This weekend was the world premier (doesn’t that sound grand?) of our son Thomas’s play “The House of Atreus”. He wrote the play for the Morris Area High School (MAHS) folks to perform as their entry in the annual One Act competition, and it was a really wonderful opportunity to give back to the theatre program that was so valuable to him during his time at MAHS.

The play is a challenging one to perform, involving a lot of monologue from the four leads, and a lot of synchronized response from the chorus. There’s not a lot of action, as the play emphasizes ideas instead of car chases and love scenes. The cast really rose to the challenge, though, and managed to own these complex concepts and stories.

I’m particularly grateful that teacher/director Seth Kelly was willing to work with Tom on this. Not everyone would be willing to take a flyer on a still-being-written play by a college student. Mr. Kelly, however, was incredibly supportive of Tom’s writing, and was then able to help his student actors inhabit these complex characters and make the play really work on the stage.

All this would have been totally wonderful if all that happened were the two performances at the high school. Today, however, they took the play to the one act sub-sections and won first place! This qualifies them to go on to sections next Saturday (8 Feb). If they can take first there as well then they perform in the state event on Friday the 14th! Taking first at sections is tough as the competition is likely to be stiff, but a parent can hope :-)

Congratulations to Thomas for writing such a cool play, and to all the MAHS folks that brought it to life on the stage!

We really liked Mr. Kelly’s description of the story in the program:

This bold and honest Greek drama is a tragedy within a tragedy, focusing on Agamemnon’s children. Agamemnon, a hero of the Iliad and the Odyssey, has no shortage of heroic feats and triumphs under his storied belt, but his children’s struggles are more complex. In popular mythology, these four siblings are rarely given depth, often acted upon as pawns, and usually treated as victims rather than individuals. This play gives them the voices they lost millennia ago.

Iphigenia, Chrysothemis, Electra, and Orestes must face the terrible realities of their existence in order to make peace with their lives. As they bravely face the trauma of their pasts, they grasp for hope’s elusive grip. The truths they stumble upon along the way are as relevant today as they were in ancient Greece.

and his “Director’s Note”:

I knew that selecting a Greek play for our One Act this year was ambitious. After all, stripping actors of all physical objects and elaborate scenery leaves them with little but their own dramatic imaginations to carry the story. That said, at the production’s onset I couldn’t have fathomed the intensity we eventually found in these stories and characters. I’m tremendously proud of our cast and crew, and I would never have burdened them with such a complex and challenging script if I didn’t have faith in their ability and dedication.

We are pleased that this year’s show was written by MAHS alum Thomas McPhee, who currently studies Theatre and Writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. I am delighted that his passions have continued to inspire us beyond his tenure here, and I sincerely hope this won’t be the last time he lends us his talent.

It is also worth noting that, as in all Greek tragedies, very weighty themes abound in this show. At its best, tragedy informs the audience how we might improve the business of our own fleeting lives, therefore an ever-present, foreboding sense of mortality drives these stories. We recognize that these concepts might be difficult for younger children to digest, so please don’t feel locked in to your ticket purchase if, knowing this, you’d rather not have your children hear about violence, war, sacrifice, death, and revenge. We understand! The ticket taker can refund you if you leave before the show begins.

…a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. – Lewis Hyde

Tomorrow (24 June) marks the 24th anniversary of our marriage!

There are so many things I’m grateful for, and no way to enumerate them or document them here, so I’ll settle for an example.

Among her many “strangely inventive” artistic talents, Sue makes books. Wonderful, handmade books, where she cuts and folds all the paper, sews together the signatures, builds the cover, and glues it all together. Some of these are displayed in galleries, while others (such as the one pictured here) are notebooks or journals filled with blank pages inviting us to share our thoughts in word or sketch.

For the past several years, Sue has made such journals as high school graduation gifts for our and, more substantially, Tom’s friends in that year’s graduating class. As he moves on to college, the numbers are beginning to contract, but over the years she’s made many dozens of these books, often for people we didn’t actually know terribly well. That’s a lot of work, constructing by hand an object whose future is far from certain. She is, after all, making blank books, in an age where the future of books is at best unclear, an age where most are far more likely to send a text message or post on a blog [I’M LOOKING AT ME!] than to write a letter or keep a journal on paper.

