Project 3 Project Analysis

I had a lot of fun doing this project. I got to research something that I already knew a lot about and I got to actually enjoy working on. My observation was watching a bunch of improv teams do their stuff for Pete sake. Improv has become one of my passions ever since I joined ISU's team earlier this team. It has become an essential part of my life. Doing improvisation has been a stress relief, a life lesson experience and a place where I have found the closest friends that I will ever have. To write a whole ethnography about something I care about so much just made this whole project a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable. Needless to say, even though I loved my topic there were some things I know I could have improved on. I wish I had been able to revise it more. I really wanted to add the explanation and differences between short and long form. Though not absolutely necessary, I think it would have cleared up some misconceptions throughout the paper. Also I should have figured out how to cite my interviews better. I gave credit in my paper but not in my reference page. C'est la vie though right? Good news is that I actually had a peer reviewer that gave me good notes and things to change in my paper. I am not sure if that means that my writing was not as good this time around or this person legitimately read and edited my paper. Either way it was a nice change up. It got me to actually catch some points in my paper that I wanted to change. Each paper so far has been about something I like and enjoy, which I am assuming is what everyone else does for their papers which I find interesting to see what some of their topics are because it allows me to indirectly get to know that person a little better, but something about writing about something I am so gosh darn passionate about made me feel more satisfied turning in this paper.

Creeper Notes

Observation Notes from 10 March 2012
Subject: Improv Teams
Location: College Improv Tournament at Mercury Theater, Chicago, Illinois
Purpose: To determine if the style of improv varies depending on where the team is from
Question: Since improv was practically born in Chicago, how has improv changed when practiced in other cities around the country?
Notes:

• Each team is performing their own form
• Almost all long form
• One team did short form
• Canada team has long form I've never seen
• Involves writing down monologues
• Used as idea generators
• Interesting use of "current" events
• Health care
• Depending on how far away team is from, possibly determines how many team members they bring
• Styles have same basic core just varying details
• All use one word suggestions (cept for Mafia)
• CIT has grown in the past 5 years
• The the amount of teams that were in nationals this were is the same number of total teams competing in CIT's first year
• Different size teams work the stage differently
• Different energy
• Use of stage
• Ideas used

Preliminary Ideas for Project the 3rd

To my understanding ethnography is stalking and creeping on a certain group of people and writing up a case study on that group. Sounds weird and wrong but as long as no one does anything illegal I think we'll be okay. So the first group that popped into my head when you were describing this project was to observe different improvisation teams. This Saturday I will be seeing the College Improv Tournament at Mercury Theatre where sixteen different college improv teams including ISU's very own Improv Mafia will be competing to earn the top place for this international competition. Having already seen a few different groups from regionals and studying with Improv Mafia, it is actually fairly obvious to tell the distinct differences in styles of each team. Some teams like to have more musical improv or more two person based scenes, or even just have a higher energy than other teams. Bottom line is that each team is different depending on their preferred style of improv which is also affected by what part of the country (or world) they are from. Chicago is the hub for improv. It is where improvisational comedy was created. So of course Chicago based teams all relate to each other in their own developed styles, however the cool thing about Nationals is that there will be teams from all over the country and even one team from Canada which brings in so many new styles of improv to watch and learn from. If this idea does not pan out, I am not too sure what I could do. I am going on spring break which narrows down the possibilities of groups I can observe. I guess if all else fails I can observe the group of people at the local grocery store or park. I would however feel way more creepy doing that than watching people perform at a comedy festival.

Project 2 Analysis

I kind of dropped the ball with the blogs for this project. It is real unfortunate that I did. I enjoy these blogs sometimes. They get me thinking and let my reader(s) know what I think of my various assignments. So this blog, as the title states, is supposed to be about what I thought of the project we just completed. The idea of the project I thought was really good. It made my peers open their eyes and look into why and how certain texts can have such a huge effect on a certain person or an entire culture. I think one of the problems with society today and probably throughout all of society is that people are ignorant. They never like to learn more about people and try to understand other cultures. I will admit that I am ignorant on a lot of things but the difference between me and the majority of society is that I am willing to learn. That whole saying that "ignorance is bliss" is a bunch of poppycock. The less you know, the less helpful to the world you are. It is always important to be informed to know what is going on so you are not left behind in your "blissful" world while the rest of us decide to pack up and move on.
I decided to use the word "gay" for my unethical text because it is a word today that most people use as a synonym for dumb and other insult words. Hearing this word used in the wrong context all the time and having several gay friends I already had a basic knowledge of how the word was being used unethically but I wanted to know more. I was amazed at how much I learned about the hardships of being homosexual in today's society. The high suicide rates, the origin of certain homosexual insults. Each disturbing fact I uncovered intrigued me even more and provided me a lot of research to write this paper with. The part that I did not understand and had trouble with this during this project was trying to be unbiased. I was confused as to how we were supposed to write an objective paper on something that we find to be subjectively unethical...but despite that obstacle I managed to write, what I and my peer editor believe, a pretty darn good paper. Obviously I noticed a little opinion in my writing but nothing can be 100% bias free, but I incorporated a lot of various facts and history of how "gay" is used unethically today. One of the troubles that I had again in this paper is revising. I know you said to do more research and that will help, but I could only find so much research without repeating myself. Like I said last time, I write papers to produce the final product. As a math major I am programmed to produce the final correct answer. If you need to revise your answer then you did it wrong. The combination of that thinking process and my peer reviewers not providing thorough notes, I find it very difficult to change anything about my paper. I even purposefully tried to sabotage myself so I could have something to revise which I wound up rewriting the Prop 8 paragraph near the end. I am not saying that the revision process is useless by any means, I just wish that I had someone who would truly revise my paper and try to tell me what I need to add or change or what sounds awkward so I can actually improve my writing. Other than that speed bump I think my paper went pretty well actually. My creative piece is probably my favorite part. I have to give credit to my roommate for helping my brainstorm about this idea. I feel like it probably could have used some color but with the materials I had available I think the absent of color actually makes it stand out more and adds to the message a little bit.

