Year: 2015

While students at Houghton’s main campus seldom have the opportunity to interact with students at Houghton-in-Buffalo’s campus, Professor Laurie Dashnau and her Literary Non-Fiction class have spent the past semester challenging this division. On Wednesday, November 18th, she and five students from the class traveled to Houghton-in-Buffalo’s (HB) campus to meet with a Writing 101 class, and to see how Houghton’s mission extends beyond the Genesee Valley.

The partnership between Dashnau’s writing class and the HB class has been in the works for the past three months. As a project for the duration of the Fall semester, Dashnau assigned her Non-Fiction students to write to students in Anna Matejova’s (‘11) HB Writing 101 class as pen pals.

“The idea came from me already working with the Writing 101 instructor in Buffalo and having met last year’s students and wanting to seize the opportunity of encouraging them to connect more strongly with Houghton College in general, as well as with our residential students,” said Dashnau.  

She consulted with Matejova, a former student of hers, in mid-August about the idea, and Matejova responded enthusiastically. They tried to mostly pair male students with male students and female students with female students. Several of the Non-Fiction students were assigned two pen pals, as there are twelve students in Dashnau’s class, while there are twenty-two in Matejova’s. The letters would be posted to Moodle on a regular basis, and the students could write back and forth. Over the course of the next few months, they gave their students writing prompts for each letter that included topics such as a favorite memory, a historical event or country of interest, and a discussion of a character in a work of literature. According to students in Dashnau’s class, these assigned topics often branch out into other areas as they discover things they have in common despite their differences.

On November 18th, Dashnau and students Carina Martin ‘18, Bonnie Huegel ‘19, Jordan Trautwein ‘19, Alyssa Rogan ‘18, and Andrew Meyers ‘18 all traveled to Buffalo and sat in on an HB Writing 101 class. In the classroom, each Non-Fiction student was assigned to a group of five or six HB students, and instructed to interview one another with questions they had prepared beforehand. Rogan’s group was mostly interested in what her life was like on Houghton’s main campus, while she asked them about their lives in the United States compared to their lives in their home countries. Huegel and her group talked about how they are different and similar, their home lives, their friends and their families.

“Their life experiences are so different from my own, yet really, we are the same,” said Huegel. “It was exciting and eye opening to talk to them and get to know them.”

After writing to one or two of the HB students throughout the semester, it was especially exciting for the Non-Fiction students to finally meet their pen pals. According to Martin, the experience was somewhat strange, but still enjoyable.

“When you’re communicating virtually with someone for a long period, you sometimes formulate an idea of them in your mind that turns out to be very different from the way they really are,” said Martin. “In general, I found that my pen pals’ letters had clearly reflected their interests and personalities, enough that I felt upon meeting them as if we already knew each other. It’s amazing how much of someone’s personality and individuality can be conveyed through a thoughtfully written letter.”

 Overall, the pen pal program has proved a success. Not only do students in both classes have the opportunity to practice their writing skills on a technical level, but, according to Rogan, the writing project has enhanced her abilities to relate to and understand people of different cultures through her writing.

“It isn’t often that I connect with people from cultures so vastly different from my own,” said Rogan. “The whole experience has given me a deeper appreciation for diversity.”

Dashnau echoed Rogan’s words, saying that the experience was designed to accomplish this.

“My students have been challenged to think about crafting their writing for students with a different level of experience with the English language as well as cultural knowledge,” she said. “Mother Teresa is quoted as saying, ‘I am a small pencil in God’s hands.’  I think many students feel the same way in regards to their pen pal experience.”

The Good Dinosaur is built around a “what if?” premise that the film’s trailers have likely already explained to you: what if the meteor responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago had just zoomed past earth, uninterrupted? Pixar takes this scenario and imagines dinosaurs that have evolved to become an advanced species, while humans still walk around on all fours in a pre-Neanderthal kind of way

The central story being told here, revolves around Arlo, a young dinosaur who becomes separated from his family after being provoked by a human child. The two are forced to overcome their initially perceived differences and gaps in overall mental capacity; having to rely on each other in order for Arlo to conquer his fears of the unknown so that he can find his way home.

The first thing one is bound to notice is how incredible The Good Dinosaur looks. From the hypnotic flowing water, to the shining brilliance of snowy mountaintops, to the painstaking detail of the lush forests, it is unbelievable how photorealistic the geography is. However, while the quality of the animation is sublime, the overall presentation suffers a bit due to the out-of-place cartoonishness of the dinosaurs themselves–they stick out like a sore thumb against such authentic landscapes. Cartoonish though they may appear, the film still manages to do some incredible things animating the various species of dinosaurs; Arlo, especially, the bruising and physical wear and tear his adventure has on his body is shown with great yet subtle detail.

