Improvisation

Prompts
Improvisation
Create and make spontaneously; made do with what you have; going all MacGyver on it. (Note: none of them know who MacGyver is)

When is improvisation a good thing, a healthy thing, a worthwhile thing? Try and come up with at least three scenarios and explain why it helps? (Example: when there’s six seconds left on the shot clock, you don’t run a new play)

  • When you do not have everything you need
  • When you run out of materials or you need a specific tool
  • BC: Improvising is good when you’ve done the work.
  • When is improvisation unproductive? When might it become a crutch or even an excuse?

    MB: It can be not productive when you’re not getting anywhere or you’re not accomplishing anything. It might become an excuse because you think you’re doing something but you’re actually not.
    EG: When you do it for no reason.
    KM: When you are the president of the United States of America.
    MH: When it’s the main or first way of going about things; it should come naturally out of fluid, good work.
    HG: When you’re using it not to complete the work.
    SH: One unproductive way is doing at the last minute and putting almost anything in it to get it done.

    We ended the conversation by talking about why I would bring this up in terms of the CSpan video.

    Example:
    Untitled

    Why you read

    I try and read something every night. Not always successful. Really liked this review but liked being able to give this paragraph to a student trying to make an argument about climate change:

    More recent—and possibly more powerful—is the “ecosystems services model,” which is an attempt to cost out all the various services that nature provides, as if nature were a giant utility in charge of cleaning the water and freshening the air and sheltering coastlines from damaging storms but incapable of presenting us with a bill we can understand. The point of commodifying nature in this way is to give us a means of putting our actions—destroying mangroves, for instance—in perspective, showing us the hidden costs of what would otherwise look like rational economic behavior. The flaw here is that we can only value the ecosystems services that bear some resemblance to the things we’re used to assessing. Or as McCarthy puts it, “Worth is attributed only to services whose usefulness to us can be directly measured.” But what value, he asks, “do we give to butterflies which, when I was seven, captured my soul? What value do we give, for that matter, to birdsong?”