Post It!

Who would have thought that the most valuable tool in building a college curriculum would be Post It Notes?

In the Flashpoint office we have a wall, much like this one, full of two-foot square month by month calendars going from September -May. On each of those calendars are Post Its with perspective classes written on them. We need a tangible and visual reference for our academic calendar so we decided on little sticky squares of paper. We spent the better part of June and early July putting classes up on that wall. When we finally locked in on a schedule we transferred the information from the wall to Excel programs and then passed that info on to Flashpoint registrar Brad Bergeron. At that point Brad did his registrarial magic and Viola! students and faculty had a schedule for the year.

In addition to Post Its the other thing that really surprises me about this college building experience is how much time we have spent with the registrar. Everything we do in terms of class schedules and credit hours must get approved by Brad. At Columbia I didn't even know then name of the registrar. At Flashpoint he is ever present.

Here is a typical early July day. I am at my computer and Brad quietly walks over to me and says, "Excuse me Peter but you seem to have made a little mistake."

"Huh?" the dumb filmmaker replies.

"Yes, you have 37 screenwriting sections scheduled for group A and only 3 for group B, you know they have to be equal."

As much as I want to say a la Samuel L. Jackson, "Check out the big brain on Brad!" I say, "Sorry, I'll fix it," and slouch back over to the wall of Post Its.

PeterH

Drinking the Kool-Aid

On Wednesday this past week Howard Tullman, President and CEO of Flashpoint Academy, cuffed me on the back of the head. Yesterday, as we were waiting for people to arrive at a Flashpoint open house, founder and chairman Ric Landry slapped me on the forehead. Now if Paula Froehle, academic dean, slaps me across the face (inevitable) I will have hit the Flashpoint Academy beating trifecta. In all seriousness I take these whuppins' as signs of endearment (if not I have a pretty good law suit on my hands, I think).

We are a week away from opening the doors to the first class and all is terrific. The building at 28 N. Clark Street is state of the art and for the first time in my teaching career I feel I have all the tools and resources necessary to be the best teacher I can be. In all modesty and honesty I believe Flashpoint is going to be a big success and I take great pride in helping to get it off the ground.

More on Flashpoint developments as the week progresses but for now I need to work on my bobbing and weaving and keeping my left up.

PeterH

Sentimental Education- Part 2

Flaubert's Sentimental Education (that's him to the left) is a ironic and pessimistic novel, but what would you expect from the man who wrote Madame Bovary. I would like to think I am not that dark (I am an Optimist's son after all) but there are certainly some aspects of schooling that drive me mad.

As a teacher I think I draw on all the formal learning from my youth and distill it somehow into my own approach to teaching. I would like to believe I take the best of how I was taught and leave the rest behind. The following are some general things one would find in my classes. It is up to you to decide how Draconian I am.

Attendance- Come to my class. Columbia and now Flashpoint have these serious attendance polices- X number of absences means a drop of a letter grade, more means an automatic F, 15 minutes late is half an absence. (Fourteen minutes late is OK I guess?) I don't get it and don't care. One of the appeals of going to college for me was that I didn't have to go to class if I didn't want to. Just show up to my class on time and everything's cool.

Tests- I don't like them. I prefer oral exams and practical tests- show me you know how to do it. In the film business rarely is there one right answer, usually there are several ways to reach the same conclusion. A standard test doesn't allow for options.

Writing- We will write a lot, tear it up and write some more. You have to be able to express yourself through the written word.

Class participation- Critical. For starters it takes the pressure off the dumb teacher to fill up the time, but more importantly, when we start having a dialog in class as opposed to me talking at you, the class is better.

Presentation- Almost all of my classes have components of students making a presentation to the rest of the class and defending their position. You can not manage in today's workplace with out being able to speak well and concisely.

As I read over these last three topics (I tend to blog in stream of consciousness) it is clear to me that developing good communication skills is a driving force behind my teaching. Being in the communication business, I guess this makes sense.

PeterH

Sentimental Education- Part 1

School resumed this week in Chicago and the big yellow buses are a reminder of just how much I hated going to school. While I was a good student and had lots of friends and did lots of extracurricular activities I just plain hated going to school. All those rules and regulations, do this and do that- who needs it? But now I am a college teacher so go figure.

