Disaster Area

Movie Night

It was movie night at youth group this week. I've been dying to show Saved (2004, Jena Malone, Mandy Moore), as there are so many interesting themes to explore: the nature of religion and Christianity, teen pregnancy, degayification and so on.

It's not high art, but it is a funny movie, featuring a really excruciating altar call and one of the most unexpected laughs of all time. Jena Malone thinks she's pregnant and goes to a Planned Parenthood clinic to make sure (or hopefully not). Two of her classmates in a coffee shop across the street see her coming out of the clinic. The following exchange takes place:

Cassandra: There's only one reason a good Christian girl comes down to Planned Parenthood.
Roland: She's planting a pipe bomb?
Cassandra: Okay, two reasons.

Brilliant movie.

Scary Movie V

No, this isn't some lame compilation of spoof scenes from movies that weren't even worth making in the first place, never mind immortalizing in a spoof. No, this is the genuine article - a movie that will give you nightmares. Check out Jesus Camp. Go see the trailer, then come on back...

Back from Camp

Another year, another Six Day high school camp week. Once again we (75 teenagers, 20 staff) had a fabulous week in the foothills of the Cascade mountains at Camp Huston in sunny Gold Bar (and yes, it was roasting - rivaling 2000 as the hottest, dryest camp week ever.)

The daily Eucharists were amazing, capped by confirmation on Sunday performed by Bishop Nedi Rivera, and the traveling Eucharist on Monday that was absolutely spine tingling.

Nedi spent the entire week with us, demonstrating just how highly she values youth ministry. So many people in her position say lots of nice things, but few actually do anything about it on a personal level. And she's a real trouper, too. She happily ranges from full bishoply stature to overhead flipper for the songs.

Camp did end on a down note as one of the youth found out on the last day that one of her friends where she used to live had died of a drug overdose. Apparently she had been veering into the drug world and well, that's what happens sometimes. Tough to handle at 15.

It seems weird to say "apart from that it was a great week", but that's about the gist of it.

Flamingoed!

Moving house, generally speaking, kind of hijacks your life. 10,000 lb of stuff to move, cats to manage (they really, really don't like to move) and a whole bunch of other stuff to worry about. All while holding down the day job and the usual volunteer stuff.

Anyway, our annual youth mission trip is coming up in a few weeks, and as a fundraiser, the team is selling flamingo insurance. They're also selling flamingo opportunities. The latter is where you can pay them to flamingo someone else's house. What with the moving (and not just that, but moving into a secret hidden condo for a few weeks), I thought I was safe. Youth leaders are obvious targets, but what if they didn't know where we are? Well, this is what happens:

And this:

And this:

Theoretically, for a mere $10 I can get my car de-flamingoed, but I'm getting to like the toxic plastic fumes, so I think I'll keep them until youth group on Wednesday.

Weekend Away...

Off to this church for the duration staffing one of our diocesan youth weekends.

Also get to sing in the state capitol building rotunda...

Another Busy Week

Yes, believe it or not, life in the Paisley household has been insane the past week. Maybe it started with last weekend's marathon push to get the house ready to put on the market (which, by the way, appears to be going insane in a good way for us right now).

Somewhere along the way I did manage to get in some leisure time. I managed to watch the 2003 movie Thirteen, while also finishing The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things and also Saving Francesca. Now, you might ask what a fifty year old guy is doing with all this. To be honest, even at age fifty, there are things about women that guys simply don't understand. Nor may we ever want to (check out Adam's Vagina Monologues post, for example) because, well, who wants to go there? But then, for whatever reason, I seem to have formed an informal reading club with several of my female youth group members.

For the record, Thirteen is a disturbing movie, but not necessarily because it depicts all those scary things parents worry their thirteen year olds may be getting up to. Well, not unless your thirteen year old is headed directly for crack-whore as an occupation, anyway. It's one of those movies that critics earnestly proclaim as "meaningful" and "essential", while ignoring the way life really works most of the time. Just because it is "sort of" based on the writings of the once upon a time thirteen year old co-star doesn't exactly make it a documentary.

The two books are pretty much excellent. While The Earth... could easily fall into the after-school special "fat girl sees the light and loves herself despite her physical appearance" trap, it doesn't. The book explores not fitting in in a lot more complexity than that. It manages to combine its serious topic with the occasional hilarious foray into Louise Rennison territory (Georgia Nicholson series). Highly recommended. And Saving Francesca is even better. With Rennison depicting female teenage life in England, and Mackler, McCafferty et al depicting it in the US, it's nice to see an Australian slant on teen life (with Italian heritage, no less). Merlina Marchetta apparently doesn't write very quickly, going ten years between (award winning but out of print) book 1 and book 2, but hopefully she'll give up real life in favor of turning out novels more frequently.

So yeah, that's the Dave week in review...

Technorati: female teen books movies

Powered by Bleezer

Off For The Weekend...

...in downtown sunny (no, scratch that, it's rained for 26 days in a row now) Medina. It's the high rent district of Bellevue, itself the high rent suburb of Seattle. This is where Bill Gates lives. Nuff said? BTW, random fact of the day, Bill Gates is one day younger than I am.

I'll be staffing one of our high school youth weekends at St Thomas Episcopal Church. The usual stuff will happen, but somewhere along the way the last few months, we turned a significant corner and a lot of our activities are very outreach oriented. Tomorrow I'll be taking a group of youth out to go scavenge the neighborhood for food bank donations. I've made up custom cards on business card stock with our purpose on one side and the church contact info on the other. Should be interesting.

Well, I've got small group stuff to pack, clothes, sleeping bag, guitars, amps and other stuff to pack, so I'm off... Back in a couple of days.

Making Learning Engaging

This is rapidly becoming my favorite blog. In particular, these posts, Most Classroom Learning Sucks, Dealing with a legacy school system and now Interaction vs. one-way communication combine to point out just how the way most subjects are taught, whether in school, the workplace, and even church just fails to deliver the goods. Not only that, when someone tries a different method, people get bemused to the point of bafflement.

There have been some interesting posts recently in defense of the traditional lecture, particularly by Maggi and Hugo. It's OK, nobody is saying that the lecture method never works, just that it only works for some of the people some of the time. and it doesn't work for some people almost any time. I think you'll find that people who are "good lecturers" are actually applying and using many other learning principles as well as lecture. And good lecturers are actually few and far between. The norm is much closer to Ben Stine in Ferris Bueller.

A critical pitfall of lecturing is that it can easily become a performance, where it's all about the performer, completely missing the point that it's supposed to be for the benefit of the learner...

Weekend Away

Off this weekend to staff a Diocesan youth weekend in sunny downtown Bremerton WA. Gotta pack guitars, amps, video camera, camera, laptop, clothes, toiletries, sleeping bag, air mattress, blankets, small group materials (books, games, writing material), alt worship stuff.

Technically we don't need all those things, but they sure do come in handy...

While I'm gone, here's something to keep you amused - an educational forklift safety video from Germany, hosted on some Icelandic website. It's basically forklift safety meets Monty Python's Black Knight meets Itchy and Scratchy... (CAUTION! Not for the squeamish...)

Take a deep breath and click right here...

Au revoir, mes amis!