END OF THE TUNNEL?

The school year is drawing to a close, and with it (one hopes) I'll get a bit of a wind behind me before I start teaching (gulp) summer school.

I've done it before, and I'm here on a Saturday, reviewing my previous summer school materials and calendars, doing some photocopying and (double-gulp) calling the parents of students who have dropped the ball on their essay project and are thus choosing to fail. More on that later, if I can stand to write about it.

Anyway, I've been ridiculously over-committed, and for that reason alone haven't posted much. One of the things I decided to do was submit a video for DISCOVER Magazine's contest to 'Evolution in Two Minutes', which you can read about here. Below is a still from the video's final segment, representing biological diversity:


I've privately circulated a low-res version of the thing, but I can't put it up for public consumption right now due to the contest requirements. I do, however, want to note that it is getting ridiculously affordable for people to make high-quality videos with all manners of production qualities. I don't claim, mind you, that mine is that high-quality: it's a first effort, with technology I'm not familiar with, and under a pretty severe time crunch. But I can definitely see myself setting up a 'green screen' in my own home to start doing stuff like this in the future.

Anyway, here's a still shot of my partner-in-crime (a high school student) who donated her expertise and oodles of time and energy to assist me, working on the video files. If anything looks good, she deserves the credit:




If anything looks (or, especially, sounds) yucky, that's on me. And, yes, I will put the audio tracks up for people to listen to.