So, first check-in of the early summer. What kind of week has it been?
I accomplished most of what I set out to do last week. I played my part in our group JMTP submission, getting all the files together into one virtual package and sending them off to the editor. I wrote and sent in my essay for Engaging Students, giving me a cool 3000+ words to start the summer word count off. AND we spent four days visiting some good friends at their beach house this weekend. Even if it rained for three of those days, everyone had a great time.
I also started my summer class, and we’ve now had three of our ten meetings. It seems to be going well so far - students have been engaged in the discussions, and I’m getting better at this format for the class - it’s mostly seminar-based, but I try to mix in various virtual activities to keep students engaged in different modalities. It’s a whole thing to get into another time, but I’ve realized that a focus on # of hours of instructional time (which my institution is reaaaaaally into) is pretty toxic, and that a class flows better if I’m spending time checking in with my students informally at the beginning of sessions. I do this in normal classes, of course, but in a compressed summer class I think I’ve always felt like “oh no! we only have an hour and a half, lets GO GO GO talk about the readings, fast!” I’m trying to treat these more like I would regular class meetings, rather than precious little windows of live time that need to be absolutely crammed from beginning to end.
Each time I teach it I add a few new things, so this year I’ve created a spruced-up video on the physics of sound (which will have a part 2 that I still need to make, for next week); an accompanying assignment that asks students to use a smartphone spectrogram app around their house and “capture” a sound to write about; and a term-long assignment in which my students interview video game music scholars and write about them, as a way of collectively building a broad view of the discipline.
The last updated piece of the class puzzle will be a video lecture on video game adaptations. That one is designed to help me think through this month’s big writing project: a chapter on film-to-game adaptations for The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound. It’ll be partially based on the talk I did at last year’s NACVGM, but it also has a significantly broader historical component that I’m still working on. Adaptation is a broad interest of mine, so this week I’m starting off by reading some work in adaptation studies, in search of inspiration. Should also play some games too. Oh, the toils of research.
[On that note: NACVGM 2021 is next weekend (June 12-13, 2021), once again in an online format. In my opinion, last June’s NACVGM was by far the most successful online conference of the whole pandemic, so I’m looking forward to once again tuning in to listen to papers all weekend. Twitch chat is the single best feature I’ve seen for an academic conference, and something I would love to see mirrored at in-person conferences.]
Onto the goal setting:
The one thing I didn’t really do last week was lay out a picture of my writing goals for the summer. I’ll still need a day or two away from the intensive Engaging Students writing in order to get the clarity needed to do that, but it’s on this week’s list.
As is a major email catch-up (which I’m going to do first, right now, as soon as I post this!)
and writing 250 words a day towards the Oxford Handbook chapter. I’m aiming for a faster check-in to get my weeks back to Sunday, so that means 1,250 words towards the chapter by this Sunday. Doable.
Summer word count so far: 3,822