FIELDNOTES Issue #6 11 February 2014 Several of you asked me via email if I plan to watch the Winter Olympics. Yes, I do. The opening ceremonies—only so-­‐so, I thought—began at 4.30 Friday afternoon in the UK. It appeared that some Russian technician did not quality-­‐check the systems designed to convert a gigantic electric light display shaped like a snowflake into an Olympic ring. Let’s all please send that person letters expressing our sympathy; address them to the Siberian work camp where he or she probably now resides. In Swansea, I have encountered almost no Olympics hype. This past weekend, pubs had sport on their television screens, but rugby or football -­‐-­‐ i.e., soccer, not what is known here as “American football” -­‐-­‐ instead of winter Olympics. I do, though, want to be fair to British media professionals. They certainly may have produced promotion of the Games that rivals—in taste (or lack of it), scope and cost—
anything U.S. American media giants can generate in an Olympics year. Maybe I’m simply not seeing their work—I have not been watching a great deal of television, where so much Olympics marketing surfaces. Unless, however, British Olympics coverage has shaped women’s figure skating competition into narrative lines worthy of a miniseries, U.S. American media organizations have a lock on the gold awarded for winning the Games’ most prestigious event: the 98 x 17 ballyhoo. The Super Bowl came and went here. The NFL schedules one game early each season in London’s Wembley Stadium. In the UK, though-­‐-­‐according to one of my Welsh students-­‐-­‐serious interest in American football extends only to some enclaves within a few English cities. The NFL brings a game to London because it makes the NFL look like it has international appeal, which I presume makes the league look good to someone. The 90,000 British ticket-­‐holders fill Wembley primarily to marvel at the antics of athletes the size of monster trucks. Some Welsh males, especially those who work in the trades, consider American football players effete. Why? Because unlike rugby players, American footballers wear protective gear. I first encountered this rap against American football in the early ‘80s, when I worked in Indonesia. Many of my expatriate colleagues, most of them construction engineers, hailed from all over Britain. They simply could not live with the fact that to get their paws on one another, members of opposing teams in American football must claw through several layers of leather, plastic and cloth, not to mention flout various unnecessary-­‐roughness rules that don’t exist in rugby. Sure enough, this topic came up for discussion with Phil, a carpenter I chatted with in a pub last week. Recent worries in the U.S.A. about the problem of concussions at all levels of American football have leapt across the Pond: Phil proudly enumerated for me his beloved sport’s concussive attributes—Traumatic Brain Injury, oogie-­‐
oogie-­‐oogie, oi-­‐oi-­‐oi (cue Chariots of Fire theme music)! Well … shoot. There went the argument that American football players are so tough, they sustain decades’ worth of concussions, yet suit up without complaint, even as they court chronic traumatic encephalopathy. So I decided to complete a bit of Internet research to give myself something thoughtful to say the next time I see Phil. The most instructive stance I encountered: Rugby play moves very fast and violently for 80 minutes, with little interruption. Rules allow for only very limited substitution. In contrast, American football play stops and starts, with bursts of action punctuated by periods of rest, and has relatively liberal accommodation for substitution. But what violence occurs during those “bursts of action”! One researcher attached electronic sensors to the bodies of rugby players and American footballers, the athletes all playing at elite or international levels of their game. The researcher calculated that collisions between rugby players reached a distressingly high maximum of such-­‐and-­‐such G forces. His sensors also recorded that collisions between American football players occurred at three or four times those G forces. I have consumed a great deal of tea here and have learned a couple of techniques that have improved my results when I brew it. Tip #1: Catch the water “just off the boil” (i.e., moments after it begins boiling), remove the kettle from the heat source and pour some of the boiled water into each of TWO teapots, to warm the vessels up. Doing this also allows the boiled water remaining in the kettle to lose some heat-­‐-­‐
which is good, because pouring freshly boiled water on the tea leaves apparently burns them. Tip #2: Pour the water out of one teapot. Put in the correct amount of tea leaves (or number of bags) and pour water from the kettle into that pot. Then, when the tea has almost finished steeping, pour out the water still in the SECOND teapot. Then, pour the brewed tea from the FIRST pot into a teacup -­‐-­‐ and then, into that SECOND pot, pour any tea remaining in the FIRST, making sure that no leaves or bags of tea fall into that second pot. In this way refills will never become bitter from any steeping that unintentionally continued while you were enjoying that first cup. To those of you who think this is too much trouble for a hot beverage, I say: Drink your instant coffee and leave me alone! Teaching continues to go well -­‐-­‐ so far, so good. I have noticed that my home students (Swansea University’s term for students who are neither international students, nor visiting from another British uni) write email messages with excellent spelling and grammar, cogent phrasing and readable formatting…qualities less common in messages from U.S. American students I work with at UNCW. I would like U.S. American students to emulate these home students in this matter -­‐-­‐ less because of any discomfort misspellings or poorly articulated ideas cause me, and much more because how the home students write email messages will be what my students must do when they enter the work force. I introduced an oral assignment to my World War II students last Thursday: Each student must prepare, for oral presentation to classmates and me, a text (i.e., some written material) that pertains to the U.S. American involvement in World War II. “Prepare” means analyze the text in depth, and rehearse the oral presentation of it thoroughly, much as a public speaker rehearses a speech or an actor rehearses lines in a script. The various texts include letters to or from soldiers, reminiscences by U.S. American civilians actively involved in the war effort, passages from wartime newspaper columns, and more. Each student presents his or her prepared material during a lecture, so that the voices of U.S. Americans for whom World War II was a living experience may be brought into that lecture. I assign each student his or her text, but students can choose which lecture they will present during. This assignment worked very well when I taught the course in Wilmington. During a guest lecture early in the semester Julie-­‐Ann Scott, my UNCW colleague whose academic specialty in performance studies includes techniques for oral interpretation, trained my students very effectively; almost all of them acquitted themselves well in the event. At UNCW, though, the assignment included several assessment opportunities—scoring a student on his or her oral presentation itself, or course, but also evaluating some written work the assignment required. At Swansea University, though, I may only assess students on those two essays I described in the last issue of these fieldnotes; I cannot, for motivation, leverage the tool of interim scoring opportunities. So, I am experimenting: On the strength of personality and interpersonal persuasiveness, what must I do to elicit from the students high-­‐quality work in the oral interpretation tasking? The first three students are up to bat on Wednesday, so cross your fingers.