Over All Reporting

Today I completed what is for me the most drawn out process in creating report cards, the writing of personalised overall comments.

Most report card comments these days are entered by using codes where 42HEA\ Gives you:

[Name] completed health assessments to a very high standard this semester. [She,He] refrained from picking [her,his] nose with commendable fortitude.

Where fields in [square parenthesis] are automatically populated with the relevant gender and name. Overall comments on the other hand require a fine balance between friendly fluff and brutal honesty. Very little of that brutal honesty will make it through to the final printed report card after rigorous self and peer editing, but if there is not an element of it present then the whole document will be cheapened. My mentor described the best comments as being ‘Designed for the student themselves to read in 30 years time.’. My comments have in truth gotten tamer and tamer having over the last few years repeatedly butted heads over what it is and is not acceptable to put in the one little box where I am given authority to share opinions about my students development as learners.  Anyway today was typical of reporting in that it took me about 8 hours to write 27 such comments and I will need to revisit each before I hand them on up the line.

Since I have not an ounce of energy to spare creatively this evening I will share one of my completed projects which I shared on r/papercraft about a year ago. I maybe linked it on Fbook at the time, I’m not sure though and I definitely haven’t posted it elsewhere online until now. I created this from scratch using Autodesk Maya, Photoshop and Pepakura. I’ve had another piece of similar type unfinished for six months now of the sword from Transistor.

 

Cogs are a common thematic element throughout the game. This cog is worn on the player character “The Kid’s” back throughout his beautifully narrated adventure.      

Bastion is a superb little game by Supergiant Games which if you haven’t tried, and you have a controller, you really aught to.

The game is an isometric hack and slash, RPG, bullet hell hybrid. The gimmick of event triggered ever present narration by Logan Cunningham is simply extraordinary, at times dry and hilarious at others quite sad and moving.

I may continue in this vein, sharing completed works I have not posted on my sites for the next couple of days, at least until reporting is under control and A’s high school graduation is out of the way.

One more thing; While writing this afternoon I was struck with a memory of a story I had read in a bedroom at Crystal Waters that would place me at maybe 14 so 23 years ago. This story featured a prison which was a giant wheel of stone within a mountain and the wheel turned by the labour of the cells occupants realease only being available when the wheel returned completed a rotation. It was an extraordinary story and the images returned vivid in my mind so I immediately googled: “story about a prison that is a wheel within a mountain”

and found on the first hit somebody else searching for the same thing.

The book is Helliconia Book 3: Winter .

Has anybody else read this story?