Renaissance Learning: My Personal Findings

This course has been challenging and rewarding at the same time.  The learning curve was substantially high at the beginning of the course, yet rather than being daunting, I feel that the experience has inspired me.  This post is a summation of my observations about the academic blog, and my emphasis on Renaissance Teaching Methods.  I have built a personal learning plan that reached the following working thesis.  I call it working because while it does make a specific claim, that claim is mostly based on my learning process thus far, and given additional time, would likely further adjust becoming even more specific.  Here is that thesis:

Returning to the Renaissance Teaching Methods employed to teach English, particularly the practice of the Imitation of subject and form, will help students develop a system of analysis that they can apply to texts in visual, audio, tactile, and written formats.

Let me explain how I got here:

Letter to Martin

Here is a reply to an email that Martin sent me about our play:

I think this is dead on.  I’m finishing up the introductory scene to justify the incorporation of fictional characters with “real” people.  I am doing some interesting things with the fruit and Schrödinger’s Cat.  I think together the two paradoxes will help to justify what otherwise could be seen as simply meta-Theater: a term I am not sure I want directly applied to this.  We will have to see, I suppose that will be up to the critics to judge.  I love how loaded you made the scene, it was fantastic.  I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t just me thinking it was funny, so I had the dimmest one of my roommates read a section of it and he was laughing quite a bit, so I think we are dead on in that field.  I don’t think I want to do the Butterfly scene in the beginning.  I think it would play out better latter on.  Your characterization of hamlet works great.  I have some ideas about him being there and not there at the same time that we’ll need to discuss but that idea doesn’t come into the fore till much later, so for now we should be good.

As far as “scene two,” I think that keeping it funny is a good idea.  Perhaps a parallel to the plight of Hamlet occurring among the actual characters would be a good way of illustrating the need for better resolution without needing to have him directly discuss it.  Again the double entendre should work great here.  I’ll get my scene over to you and then this next one that we are working on can kind of tie the two together, so that we can then move on to act 2. 

These are my thoughts,

Bryan

Plotting to Avoid Disaster

Here is a plot summary for the play.  I suggest enlarging the image.  These really are the bare bones of it.  There are so many things that go on in it, and a flurry of concepts that we want to approach.  The summary is separated into three main segments.  “The Events” gives a brief blow by blow for each act of the play.  So far it looks like a five act play.   The other two segments deal with the progression of two of the main concepts that underpin the idea of the play.  As you can tell one deals directly with Hamlet, while the other concept deals with academia.  I wanted to keep the construction of the play fairly simple so that I could focus on concepts.  This is in line with the tips from Tom Stoppard that I posted about previously.  Since I said I would catalog the progress of the play, I wanted to get this posted.  Right now Martin is doing some research while working on a few character sketches, and I am working on the opening scene.  Hopefully I will have that done by the weekend.  Feel free to comment or ask questions.

Making a Play

So, after much consideration and analysis Martin and I have decided to write a play based on our observations of several of Shakespeare’s works, as well as a few other key plays that relate to the themes that we are discovering.  I think this will be a good opportunity to synthesize my learning, and to put into action a few of the specifics that I have observed as linguistic trends.  We have a lot of ideas and plan to record our journey from concept to concrete on our individual blogs.  To keep them from being mirror blogs of each other, I will be putting in a lot of the back reasoning behind the choices I make in crafting the play so as to show the relationship between the things I study, and the play.  If all goes according to plan we should have the plot outline completed, and a handful of scenes for the play done by the end of next week.  As I post the ideas and progress of the play, please feel free to provide as much input as you would like.  This is a bit ambitious, but it is the overall end project that I hope to do for the course since it will reflect the things learned throughout this course in an engaging way, or at least I sure hope that you find this more entertaining than a term paper.