>> ^FishBulb:

If "any intelligent person will evaluate an argument or what is being said by the core information facts and logic , not the poetry and colourful use of language", then why are you so upset that he is "so verbose and shouting"?


Because he is a teacher doing a specific talk to a receptive audeance who he acnolages at the start as alredy knowing the subject mater and thus would know that the students don't need him to be so verbose and noisy to understand what he is saying.

also my comment above says "does make some valid observations and interesting listen just a shame about the above points. " so I acknowledged the content of his talk and just point out that the verbosity and loud voice is a waist of his effort.

I am not "upset"

If "any intelligent person will evaluate an argument or what is being said by the core information facts and logic , not the poetry and colourful use of language", then why are you so upset that he is "so verbose and shouting"?

>> ^Kofi:

My favorite philosopher. His books Outside ethics and Politics and the real are fantastic. I can't wait to watch this later tonight.
BTW Westy, he's a philosopher. Being overly verbose is what they do


lol I know but its just stupid , any intelligent person will evaluate an argument or what is being said by the core information facts and logic , not the poetry and colourful use of language , in this context especially where he is presenting to university students it makes little sense for him to be so verbose and shouting.

If his books are more concise then id defiantly reed them.

This beautiful video was sent to me by my dearest friend and I haven't stopped watching/listening to it since. I tried to sift it but found it already here, and since it's been qualitied already, I guess I can only *promote it.

The director made a different version of this film for an ad, starring the poetry and voice of Leonard Cohen, music by Clint Mansell: http://videosift.com/video/Two-Worlds-Narrated-by-Leonard-Cohen

Some celestial event. No - no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea.

I made it to 5:01, but probably only because I was already insane from hours and hours of reading annoying critical literature about women writers of 17th century poetry.

>> ^critical_d:

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.


Exactly what I thought of, critical_d!

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I've got two perspectives on some of these comments and the video, and thought I'd chime in with some (hopefully not overly longwinded) history / anecdotes:

First, I grew up and attended public school K-12 in Kansas in the 80's and 90's. Overall I am very pleased with the quality of education I received and the teachers I had. From High School, I remember having 3-4 standout excellent teachers, a whole lot of adequate / no-complaints teachers, and 3-4 teachers that I thought were sub-par.

The excellent teachers stand out in my memory because they got me more interested in subjects that I already had some interest in, OR because they made me appreciate subjects that I was otherwise pretty ambivalent about. For example, my math teacher who I studied Geometry, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, and AP Calculus with was fantastic. When I was in his classes, I loved learning about math. When I went to University and studied Calc 2 in a lecture hall with 400 other students and teacher-student interaction only with TAs, suddenly math wasn't anywhere near as interesting.

Some of the adequate teachers that I had were probably the favorite teachers of students with other interests. Expecting every teacher to mesh perfectly with absolutely every last one of their hundreds of students per year is probably setting the bar a little unrealistically high. That being said, even though I wasn't completely enthralled with their classes, I think that I got good value from them.

The teachers that I remember as being poor fall into two categories. First are those that taught subjects that I wasn't at all interested in and who did nothing to prompt me to change my mind. I remember hating one of my English teachers because she wasn't impressed with my lack of effort on things like poetry assignments. Looking back, I think that says much more about what I was putting into the class than the quality of that teacher. The other category had teachers that seemed lazy and ineffective, or those whose classes were complete wastes of time -- similar to those that @blankfist described. Most of those teachers were teacher/coaches who, in my point of view, were just phoning-in their teaching duties and only actively interested in the coaching. I still have a bias against sports being included in public school activities due to that type of teacher.


And I also have a perspective from the teaching side of things. I've been living in Thailand for about 4.5 years now, teaching English as a second language. I got a bachelor's degree in Computer Science but struggled finding a job when I graduated (I think I was naively setting my sights too high and too narrow, but thats another story). So, I ended up working as a farmhand on my family farm. That was OK but not really something that I was very passionate about.

