Days n days n days: All Project-Based Courses are not the same

The last few class periods sort of blur into each other due to the material – Lorenz on the Butterfly Effect, Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder, The film Run Lola Run, and then a discussion of the film. I realize as I think about the connections between these elements that my thinking about the rhythm of the class is directly connected to the course material. I know that sounds like a fairly benign comment, but it does help me examine why this class seems to be working differently than other project based classes. I have used this structure about five times now and I have just assumed that the type of driving toward an understanding by moving from one element to the next was part of how these courses worked – and it was for those subjects. The chaos class seems to be working differently.

Some of this comes out of the fact that even when I taught this material as more of a seminar course that it felt like similar ideas simply presented in a different way. So each of the organizing topics – things like sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the butterfly effect, iteration, feedback, fractals, strange attractors, non-linearity, indeterminacy – all seem like different words for the same thing. So rather than move from topic to topic acquiring a greater breadth of knowledge on a subject this course seems to work to gain a deeper understanding of these ideas. What I mean by that is the difference between a horizontal and vertical structure – one moves forward in time whereas the other freezes time and moves deeper into the subject. Rather than a well made play, this course seems to be working more like a slowly developing picture. This was not planned, but rather discovered as the class developed.

What this means is that projects and readings and conversations we have had prior to this point may not reach maturity until we add more material. We have been cycling back to discuss both projects more than in previous project courses. It is interesting since chaos theory suggests this kind of non-liner structure that the course would develop this way.

The point with the past few class meetings has been to start applying these ideas to stories, to film, to structure. So we bounced Lorenz off of Bradbury and basic chaos ideas off of Run Lola Run. The point is to see these elements in these stories with the eventual leap to structure stories this way ourselves. I find that due to this structure that the course is more about narrative than I had intended. For that reason I feel like I need to make a change for the next in-class projects in which text and language are not part of them. But, there are a million different ways to tell a story – so – who knows.