From Montessori until I graduated from high school I went to school everyday with my father. Each morning we would get up and have breakfast- the same thing, cereal. After 1700 of these breakfasts before my 18th birthday I now refuse to eat cereal. (The last time was in England a few years ago when my alternative was a “healthy” full English breakfast.)

Our conversation consisted of this: Dad: Eat your flakes. Me: OK.

The sum total of 14 years of weekday morning conversation- 4 words.

Several of those years my dad had a Volkswagon I had to push to get it started and then run to catch up to the car a la Little Miss Sunshine. These moments with my dad were often the highlight of my school day. It was downhill - literally from that start- from there.

So with apologies to Gustave Flaubert below are a series of highlights (lowlights?) of my early education.

Montessori- My grandmother, Kakky, picked me up and asked me what I learned today. I said, “I don’t know.” She said you were in school all day and didn’t learn anything? Oh to have been able to shift into my adult head and say, “You know it was all that 2+2 is 4 and ABC bullshit. Give me a break grandma!.” Instead I said something like “we used crayons” and hoped for unconditional grandmotherly love.

Second grade- Luckily I was allowed to skip first grade, I don’t think I could have handled any more rudimentary education. However, skipping a grade made me forever the youngest in my class.

Fourth grade- Each weekend Mrs. Hackworth (a sometime reader of this page) made the class memorize a poem and be prepared to recite it in front of the class on Monday morning. Now as every fourth grader knows poems rhyme, that’s the definition of poetry, right? Evidently not. Mrs. H. gave us “real poetry” the crap that doesn’t rhyme or make any sense. Poetry and public speaking- I’m in fourth grade this is not Victorian England! Note to Mrs. Hackworth, thanks to you I still have trouble sleeping on Sunday nights in anticipation of failing my poetry reading.

Fifth grade- An insane woman comes to our class room and speaks only in French to us. She refuses to allow any English. This is funny for the first five minutes, then we think she is seriously disturbed. This continues for days and weeks. Finally I burst out, “Je vais a la salle de bains.” Where this comes from even surprises me but my point is made and I was allowed to escape to the bathroom. (I know it really means “I go to the bathroom” but we had covered “May I” yet.)

Seventh Grade- By now I am thoroughly ensconced in the third ring of education Hell. Our assignment is to write a science report and make an oral presentation to the rest of the seventh grade on a topic picked randomly from a hat. My pick: the reproductive process of amphibians. No, nothing safe an easy like the Big Bang (at least my school believed in that) . Being good (strict?) parents I had to rehearse my speech in front of them. I do not know what is worse, talking about frog sperm in front of my parents or in front of 50 7th graders.

Ninth Grade- What is with this incessant need for my teachers to insist on memorization and public speaking? Draconian Mr. Grunwald makes the class memorize the Declaration of Independence from the preamble through the charges section. (Even then I was certain this is something that I would never need to do at any time of my life.) Then, over the course of a month he randomly picked students to recite passages to the class. So I memorized the damn thing and he never called on me!

That’s enough for now I am having bad flashbacks.

PeterH

Navel Gazing

It was an interesting week for the dumb filmmaker. As you saw in the previous posts I was simultaneously shooting a film and teaching eight incoming students. If it was 3:30, I must be teaching, 4pm, filmmaking and back and forth throughout the week. It was all a blur but it went well.

I didn't even think about becoming a filmmaker until I was in college. There was no path, I didn't know anyone in the business. Filmmaking- whatever that was- was something that happened in a place called Hollywood and I didn't give it much thought. Today it seems everyone knows a little something about how movies are made. DVD extras, websites and those infotainment TV shows all illuminate some part of the process, and as I result I think the barriers to entry in the business are much lower and more accessible. This is a good thing, I think.

Yet, despite how much my students thought they knew about the business, they were taken aback by what really happens on a film set. I think it was Werner Erhard (I am not a disciple, in my first draft I originally called him William- but a good quote is a good quote) who talked about three types of knowledge. 1) There is what you know you know. You use that in your life. 2) Then there is what you know you don't know- that is why you learn and discover. 3) Then there is big other area about what you don't know you don't know.

One of my jobs as a teacher is to expose students to the idea that there is a lot more out there than what they know they know and what they know they don't know. I like to peel back the curtain to expose something they didn't know existed, and then let them learn and discover on their own. When it works, like this past week, it works well.

PeterH