Eventually through a family connection, someone approached me about traveling abroad for a year and working as an ESL teacher. I thought that would be an interesting thing to do and a good way to challenge myself, so I flew to Thailand in 2007 and started teaching. The school I connected with put me in as the teacher for kindergarten, which was crazy but fun and rewarding and a good sink or swim introduction to teaching (which I had no prior experience with or education in).

I ended up liking it so much that what was originally just going to be a 1-year experience got extended. I taught kindergarten for 2 years and 1st grade for 1 year. Then there was a big shakeup / administrative disaster at my former school and I switched into teaching High School aged students. Another challenge and something different to get used to, but I am enjoying that as much or more as the younger students.

Being a foreign, native-English-speaking ESL teacher in Thailand is a bit weird. There are lots of really *terrible* foreign teachers that are here to purely to have ready access to cheap beer and prostitutes, and who have absolutely zero interest in the actual teaching; it is just a paycheck. The average salary of a native-English speaking teacher here is about $12,000 a year, which sounds terribly low but is actually a pretty upper-middle class income by Thai standards. For the shitty teachers, it translates into a lot of beer and hookers.

The schools here see foreigners are all fairly identical, easily replaceable cogs. Someone with a master's degree in Education and a real interest in being a good teacher can easily be replaced by a drunken loser that rarely shows up for classes if they don't fall in line with the Thai way of doing things or try to change up the status quo.

I hope that I do a decent job of teaching here. I am confident that I'm way better for my students than many of the drunken backpacker alternatives, but it is dangerous to set the bar that low and get complacent. I'm sure that to a lot of my roughly 800 students this year, I am merely adequate -- not all that memorable but at least not bad either. I know that some of them get a lot out of my classes and I can see them improving in English in leaps and bounds. And I know that there are some on the other side of the coin who are at best ambivalent about me and their English classes in general. My level of motivation prompts me to try my best, but I am too lazy and don't have enough time to throw a whole lot of extra effort at each and every one of my 800 students, most of whom I see for 1 hour a week total.

Anyway, my experiences here have made me appreciate all of my excellent former teachers that much more. Plus, I've learned that anyone that thinks that a teacher in the US is sub-par ought to be thankful that they probably aren't quite as bad as a sub-par "teacher" in Thailand...

Hipsters are still better than Yuppies, and the Beatniks will kill the makers of this movie with slam poetry if they ever find them.

Also, it's important to check out the Youtube comments and the video uploader's description. If you did that, you'd know his non-dying performances outweigh his dying performances. Someone did all that work and now you don't need to: http://www.compleatseanbean.com/deathbycow.html

HE DIES IN:
Airborne - bye bye Toombs
Caravaggio - Rannuccio gets his throat slashed
Clarissa - Lovelace is skewered by Sean Pertwee
Don't Say a Word - Patrick Koster is buried alive
Equilibrium - Death by Poetry - Partridge is blasted away by Christian Bale while reading Yeats
Essex Boys - Jason Locke meets a nasty end in a Range Rover
Far North - Loki is frozen. Naked. In the snow. A chilling end if there ever was one.
The Field - the infamous Death by Cow - Tadgh falls over a cliff, pursued by a herd of stampeding cows
GoldenEye - Alec Trevelyan falls a long way down and is crushed by a satellite dish thing
Henry VIII - Robert Aske meets a gruesome end
The Island - Death by Clone. Merrick is shot in the throat by a nasty grabber thingy with a sharp
hook and a cable that gets wrapped around his neck, and while he's struggling with Lincoln
Six-Echo, the catwalk they're on collapses, and Merrick ends up dangling by the neck. Currently
the most creative dispatch of Sean's career. Definitely well hung.
The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) - Death
by Orc. Boromir. Arrows. Need I say more?
Lorna Doone - Carver Doone drowns
Outlaw - Dead Dead Dead. Was there ever any question? Dead.
Patriot Games - Sean Miller is beaten up, boathooked and finally blown up by Harrison Ford
Scarlett - Lord Fenton is dispatched
Tell Me That You Love Me - Gabriel Lewis is stabbed by Laura. Or he stabs himself. We're not
quite sure about this one, actually.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - Death by summoning a god's avatar. Martin Septim (the son of the Emperor, aka The Lost Heir) meets his X-Box end when he attempts to save the world.
The Hitcher - Surely you jest. You need to ask? (There were two different versions filmed. He dies
in both of them.)
War Requiem - The German Soldier dies, but returns in the afterlife


