The sketch above is of a small portion of my Biol 142 class notes. We covered the topics of Mendelian genetics and Meiosis/Mitosis.
I began by first writing all my notes in words and began doodling around them. For the more complex topics, I deleted the texts and substituted them with diagrams as seen on the bottom.
Drawing out my notes was extremely helpful as visuals have always helped me understand complex concepts. Drawing processes helps me visualize the different proteins, molecules, and organelles and how they interact with each other. Doing this Sunday Sketch only further reinforced the benefits that visualizing my notes does for me.
I hope that those of you who are traveling to return to campus are doing so safely and without too much tumult and stress. I look forward to seeing you all in person on Tuesday for our next class.
We’ll meet in the Callaway Building room S103 (here’s a link to that building on the official Emory map and here’s a link to that building on Google maps). Note that the Callaway Building is kind of confusing — it used to be two different buildings that were combined together and that history lives on in the room numbering. The S in the room number means it’s on the south side of the building so our classroom is in the section of the building that is located right along the quad, not on the side of the building that is closer to the Modern Languages building, Tarbutton Hall, and beyond those over to Woodruff gym (rooms on that side of the building are marked with N for north).
In the meantime, you should be creating your visual notes for sketch 3 this weekend. We’ll talk a bit about the upcoming combophoto assignment in class this week.
For Tuesday, you have a short chunk of Stitches to read. We’ll spend a lot of class on Tuesday discussing Hillary Chute’s chapter “Comics for Grown-Ups.” Chute is probably the foremost academic authority on comics these days — she’s the Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University in Boston and has published six volumes of criticism on comics as a medium. The first twenty pages of her article provide a very useful overview of the history of comics with lots of useful information in it. But in class on Tuesday, we’ll focus most of our attention on the last 10 pages of the essay, the section called “Reading Comics,” which provides us key terms and a theoretical framework for understanding how comics works and how to read and analyze them.
We’ll spend most of Thursday diving back into Stitches. Scott McCloud’s Making Comics should be really useful for you as you begin to think about revising your literacy narratives into comics literacy narratives. We’ll spend a bit of time talking about it, especially paying attention to the 5 aspects needed for clarity in your writing, but mostly I see that chapter as a resource for you as you go about designing your own comics that doesn’t really need to be unpacked in class discussion. If you have questions about the text, then please do raise them though.
Conservative officials across the United States have been removing books by people of color and LGBTQI+ from curricula and school libraries at an alarming rate recently and now they have come for Maus by Art Spiegelmann, which we discussed on the first day of class this semester.
Here is a two-page comic that Art Spiegelmann drew for the New Yorker a couple of decades ago about his conversation with the renowned children’s book author Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are and countless other classic books)
From the New Yorker, September 27, 1997.
The executive editor at Dutton Books for Young Readers, Andrew Karre tweeted the comic above with the powerful statement, “Protection from history, protection from the other, protection from the intricacies of the spectrum of human identity—all of these ‘protections’ inevitably extract a toll on the protected and, most acutely, on those children cast outside the walls of the ‘quaint and succulent.'”
Dan Roam isn’t just right with Business. In fact, the fundamental way mathematicians think is via simple, analytical pictures – simplicity embodies abstractness and generality.
Like most (pure) mathematicians, I believe in the existence of an eternal Platonic garden of forms, in which the most beautiful landscapes hide behind the steepest mountains. Indeed, my most challenging course this semester (Math 523) has introduced me to the most enchanting theorems – Hilbert’s Nullstellensätze (theorem of zeros, hence the title), Snake Lemma and more. As said, these theorems have complicated proofs and could be expressed in jargon-full algebraic terms, but their prettiest facets definitely lie in visualizations; at least, that’s how I would like to picture them. Explanations are provided below the pictures if the viewer happens to be interested.
Nullstellensatz says that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between radical ideals in Polynomial Rings over a Field (upper sphere) and Irreducible Varieties in an Affine Space (lower box). A ring is an abstract algebraic object, an affine space is visual, geometric, and intuitive. This correspondence bridges the abstract and the geometric, hence is a significant theorem of Algebraic Geometry, the most popular field of pure maths today.
The Snake Lemma, probably known by most people via the film It’s My Turn, is a theorem in Homological Algebra whose complexity (as witnessed in the graph) is as notorious as its usefulness. It describes the structure between commutative exact sequences, and especially the snake (from Ker y to Coker \alpha) that generated a whole new exact sequence. Drawing it out is the only way to make this thing penetrable.
Local Ring is a special ring that has a unique maximal ideal consisting of non-unit elements. To me, it has the image of a dragon’s eye. In fact, it’s indeed the “eye” of the “dragon” Algebraic Geometry.
Having been raised in a society that is often both misunderstood, misrepresented, and distorted, I tried to portray my story differently with details that I thought would add to the narrative. The freewriting helped significantly since it already provided a pathway for me to write the literacy narrative. Although I already know the details of my upbringing, writing this made me realize the things I tend to forget about my life as a child. Lastly, I do not think I have a particular sentence to quote, but realizing the importance of liking what I do (in this case reading/writing) should always come to mind.
There are many experiences that shaped me as both a consumer and producer of stories, but the earliest and most fundamental for me was the creation of what my siblings and I creatively called “The Game.” In my Literacy Narrative (“The Game”), I explain this long-lasting game of pretend and how it brought storytelling into my life.
Through this assignment, I’ve learned that one of my greatest weaknesses when it comes to writing is getting started. I get too focused on what the end result will be rather than focusing on telling the story. The pre-writing really helped me combat this issue because it forced me to free-write within a time limit. This ensured that I didn’t have enough time to second guess or edit what I was saying until my time was up. The prewriting also helped me realize exactly how much I grew up writing, reading, and storytelling and although I didn’t use the exact story from my original prewriting exercise, I did write about the same topic.
It’s hard to view my writing through the eyes of others simply because of how many times I’ve reread it, but I think the following sentence would be viewed as most interesting due to its relatability. “Instead of games of pretend, my portals became sheets of college-ruled notebook paper and a 24 pack of mechanical pencils.” Everyone who writes (or partakes in any artistic hobby) probably remembers when they made the switch from simply benign someone with an imaginative mind to being someone who makes something with that creativity.
Before writing this assignment, I jotted down a list of events that have influenced my reading and writing style and surprisingly realized that almost all of them were interrelated. So the main challenge for me whiling putting everything together was how to select the most important ones and weaved them together within the 1000 word limit.
I mainly reflected on how my love for reading and writing fantasy stories led me to redefine my reality and determine what kind of writer I want to become. I strived to explain what I learned from facing the conflicting purposes of writing demonstrated by school composition assignments and my interest in writing fantasy stories.
Overall I enjoyed the assignment a lot for its level of freedom and how it inspired me to reflect on my past experiences which led me to become more determined in what I hope to achieve as a writer
I was unsure about what to write about at first. The X pages helped with remembering memories that dealt with reading or writing. However, they were very vague memories that I had because reading and writing have become something that I think of as being something I could always do. So, this narrative was sort of hard to write. But because I did have to think hard and remember about the past, it was enjoyable in its own way. This assignment also made me realize that I do have a lot of fond memories that deal with reading and writing. There were a lot of factors that I did not realize that have shaped the way I read and write today.
