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![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jimvanpelt | |
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Here's the assignment (instead of a traditional essay): My honors 10th graders finished reading Something Wicked This Way Comes, a book that is so cool that almost every teacher in the department teaches it (replacing one of the other choices, Bless Me Ultima, Tom Sawyer or Catcher in the Rye). The students had to find a quote from the book that they would like to illustrate. This is the easy part since you can hardly open that book without finding something arresting to contemplate. Then they illustrated it on a piece of poster board with the quote included. Doing the art is fun and a nice change of pace from the other ways we have worked with literature, particularly since we are at the end of the year. The payoff in the assignment, though, is when they present their quote to the class in a sort of show and tell of their poster. They have to connect the scene they chose to illustrate with a theme in the book. I've included one their posters here.  I spend a lot of time talking about theme as just what a work says about its topics. So, Romeo and Juliet, for example, has numerous topics, like friendship, love, violence, revenge, etc. But a topic is not a theme. It doesn't become a theme until you make a statement about the topic. "War" is only a topic, but "War is hell" is a theme. I also stress that there really is no such thing as the theme in a work. Works have multiple themes, including some that appear to contradict each other. A teacher who says, "This is the theme" in a work is expressing an opinion, not a statement of fact. A theme, to be valid, must be supportable from the text, so just any old statement about a story isn't necessarily a theme, but there are many ways to look at text. At any rate, most of the kids find it kind of liberating that I'm not expecting them to find the "right" answer for theme, and that if they can support their interpretation, their expression of the work's theme can be valid. Most honors kids get the idea that all literature is essentially metaphorical. That we tell stories because they are meaningful to us in some way. If they weren't meaningful, we'd be left when the work is done scratching our heads and asking, "What was the point of that?" A discussion of theme is just a way of asking what the work says about the universe or the human condition. Some stories have such familiar themes that they hardly seem worth discussing, like "love conquers all," or "athletes who are pure of heart can defeat stronger or faster but corrupt competitors." Something Wicked This Way Comes presents interesting themes in unfamiliar ways. The discussions of the posters so far have been wonderful. Tags: teaching
Variant of "ugh":  chipper
Tune of the moment: "Crown of Creation," the Best of Jefferson Airplane
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deannahoak | |
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Originally published at Deanna Hoak. Please leave any comments there. I was reminded of the movie I Am Legend today, which I’d seen a while back and mostly enjoyed despite what I considered a pretty big plot issue. (Does anyone know if they have the equivalent of copyeditors for movies? They really should.)
It seemed to me that if rats can get the disease (and they can–the protagonist is doing experiments on diseased rats), it would be impossible for there to still be human survivors. :-/ And that brings up an interesting point for viewers and readers: I don’t think most people want to have to come up with excuses for a serious story in order to take charge of suspending their own disbelief. (I’m not talking about having to explain something that’s clearly fantasy–I mean issues like this for which there is perhaps a logical explanation, but the viewers never see it.) So yes, we can assume that even though dogs in I Am Legend can get the disease, maybe it has to be somehow induced in rats. Or maybe there’s some other reason they haven’t taken over. Whatever it is, though, I have to come up with it myself in the course of the movie in order to suspend my own disbelief. I actually would have enjoyed the movie more with a nod toward whatever it was, though maybe that’s just me.
As a reader or viewer, what kind of issues do you want explained? As a writer, how much do you feel it’s fair to leave up to the reader to figure out? Some explanations will always exist only in the writer’s mind, but which should those be? Tags: blog
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the_flea_king | |
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The New Sleekness » Little Brother, in progress
Tor designer Pablo Defendini has, in his spare time, done up an alternative cover to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (which I hope to getting around to reading sometime this decade). I really love the approach of this cover design, and from what I’ve read about the book anyway, it seems really appropriate. The addition of easter eggs means after reading the book, you have a newfound appreciation to it. I like the illustrator style–it’s not something you see in SF book covers very often, so I think this book would stand out if I saw it on the shelf. The typography is tight, well done, and going with the Neil Gaiman quote prominently like that is a damned good decision that will help sell the book.
I’m adding this site to my feeds. I’m more interested in cover design lately, and I think his work is particularly inspiring.
Here’s a progression of that Little Brother sketch I put up a few days ago. This is what happens when I have a weekend to myself. I’ve had lots of fun putting this together, particularly including little easter eggs (hints: run the binary through a translator; check out the ‘maker’s brand’ on the arphid on the spine, etc.)
Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there. Tags: graphic design
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the_flea_king | |
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For my first web design/css tutorial, I wanted to talk about a problem that I had, and how I solved it. This is pretty simple stuff, but it took me a while to grasp the idea, so I thought I’d share it with the half-dozen of you who do this sort of work.
Below is a screen capture of a footer of a blog I’m designing for a client. Typically, I like to include the navigation redundantly at the bottom of a page so that, rather than scrolling back to the header, a user can jump to wherever they want to go next. You’ll see this kind of basic redundant navigation in a lot of places.
The little line between links is called a pipe, and as a separator, it is pretty common. It’s just a simple little visual element to help delineate between the nav items. The trouble comes in when you want to use these in combination with dynamically generated code from WordPress.
The List Code
First off, navigations should pretty much always be a list in html. That’s what lists are for, and styling them is great and easy. And, coincidentally, WordPress returns a call for pages with list code. So the HTML for this list of links looks like this:
<ul>
<li><a href=“#” title=“Home”>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=“#” title=“Blog”>Blog</a></li>
<li><a href=“#” title=“Fiction”>Fiction</a></li>
<li><a href=“#” title=“Other Writing”>Other Writing</a></li>
<li><a href=“#” title=“About Rudi”>About Rudi</a></li
</ul>
I stripped out some classes that WordPress adds automatically, as I don’t need them here. All of the above is contained in a div with an id of #footer. So, note that nowhere in that code is the pipe iteself. That’s because I am adding the pipe with CSS. You can add characters with CSS, you ask? Yep!
The CSS
#footer ul {list-style-type:none; position:absolute;
left:300px; top:27px; font-size:16px;}
#footer ul li {display:inline; color:#e3bd8e;}
#footer ul li:after {content:" |";}
So what’s going on here? First of all, I am using Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset above this, so all of that default padding and styling on a list has been stripped. This means the only styling that happens is the styling you want, and it creates a baseline between browsers. It really makes my job easier.
So we’re styling the list itself to have no bullets, and we’re positioning it absolutely within the container. You don’t have to do that, but I just found it easier for my needs in this particular footer. Next, I wanted the list all on one line, so I added display:inline. Finally, I’m using the pseudo class :after and the property content to insert a space and the pipe after each item on the list. Say my client wants these items separated instead by an asterisk? Easy enough to change across the entire site with that one line.
Pseudo classes aren’t something I often use, so the next thing I wanted to do tripped me up. The code above will add a pipe after each li tag, but I don’t want one on the last one. There’s no reason for it. How in the world do I do that? I know how to use the :last-child pseudo class, but it alone wouldn’t let me remove the pipe. Turns out, you can and should chain together pesudo classes
#footer ul li:last-child:after {content:" ";}
I probably could have set that to content:none as well, now that I think about it. But a plain space in my case works just fine.
So there you have it. The moral of the story? Chain pseudo classes together to get what you want. Any questions?
Related Links:
Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there. Tags: css, tutorial, web design
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