To be honest, I am not too sure what this blog is supposed to be about. I am supposed to be writing about what underlying ideologies/beliefs are in the text, what is and is not being valued...I have read it over several times but nothing is clicking. Maybe these questions are hard to answer due to the unethical text I decided to work with. The word "gay" does not really have any underlying ideologies or beliefs. It is used as an insult for a multitude of things from trying to hurt someone's personal life style to complaining about some mundane task. There have been for years homophobic and anti-homosexual people out there lashing out against a group of people that are no different from you or me. I guess you could say that the ideologies and/or beliefs behind this prejudice come from different types of groups of people. For example the (Neo) Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Westboro Baptist Church all  had and have continued to hate the homosexuals either due to a crazed leader or because it is what the bible told them to do. What is not being valued is that no matter your sexual preference you are still a human being. It is the character of that human being that determines whether or not that person is "bad". I think that is what irritates me the most about this topic is because the ignorant homophobic bible pushing idiots cannot see that their ideals and beliefs are what making this world an awful place, not whether or not if a man wants to lie with another man or woman with woman. They can't take the time to open their eyes like their God wants them to and accept all of His creatures for who they are. Now I am no by any means a man of religion or faith but damn it all do I know more about the message of God than those assholes. Yeah sure the bible is up for anyone's interpretation and I know this is supposed to an objective project but this blog isn't objective. It's a blog. Anything goes in the internet as stated by rule #8 of the internet, "There are no real rules about posting." But I digress. So what was I actually supposed to answer? I'm not too sure but I think I touched base on what I was supposed to write about. "Gay" has turned from meaning happy to describing someones personal sexual preference to being tossed around as another insult as common as the word "the". Why? Probably because being gay is different and in society, especially America's, being different is bad and we shun the different. Also the bible told us to hate the gays. So we should definitely pick on them and hate them with as much passion as we can because that makes sense, right? There is absolutely nothing being valued behind the unethical use of gay. The world is full of hate and prejudice, it's a disgusting place where we have groups of people destroying people's lives who are just trying to be happy and find love where they can. But whenever I get infuriated by the ignorance of anti-homosexuality groups I always look down at my wristband that says, "It gets better...<3" and hope for the best.

Project 2 Preliminary Ideas

It's been a long weekend. Sorry I couldn't come up with a catchy title for this blog post like I normally do. Anyway I think that I am going to use the word "gay" for my unethical text. I know it is not a book or a document that made the whole world gasp but that one word causes a lot more harm then a lot of lengthy texts do today. I originally had the idea of doing the Jim Crow Laws and possibly throw in the three crows from the Disney classic Dumbo in there but after discussing with my roommate we both agreed that writing about the unethical use of the word "gay" in today's society would be way more important to write about. I think if I were to incorporate things like the original meaning of the word, the path of why and how the word became what it is today and included why it became an insult it would add a whole lot more meaning to my paper. Also, those are pretty interesting and easy topics to compile research on. I was also planning on bringing up Prop 8 in my paper because I feel like it is part of the cultural events attached to the unethical use of the word "gay".

Project 1 Analysis

As far as I know my project went fairly well. I did what I had to do. Followed instructions. Completed the assignment and wrote about two things I like to talk about; music and comics. My two biggest struggles that I had were getting started and writing for this genre. I never really had the motivation to get this assignment started. Yes I knew that I had to finish it and turn it all in on time, but I procrastinated until the very last second which may have affected my writing but without any motivation to begin this project I did not feel the need to begin until right before the due date. Also, writing reviews for me is actually a little more...not necessarily challenging since I can complete the task without trouble as long as I know about what I am reviewing but it is not the genre I prefer to write. Like I said in my first blog post I much rather to take a creative approach to my writing than having a ridged structure than I am supposed to follow. I used to work at my high school's radio station and had an on-air show with my brother one year and a solo one the next. On those shows the topics would normally revolve around comics and/or music. Music especially would be easy to talk about since you could play the song or artist you wanted to talk about and discuss the elements of the song of which your listeners just heard. However, with a review, you have no idea if your reader heard that album or song that you are trying to review. It is a crap shoot. Hopefully you write well enough to make the reader want to go out and listen to that album but it is a whole new dynamic when talking passionately about something your audience just heard as opposed to something they may or may not have heard recently. Maybe it is because I have become a better speaker than writer over my years of radio, debate team and theater that I have trouble with writing down my true feelings about something without being able to freely write my thoughts. But I digress, I think next project I should probably start my writing process a little earlier than I did with this one so I can hopefully write a better paper. Also, I think I am going to have either a different person read my paper or have multiple people read my project so I get more than a quick format fix suggestion from my peer review. If I'm supposed to reach a regional level of revision I am going to need to have someone say there are more things wrong than just the format for a paper that I pretentiously believe to be pretty much perfect.