Bjorg Olafs

Why I am a lit professor

Road work is dirty work. You should have seen my father and uncles busting up the streets of New Haven, Conn., back in the summer of 1955 when I started to work for them. My job at age 11 was to make beer runs to Jacko Sullivan’s Tavern on Chapel Street to keep them from passing out under the July sun. In five years I would be swinging a hammer on the streets of The Elm City for the rest of my professional life.
It was that summer that I observed men lounging in fancy cafes along Chapel and York Streets in New Haven who never seemed to have to go to work. They wore $500 J. Press blue pinstripe suits and Harris Tweed jackets. They drove big new Caddies. They never had to wait to be seated at high-priced restaurants and got the best tables. And, they were always in the company of pretty girls.

Radical throwbacks: Top 10 classic games: Part 2

6 — “Mega Man 2”

This game is on a few “top” lists out there. It is the best-selling “Mega Man” title with over one million copies sold. This is a very hard game. Gamers have to be very precise when playing it. It’s frustrating at times, and it’s the only one of the series I owned.

You are Mega Man, and it’s your job to defeat Dr. Wiley, an evil robot builder. Players have to work their way through eight of his evil robots to get to him — I never made it.

Each robot has a unique weapon that once defeated, can help you defeat a different robot. There was a certain order players could beat them to make it easier but I was too young to figure that out, and by the time I was a “Nintendo Power” subscriber, The Super Nintendo Entertainment System had taken over, and no one was talking about “Mega Man 2” much anymore. 

A look back at ‘Grindhouse,’ a sleazy good time

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are two of the most popular filmmakers working today, both of whom got their start working on successful independent films during the early ’90s. Rodriguez released “El Mariachi,” which led to two more sequels, while Tarantino became a cult icon for his films “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.” 

After the duo collaborated on the films “Four Rooms” and “From Dusk ’til Dawn,” they teamed up for “Grindhouse.” Released April 6, five years ago, this fantastically sleazy salute to the exploitation flicks of the ’60s and ’70s opened to rave reviews from critics and disappointing box office results. 

The movie was distributed to theaters as a double feature, and at three-hours-and-11-minutes long, it may have been too much for audiences to handle.

First up was Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror,” a homage to the old zombie and killer virus films, about a deadly gas that turns innocent bystanders into mindless ghouls in a small Texas town. Shot in the style of an ’80s John Carpenter movie, “Terror” features plenty of thrills and scares, eerie techno music, and a plentiful amount of blood and guts. 

Modern society needs open minds

Typically we are encouraged to “think outside the box” for solutions to dilemmas and explanations of phenomena, although we are continuously reinforced to stay within our box via habits. These habits are a necessity to efficient and sensible living but act as a double-edged sword forcing us to confine and define ourselves within “the box.”

So what? The box isn’t that bad. It’s got four corners, a nice area, and most things fit into it really well. Well that last part is the problem. “Most things” fit into our boxes fairly well, but what of those that don’t?

I guess we could brush them off, call them irrelevant nonsense and move on. But that seems too easy. Let’s not use the same cop out for obtuse objects that we use to justify our finite box. So then what shall we do? Our box’s limitations have been exposed, and we’ve hopefully agreed not to rely on poor justifications.

Maybe here we should discuss the benefits of dismantling our comfortable box, and in its place institute an ever evolving and expanding geometric figure. This new figure that we strive to adapt will not seek to mold ideas to fit itself but will instead yearn to absorb all things as they are with the consciousness to review everything from all points of view.

For the sake of discussion we will call this figure a heptagon.

The heptagon in comparison to the box is troublesome. It requires more frames of reference, expects new methods to figure out its expansive area, and really doesn’t lend itself well to colloquial sayings. So why are we bothering?

Well, we’re causing ourselves this hassle because it is absolutely necessary. You see the box has been around far too long. Yes, it had its place at one point in time and was reliable, but that point in time has passed, and we have evolved. So, naturally our frame of reference should evolve as well.

The social war

As a teacher, I see many shifts occurring in education — most of them focusing on the primary conflict between traditional teacher-centered instruction and the more experimental student-centered pedagogy.

Despite the excitement I feel toward these changes, incorporating social media into the classroom is something that has proved a persistent headache for the new wave instructors (we call ourselves the edupunks).

Any conference or workshop about the best practices in education will have multiple presentations discussing social media. Instructors have been designing group projects and collaborative assignments by utilizing the visually appealing software provided by Facebook, Twitter and even blogs like Tumblr and Posterous.

I have been teaching composition and writing for more than three years, and I can vouch from personal experience that systems like Blackboard and WebCT are a joke compared to in-the-wild open source tools.