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MARCH 17, 2008   More below: CROSS COUNTRY  

Starting again.

Spring Break is over, sad to say, but today wasn't bad at all. Mondays I get to ease back into the work week with just an Intro to Visual Communication class to teach. It's a class I enjoy and is only two hours long, so it makes for a (usually) low-stress day.

Tomorrow I'll be meeting with the Portfolio Preparation class, and there the news isn't all good. After our Mini-Review two weeks ago I asked the reviewers for their comments, and they were overall not impressed. I think it's a very talented group of students, but that didn't seem to come across at the Mini-Review.

The negative comments were often about the details: typos, sloppy cutting and mounting of work, etc., things that are very manageable—and very frustrating to me when students don't seem to care. Other concerns, like a need to focus more on ideas and to pay more attention to typography across the board are harder to deal with. Eliminating typos is easy if you're willing to put in the effort. Coming up with better ideas is a whole lot harder.

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Finishing up.

After supper tonight I closed the book that was my Spring Break recreational reading: Cross Country by Robert Sullivan.I had a more extensive review of it on last week's page that I wrote over by accident. Bye bye review.

The book gets very mixed reviews at Amazon.com—people seem to love it or hate it. I enjoyed the style, light-hearted minute-by-minute descriptions of the sights and sounds of a cross-country car trip with wife & kids, with frequent digressions into historical details like the origin of the Indianapolis 500 and how Hitler's Reichsautobahn inspired the U.S. interstate highway system. It's both a good roadtrip book and an interesting cultural/historical tour of the U.S.

However... you may not like the author's style, and here's a quick test:

Cross Country by Robert SullivanCross Country: Fifteen years and 90,000 miles on the roads and interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, my wife, my mother-in-law, two kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant

If the full title/subtitle annoys you, don't bother reading it. If it sounds like fun, you'll probably love the book. I did.

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