Thus these are, in the true sense that Hyde means in the opening quote, gifts. As handcrafted pieces of art, they have clear worth, but their value (and how they are valued by the recipients) is quite uncertain.

Yet she keeps making them. In a flurry of activity every May between the end of the University school year and the high school graduation she cuts and folds and glues and frets. She picks out different papers to use as covers, and has Tom give her feedback on which covers would make the most sense for which graduate. She increases the worth of the world (if not its value) through these gifts, each of which is in fact a multiple gift. It is obviously a gift to the graduate, but this effort is also a gift to our son, and a thank-you to the families of these students who have been important to him.

And, to the point of all this, these are also a gift to me. For while each of these books is made by her and is officially a gift from Thomas, her work enriches us all and the glow it casts as it goes out into the world reflects back on our whole family even if it was her hands that did all the sewing.

So I say “Thank You”, for this and the untold gifts large and small that she has shared with me. It has been a truly splendid 24 years together, and I look forward to many more decades to come!

With all my love,

     – Nic

And has packed his bags for Egypt.

He’s going on a UMM course “Pyramids and politics on the Nile” led by UMM Poli Sci faculty Sheri Breen and UMM librarian Jayne Blodgett, both super cool people. This is a pretty structured experience (full itinerary as a PDF) using Cairo as their primary base but with trips down the Nile to Luxor and Aswan, visits to Alexandria, and time at a desert research station.

One of their requirements is to keep a journal during the trip, and they all had to write a “Letter to Cairo” before departing as their first entry, and I thought I’d play along.

Dear Cairo,

Please take good care of our son. I really wanted to start with something more profound, but to be honest this is the first thing that I thought of. I’m genuinely not worried. His mother and I survived a number of great study abroad experiences which did so much to define who we are, and we’re sure he’ll have an amazing and glorious time. Still, it’s an exciting time to be in Egypt, and I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d play nice.

Inspire some wonderful writing. People keep telling him to take lots of pictures, but they’re really barking up the wrong tree, as he doesn’t really do that. (Here the apple fell on a slope and rolled well away and down the hill.) Tom is much more likely to digest and record his experience in words than images. It probably won’t be straightforward journaling, however, and instead be more indirectly represented in his poetry. “Vulcan’s bed”, for example, is a response to his time with me in Lava Beds National Monument two years ago; it is his version of all my photos. So while I know that he’ll have phenomenal experiences in Egypt, I hope to see them creep (or smash) into his poetry and other writings.

Open some doors; I’m sure he’ll walk through them. Morris has been a wonderful town for Tom to grow up in, but it’s a pretty small world. Thomas has had the huge advantage of living in the UK twice, and travelling in Europe on both of those trips, but it’s still been a very European life. You represent such a fascinating crossroads of history and culture: Mediterranean and Arab and African and Islamic and pharaonic and crowded and vibrant and changing and old and new. In 3.5 weeks he’ll only be able to sample such a feast, probably taking more than he realizes in some ways and less in others. When he comes back, though, I suspect he’ll never quite see things the same, sometimes in ways that may take years to fully realize.

I know that he’ll be a tiny mite on the huge organism that is Cairo, so odds are that you’ll never even notice he was there. You’ll loom huge for him, however, and we appreciate all you have to offer.

Best wishes,

    Nic aka Thomas’s Dad

The overwhelming flood of content that we are now drowning in clearly puts paid to those assumptions. The content is out there, free, waiting for us to find it and stuff it in our heads, with more on the way. “Free on-line class shakes up photo education” from Wired is a nice example of how the content space is changing dramatically, as well as implying that traditional face-to-face education is perhaps a doomed beast:

“I think we’re heading towards a place where we’ll no longer be able to charge for content,” says Worth. “And that scares the shit out of academic institutions.”

