Teaching, the Non-Frustrating Parts

I do actually enjoy what I am doing, beyond the moments of frustration.  In fact, besides programming (which is and should be a difficult class), I have a multimedia class which I sort of set up just to be enjoyable.  Well, at least for me.  I have no idea what the students think, but they have yet to complain.   And they try.  Their semester-long assignment is to produce music videos, consisting of both still images and video footage they have taken themselves, with audio they have at least edited themselves.    They are not amazingly wonderful videos or anything, and clearly very few of them listened to my talk about not overdoing it on the fancy transitions because it is unnecessary and distracting, but I know it's easy to get carried away with fun transitions the first time you play with a video editor.  And they went to some effort and different places to get their video footage, and did not produce the standard Tanzanian music video of a line of people doing the same dance moves over and over for 10 minutes but with costume changes every three seconds.  So I call this a win.

The project I had rather mixed feelings about was one in which the storyboard (I made them make storyboards!  Mostly because I wanted to see what they would do.  It was unquestionably the most fun thing to grade ever.) showed a Miss Elizabeth (I tell them to call me Madam Elizabeth because it is difficult for Kiswahili speakers to pronounce my last name) arriving from America, and she is drawn in a rather short skirt for cultural appropriateness and is also a rather curvily drawn woman. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Fortunately for their actual video they had to use one of their group members (not named Elizabeth) as their Miss Elizabeth, because I decline to star in student videos.  While their leading lady is progressive enough to wear pants (go her!) she does not follow the storyboard wardrobe choices.   I am uploading their video but I edited it to remove the end credits with their names.   Also, the still title image is the picture they edited as the first part of their project, which was to use image editing software and a camera to produce a poster advertising what they were doing.  This group's poster was one of the better ones in the class, they did a good job blending together various photos.

Note: everything is used by permission.  I asked the class if it was alright for me to show their work to people in America who were interested in learning more about Tanzania.  Everyone said yes.  Or at least no one said no.