More on Screenplays, some Thoughts on Deaf Education, and a linkbarrage for fun

I woke at 6 a.m. today, for no particular reason, and I wasn't comfortable until I'd grabbed my laptop, swung around until my body was in a ball, and begun revising.

Which means: I like this script much better than the other I was working on, and for a variety of reasons. This is going to be MUCH more flexible for the actors, and that's gold in comedy: too specific direction, and the character won't work for any actor; make the direction too loose, and you have every character going off in different directions. Give them the bone, though, and they become the meat. Or so I hope.

Part of my continuing excitement is the slowly-increasing number of blogs I find related to screenwriting. It's awesome-just as I found with politics, there's a number of talented screenwriters out there who blog! (I'm finding this in other fields too, and it's become a bit of a game to me, finding blogs on the economy, education, and a ton of other fields.

Why are blogs so fascinating? I suspect because human beings are learning creatures, and learning occurs best through metalearning. We like to learn things, but we also like to learn how to learn things. I used to love science a lot, but when I went to college, that love disappeared; I chose to go to a hearing college, one of the best, and they had severe problems finding an interpreter for my chem class. So I spoke to Mary Ellsworth, who'd been my Earth Systems Science teacher in MSSD. I'd been frustrated by the problem of getting interpreters for my science class and berating myself for not doing better in that course than I had. She said that students need a model for learning, and that you can't get this through an interpreter properly. You could get it somewhat from books, if the books were written by intelligent, teaching authors, but as James Loewen has shown many textbooks aren't written in an honest way, and without honesty how can there be the connection you need for education?

Anyways, blogs provide a model for thinking about things. It's dangerous as well as seductive; people who haven't developed critical thinking and reading skills will be attracted to the most entertaining. So I'm cautious about who I read, but I like learning how to think about different things. Especially stuff I can't get head or tails around, like economics.