documenting work

Documentary, in class today, and those in charge of introducing sent us out to document life on campus (I love activities ...) - that was actually the easy part, since we then had to write a three part caption i) factual ii) telling the reader something that can't be seen in the image but that's totally relevant and iii) providing a quotation (real or fake).  So this is Mr Reyes, sanding down a pillar prior to repainting it; this is the table where I hold my office hours (so called) - that you couldn't know without me telling you.  If you blew the picture up, though, you could see that the table (very St John's!) has scratched on it - in ancient Greek - "eleutharios," or "free" - which I tried to turn into a nifty point, but failed.  Sometimes, the words that accompany documentary need to be pruned ... A quotation?  "It's going to be noisy," he warned me.  Which it was, but I actually work best with distractions...

... and ok, like lots of documentary, it's a fake, of sorts.  I didn't take it when we were sent off on safari: I'd taken it a quarter of an hour earlier (instead, I walked up the hill behind the campus and took pictures of the landscape seen through discarded green plastic drainpipes - strange land art).  What I learned, though, and what I'm stealing for next semester's teaching, is that writing captions is a tough exercise.  We all had to write captions for our neighbor's image, too - and that was much easier, since under such circumstances, one really can be inventive ...