Orientation

We must be starting again. Yesterday and today were orientation for new students: undergrads yesterday, grads today. My role in grad orientation was made somewhat easier at the very last second when we received an email from our lone Grad1 saying she wouldn't be attending. Whatever it was, she must have tried real hard to make it work out to have waited so long to be telling us she'd be unable to get it done - either that or the admission was a mistake to begin with and we dodged a bullet. I'd prefer to think it was the former and not the latter. So after a brief introduction I went back to working on shelves - expect a picture tomorrow.

Yesterday we did our standard dog and pony for the undergrads. When I introduced myself I told them "you will probably ask me for a staple, or if I have seen Louis. I don't have a staple, and I haven't seen Louis." It got a nice laugh, which was funny because there's no way they could have had any idea what I was talking about. It was something that was supposed to be funny a month from now when they are standing at my office door asking me for those very things. Liz made a fairly impassioned speech about theatre. She talked a lot about how the life seems to have been let out of the industry and how we were counting on the new members of the field to take up the responsibility for energizing things. They seemed to take it well.

Dick did a laundry list of operations issues and so he could take a break he had me cover grading. I did it without using the term "The Bradley Scale" which I coined a few years ago. I think I shocked one of my co-workers when I said "If you're someone that always got A's, you shouldn't expect to get A's." After I said it I thought that perhaps it could be interpreted as "if you've always tried hard to do well before, you need no try hard now" which is of course not what I meant at all. So I tried to clean up the mess by saying "You should aspire to get A's, but in all likelihood you are going to get a bunch of B's." I think they got the message though. Later on in the morning while a group of the students was presenting their devised piece to demonstrate the "education" pillar one of the kids said "I am going to be everything you want me to be... and a little bit more, so I can get that A!"

I wonder if they'll remember when they get those B's.

The best part of the session though was the group that did the "experimentation" pillar. There are these helium balloons on the stage the whole morning, one balloon for each new student color coded by option. At the end of the session we traditionally have a "launch" to symbolize the start of their CMU experience. This is symbolized by the organized litter of the balloon release. The group doing "experimentation" just set out to do a bunch of things that would make us uncomfortable: swearing, talking about disgusting things, invading personal space and the like. One of the "and the like" things was to start popping the balloons. The students of course just thought it was a disturbing sound and a destructive act, as they didn't know the balloons had any significance beyond decoration. Several of the faculty actually quaked though, and my boss asked the air "What do we do?" The head of directing could not have been more pleased, and we gushed over how they changed our plan and broke the conventions of society. I just thought it was kind of funny.

Now, I wonder if the copier will work this weekend...