I have really been into six-word syntheses lately. Maybe it was the book Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs From Writers Famous and Obscure or the conversations I have been having with fellow educators about Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind, especially his section on symphony. I've also been thinking of ways to succinctly state my philosophy of teaching and learning. So I thought I'd combine the two. Here is my six-word synethesis of my beliefs of teaching and learning:

Asset-minded assistance in patterning experiences.

Is asset-minded only one word? Hmm. Looks like I need another adjective in there.

The self-righteous columnists' response to Grand Theft Auto IV has been pretty muted thus far. But Tim Rutten from the LA Times had some things to say about the game earlier this week (part of his column ran in today's Denver Post).

Rutten argues that GTA is different from past artifacts of renegade youth culture in that its sole purpose is profit. That seems like some shaky history to me. Granted, Rutten is a lot older than me, but were other mediums of youth culture (such as comics) really interested in doing much besides making money for their publishers?

I'm interested in manga because I have so many students who love the stuff, and it was nice to see Rutten offer the medium some credit (or I guess blame): 'One of the most interesting things about this game is that it's the product of a global youth culture whose frame of reference has been shaped by mindless American action films, by post-apocalyptic Euro-American fantasy fiction and Japanese graphic novels.'

And Rutten closes with this line: 'With this game, the interactive video industry has turned an aesthetic corner and is now an art form in search of an artist.' This seems to me a classic example of Rutten trying to make today's art forms conform to yesterday's notions of art. It seems that Rutten is looking for the sole artist, who is toiling away in solitude, making art as art is meant to be: the vision of a lone individual. That conception of art just doesn't fit the things that people are creating today.

The first Saturday in May is Free Comic Book Day, so this morning I went up to Mile High Comics in Thornton to pick up a few comics. A few of my students met me there and they left the store with armfuls of free comics.

It was my first time in Mile High Comics, and it was a sort of surreal experience. There were a lot of white guys gaming on one half of the store, and an employee had to keep reminding them to keep their language clean with all the kids there for Free Comic Book Day. I think the sole female employee was hitting on me a little bit. There was way more comic paraphernalia than actual comics there, and I spent most of my hour there just wondering around, looking at the same things over and over.

I was clearly out of my element in the comic store, and comics is a subculture that is really hard to enter. There are so many comics published and they are so self-referential that to make any sense out of it all, you have to spend a lot of time building background knowledge. And a lot of the comics are awful. Maybe that's just my pretentious opinion, but I'm not too interested in much of what Marvel or DC put out. But again, a lot of my distaste for it has to do with how difficult it is to get into the them.

In other comics news, this week I checked out two comic compilations from the library, both of them edited by Chris Ware: McSweeney's 13 and The Best American Comics 2007. A friend let me borrow Ware's Jimmy Corrigan book in the past, but I didn't really get it. In looking deeper at Ware's work, I'm starting to recognize his genius. And it's genius in the true sense of the word: not the result of an inborn gift that manifests itself at the drop of a hat, but the result of complete dedication to craft.