This does indeed scare academics and administrators, and excites lots of entrepreneurs who (often rightly) feel that they compete with traditional institutions in the content space. Those, both in and out of the academy, who worry are ultimately missing the point. Content was never what we should have been charging for, and if that’s all we were doing we were frankly doing it wrong. Our real value is in the life changing experiences. When I talk to our alumni, they rarely reminisce about specific courses, and even less often about particular content. What they remember are the things they built and the experiences they shared. They remember the love Margaret Edson talks about so eloquently in this 2008 graduation speech at Smith College:

2008 Smith College Commencement Margaret Edson from Smith College on Vimeo.

So those of us in the Academy need to get over our fascination with content and focus on the business of trying to make a difference in the lives of our students. And students and parents need to become smarter shoppers and look for schools that will give them the experiences that will make a difference in their lives. Any school can give you names and dates, facts and figures, drills and exercises. And so can the Internet. A good school challenges you to discuss, write, build, experience, and understand, which is something that people are a hell of a lot better at than books or web pages.

P.S. The Academy isn’t the only place where we’re struggling to figure out The Point. This excellent post by Vaguery on what coworking is and isn’t is extremely relevant and comes to many of the same conclusions: Experience and community matter. Hop on and stoke the engines, peeps; we’ve got places to go and things to do.

The Incident at Tower 37 from bitfilms.com.

Hampshire College was one of the schools Tom and I visited on our big tour of New England colleges last month, and we saw a bit of student animation as we passed through one of the buildings. While we were visiting with Lee Spector (a friend of mine who teaches at Hampshire), the film came up and he told us we could find it online at bitfilms.com. One of the things that most impressed us both about Hampshire was the incredible quality of the student work there, and the videos at bitfilms are wonderful examples. These animated shorts are directed by professor Chris Perry, who came to Hampshire from Pixar. You can definitely see his Pixar background, as the animation (which is truly splendid) is always in service of an interesting story, and the characters have wonderful depth despite the brevity of the films.

As well as “The incident at Tower 37”, I also definitely recommend their other two bitfilms shorts (“Catch” and “Displacement”), as well as the 2010 Hampshire student animation demo reel and independent Hampshire student films such as “Nick the Shoes” by William Colón. All really impressive stuff that sets the bar awfully high for everyone in academia.

We then spent most of the day hanging around Portland together, including a visit to the mighty and wonderful Powell’s City of Books (one of the last, great independent book stores) and checking in at GECCO to get my registration stuff. Tom totally loved Powell’s (“I could get lost in here!”), and has in fact spent large amounts of my money and his time there this week while I was at the conference. We also went out and saw Toy Story 3 that night, which turned out to be every bit as good as everyone’s said it is – lots of fun and very well written.

Day 8 was our last college visit in this part of the world, as we headed up to Olympia, Washington (2 hours north of Portland) to visit Evergreen State College. This was a real eye opener for both of us. I knew Evergreen was cool (and another of the small number of public liberal arts colleges in the U.S.), but didn’t know a lot of the details, and I think we both found the unusual curriculum and environment really interesting and thought provoking.

I had arranged beforehand to meet some of the computing faculty at Evergreen so we could learn a little more about their program as part of a program review we’re doing at Morris, so after the information session and tour we met up with Sherri Shulman and then headed over to meet her husband and fellow CS faculty, Neal Nelson. When Neal walked in, there was this very weird moment where we both those we knew each other but weren’t sure why. Duh, duh, and double duh – Neal was my undergraduate thesis advisor at Reed! I’d lost track of him when he left Reed in 1988, and I somehow thought he’d gone into industry so I wasn’t even looking to find him anywhere in our travels. Given all that and the the fact that his name doesn’t particularly stand out (and that I’m really crap with names), I totally didn’t consider the possibility that I knew this Neal guy we were going to see. After recovering from that somewhat awkward start, Sherri, Neal, and I had a really excellent conversation that ran a couple of hours easy. Lots of catching up on old times, as well as discussing undergraduate computing curriculum with limited resources in a public school – many thanks to both of them for all their time!

