends (doing accounting stuff) and getting ready for class in the morning. Despite being a grizzled veteran, I still get butterflies before the first class, more so when as many things can go wrong as in Summer Abroad, a little to the surprise of my onsite coordinator Tiffany. And there were a few glitches, I must confess: the 28 of us burst the seams of our classroom--the Freddie Mercury Room (all of FIE's classrooms are named for Famous People Who Lived In Kensington)--and the air conditioning was so stunningly efficient that people were getting goosebumps (and whining). Actually the draft was pretty obnoxious, and it took some time to figure out the remote for it after Katie H gave her half-hour briefing and left the class to me.

The other thing that was a little laughable (the joke being on me) was a high-tech white-boardish contraption that projects the laptop but can also be "written on" using different colored pen-like stylus thingies. Inexplicably the laptop refused to wake up properly for me after Katie's powerpoint, stumping Amit the IT guy who had to bring in another one, and the device itself has a hair-raisingly impenetrable user interface. Definitely brings out the Luddite in me, longing for a simple dry-erase board or even the flip-charts I used in Paris and Les Houches last year. This device is persnickety--if you write at normal speed, it only picks up abut half your touches, leaving a disconcerting set of glyphs behind.

That said, I managed to demystify 1 Henry IV a little (we will see it Thursday night at the Globe), orient them to the Tour, go over academic expectations, and even get them writing a little, on a couple of early essays about travel, by Bacon and Johnson. The group seems nice and somewhat cooperative, though some of the people who want to talk might not be the best people to be talking, and from the results of my afternoon hours of blue-book-marking (I brought over books for them to do their in-class journaling in). I am not sensing the same energy-sinks as last year, though it's too early to tell.

After my hours in a café and a welcome Skype call to Amelie and Alex, now ensconced at Lake Tahoe with one set of cousins, I did a couple of enjoyable laps around Holland Park,

showered, and headed by Tube to the Criterion Theater, where I bemusedly watched the four actors power through the tourist-pleasing fare. The only real downside was that my seat was crunched next to my 6'9" student who had to fold himself into his seat in such a way that I might need a chiropractor tomorrow if my stretching just now didn't do the trick.

As usual, it's a bit surprising to get out of the theater at 10 PM and have it be just dusk, but that is life in Northern Europe. So I am pretty much caught up here…. Lather, rinse, repeat until July 31, with scary transfers and foreign languages tossed in on the subsequent legs.

Now to sleep and do it all again.