The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:16am on Tuesday, 25th February, 2025:
Anecdote
Every year, I give my final-year students the same assignment: write a plot that conforms to the 17 steps of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey formula. I tell them this isn't about story, it's about plot: I want to test the extent to which they understand the formula.
Also every year, I do the assignment myself, live, in a class, based on suggestions shouted out by the students. Well, by those present: this year, there were 9 of them out ofthe 31 there were supposed to be. It might have been the heavy rain that put off the rest, or the fact the class was at 4pm, but I suspect that the overriding reason was that they're students.
I intended to write the unfolding plot on the large, wall-length whiteboard that I knew to be in the teaching room. The dry markers provided in such rooms almost never work, so I brought my own box of a dozen of them. Unfortunately, these dry markers are now so old as to have lived up to their name rather too literally: they were actually dry. I couldn't use them.
Never mind, I had a back-up plan prepared. On the memory stick in my pocket was a spreadsheet that I'd put together in COVID-19 times; I could use this on the presentation computer and type in the various components rather than expose students to my handwriting.
The USB ports for the computer were dead. Of course they were dead. I needed them to work, so they were dead.
Still, no problem! I had the spreadsheet stored in a directory on my shared drive. I opened it up and found that yes, I HAD the spreadsheet there, once, but not any more because some kind of delete-old-files sweep had been undertaken and there were only three files present instead of the 20+ there should have been.
Ah, but I'd put the spreadsheet onto Moodle (which I loathe). I could download it onto the lecture room computer from there.
This actually succeeded, and the class began.
It took me an hour to do my assignment, and another ten minutes to read it out as a story.
If I'm lucky, it'll take me less time than this to mark each student's submission. If I'm unlucky, they'll have used ChatGPT to flesh it out and I'll be wading through pages of turgid prose for 90 minutes before failing it because they used Vogler's 12 steps instead of Campbell's 17.
The rain had stopped by the time the class had finished.
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