After returning to Portland, we went to Papa Haydn’s, possibly the best source of wonderfully scrumptious and rich desserts that I know of in the U.S. I had a wonderful Autumn Meringue and it was just like being a college student again (without the metabolism of a 20 year old). We used to walk out to Papa Haydn’s from Reed (maybe a 30 minute walk) several times a year and indulge, and was so cool to go back and find that it really hadn’t changed much in all those years.

That night was the opening reception at GECCO, so Tom and I hung around for a few hours eating little snacky things and chatting with various folks. Tom had never met most of my EC friends and colleagues, and he was very cool at meeting a bunch of strangers that are, even worse, all science nerds to a very high degree. Luckily it’s a really cool group of people, and I think he actually enjoyed himself.

By Day 9 I’d actually skipped out on the bulk of the first two days at GECCO, so at this point I essentially abandoned my son to the wilds of downtown Portland and started pretending to be a scientist for a bit. He spent most of his time hanging at Powell’s and reading books, while I listened to people talk about their cool evolutionary computation research.

That night I did actually skip out on the last session, though, and went back to Reed to join a bunch of faculty that have a regular Friday beer and food gathering at Woodstock Wine and Deli up the hill from campus. Jim had invited me to join them, and it was a great chance to meet some people I knew that I’d missed before (like Ray Mayer) and a bunch of other faculty that are new to the college since I was a student there in the dim past.

I wasn’t the only one meeting up with old friends, as Tom met up with Perry Webster from Morris (currently attending the University of Portland) and hung with her and a family friend pretty much the whole evening, which was a neat chance for him to spend a little time with people more his age :-).

Day 10 was much the same, although I stayed at the conference pretty late because the poster session and associated reception was that evening.

Day 11 (today) was the end of the conference, including eating lunch in the hotel sports bar with a bunch of very enthusiastic Europeans watching the World Cup final! Eli Mayfield (UMM ’09, now a grad student at Carnegie Mellon studying natural language processing) gave a talk today, and did a really excellent job. Tom and I went out to Jake’s Famous Crawfish with Eli and Bill Tozier. Jake’s was a great seafood house back in the day, and they didn’t disappoint, providing us with excellent food to go with the fine conversation. That was a great way to end our time in Portland!

Now we’re off to bed, and tomorrow we drive south to Tule Lake and Lava Beds National Monument. With a little luck we may hook up with Wayne Manselle in Eugen on the way!

This year’s CSci graduates included students graduating with high distinction, students who’d published their research in major international conferences, done extensive volunteer work, travelled the world, pursued diverse interests, and won highly competitive national awards. Some are going into grad school, some to jobs, some to volunteer work, and some are still trying to figure out the next step. One of the great advantages of a small department is that I’d worked personally with almost all of them on special projects, and had the rest in at least a few classes, and I consider it an honor and a privilege to have gotten to know them.

And that’s just the CSci grads. Another advantage of a small campus is you get to know lots of students in lots of areas. People I knew from the radio station graduated today, along with committee members, musicians, artists, actors, historians, psychologists, biologists, and the lot. This included two Truman Scholars and, as we were reminded today, the only other schools that could boast two Truman Scholars at their graduation this year were Stanford and Wellesley. Not bad for a little school in the middle of nowhere that no one’s ever heard of, eh?

Talking about how great this or that group of students is always sounds dangerously like comparing children, but we just keep getting cool students to work with. This is really the “norm”, whatever that means when both the individuals and groups have such distinct personalities. These folks leave, taking with them a lot of experience and knowledge and enthusiasm, and there’s no doubt that we’ll miss them. There are, however, plenty of great students still on campus, and wonderful new admits that will be joining us in August.

So, best wishes to all this year’s graduates.

Do cool things.

And send us a postcard now and then.

P.S. I’ll try to get the pictures I took today up on Flickr sometime in the next few weeks, but with grading, the May Session course, and being in Ann Arbor the second half of the week, processing all those photos is going to have to wait a bit.