HE LIVES IN:
(Leo Tolstoy's) Anna Karenina
A Woman's Guide to Adultery
The Big Empty
The Bill
Black Beauty
Bravo Two Zero
Exploits at West Poley
Extremely Dangerous
Faceless
The Fifteen Streets
Flightplan
Fool's Gold
How to Get Ahead in Advertising
In the Border Country
Inspector Morse: Absolute Conviction
Jacob
Lady Chatterley
The Loser
My Kingdom for a Horse
National Treasure (But only because of a rewrite. In an early version
of the the script Ian Howe got eaten by alligators in the subways of
New York. Really. Honest. I wouldn't lie to you. I wouldn't.)
North Country
Percy Jackson (Zeus is more or less an immortal so death seems a bit
redundant, really...)
The Practice
Pride
Prince
Punters
Ronin
Samson & Delilah
Sharpe (14 films)
Sharpe's Challenge
Shopping
Silent Hill
Small Zones
Stormy Monday
Tom & Thomas
Troubles
The Canterbury Tales - The Nun's Priest's Tale
The Dark
The True Bride
The Vicar of Dibley
Troy
Wedded
When Saturday Comes
Windprints
Winter Flight

Major Theatrical Performances:
Macbeth ... Yes. He dies. And gets his head impaled on a spike.
Romeo & Juliet... What do you think?
Fair Maid of the West ... Spencer doesn't die!

You could start by reading the original poem Heroes by Suzi Q Smith.

Although there is some truth in Enoch's claim that poetry is subjective, it is also true that (er, most) poems do have themes that almost everybody will agree on and the degree of subjectivity varies somewhat. In some cases though, you can say definitely what the poem is about and be quite sure that people will only disagree to be ornery. This one probably isn't quite that clear cut...

To me, the main theme is the obvious and overt one of our culture of idolising celebrities, movie stars, pop stars, and then hounding them every minute of every day not forgiving them even the slightest indiscretion or giving them any privacy or room to be themselves in their time off.

Since the poem in question is dedicated to Michael Jackson, "slightest indiscretion" doesn't really apply... but if you forget the dedication for a minute and read it more about the public obsession with celebrity and the associated voyeurism of the paparazzi, then the point stands.

Now, as Enoch also asked, is that anything like what you got from it? What did you think? Back to subjectivity, there are no absolute wrong answers here, and even if there were there is no videosift exam at the end of term, but I'd really love to hear your take on it.
>> ^dannym3141:

>> ^enoch:
>> ^dannym3141:
Can someone please explain to me what the idea is that's trying to be conveyed? From what i took from it, i thought the "meaning" behind the words was a poor one. And that could be because i'm coming from the wrong angle.

might help if you defined the "meaning" that you got from this in order to better help.
poetry is a subjective medium where words are more an emotive than a definitive.

I'd rather someone explain the to me what the idea is that's trying to be conveyed.

>> ^enoch:

>> ^dannym3141:
Can someone please explain to me what the idea is that's trying to be conveyed? From what i took from it, i thought the "meaning" behind the words was a poor one. And that could be because i'm coming from the wrong angle.

might help if you defined the "meaning" that you got from this in order to better help.
poetry is a subjective medium where words are more an emotive than a definitive.


I'd rather someone explain the to me what the idea is that's trying to be conveyed.

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/07/07/because-the-best-poetry-is-poetry-written-by-a-cat

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/07/07/because-the-best-poetry-is-poetry-written-by-a-cat

@eric3579, you need to see this, too....