As great as Arlo looks, overly cartoonish or not, he is, unfortunately, insufferable as a main character. He is frightened of anything and everything, and it ends up becoming the only memorable thing about him. Nearly every step forward in the story is a result of one of Arlo’s irrational fear-induced episodes and it gets old quickly. He becomes little more than a plot-device to keep things moving. In a film dealing implicitly with the effects of evolution, it becomes clear that Arlo might have been better off experiencing the effects of natural selection.

Arlo’s journey toward self-confidence does eventually begin, kicking off with the friendship he comes to establish with Spot, the film’s token boisterous, silly, apelike, human character. Spot is a lot of fun to have onscreen, although he falls victim to the recent animation cliché of being more of a dog in nature, than an actual portrayal of a prehistoric person. He pants with his tongue out, sniffs the ground, howls at the moon, etc. It’s cute, but he essentially has more in common with the moose from Frozen or the horse from Tangled than something resembling a person.  

Overall, there is a striking lack of originality or creativity in The Good Dinosaur, especially given its distinction as a Pixar movie. It struggles as a film to establish any real narrative identity that goes beyond material that doesn’t feel like it is being lifted directly from films like The Lion King, Ice Age, or Finding Nemo.

Beyond the lack of original ideas, as the film progresses it becomes less and less apparent why this story requires the presence of dinosaurs at all. There is hardly anything novel about the way the movie uses them. There are no jokes about the meteor, no jabs at evolution, no conjecture as to what will become of these silly humans, nothing like that. It is a major missed opportunity for the film to feature anything memorable or particularly noteworthy to supplement a storyline that Pixar is essentially knocking off from previous projects.

The film itself is a marvel of technical achievement and looks better than anything Pixar has ever made, making it all the more disappointing that there is very little to sustain the viewer once the novelty of the aesthetics begins to wear off. In the hands of the Pixar of old, The Good Dinosaur might have been something special, but when compared with the impact left by Woody and Buzz, and other famous duo’s, much like the meteor that misses the earth, Arlo and Spot fail to hit their mark.

From November 30 to December 11, the city of Paris will host the Conference of Parties (COP21) which is a meeting of representatives from over 190 countries around the world. The conference was called in the hopes of forming a legally binding and universally recognized agreement on climate action. This week, three members of the Houghton community will fly to Paris in order to show their solidarity with the movement: Sustainability Coordinator Brian Webb and his wife Becky, along with senior International Development major Lauren Bechtel. Becky Webb was unavailable for interview, but both Brian and Lauren expressed high hopes for the outcome of COP21 and stressed its international importance.

This is the twenty-first time that the Conference of Parties will meet, but according to Webb, the effect of previous meetings has been minimal. This year, however, a different approach will be taken. Rather than a treaty on climate action being drawn up and ready to sign before the conference meets, the participating countries have been asked to bring their own solutions and goals toward slowing down climate change. Because of this new approach, Webb said that he believes that COP21 is “the single most important political event of the decade,” and that the outcome “will decide the trajectory of how the world decides to take a stand on climate change.”

When asked what his goals for conference were, Brian answered, “there are two primary goals. Most importantly, we’re hoping to use this as an opportunity to bring a witness to the church about how climate change is related to our faith and how responding is an issue of justice. The secondary piece is that we want to be a witness to the world of God’s love by simply being there, and by being there as Evangelical Christians.”

Although Webb and Bechtel both agreed that the primary reason they are attending COP21 is to be witness to the fact that they care about climate action, Bechtel also views the conference as a means of empowering voiceless people groups. She stated that the people who are most affected by climate change are often those who are least able to speak out against it, but that “the global community thinks of COP21 as the first time that we can really band together to do something, to make a positive difference.”

To Bechtel, the issue of climate change has moved from a distant future to an immediate present. She said, “One of the arguments that has been made for a long time has been ‘preserve the environment for those that come after you,’ but what we’re seeing now is that we’re looking out for the environment because climate change is going to affect our lives.”

When asked what she thought of the argument that environmental regulations on fossil fuels should not apply to developing countries because it will hinder their development, Bechtel compared that thought process to feeding fast food to a young child. She said, “We know that it’s not good for the child, but people will argue that if there’s nothing else to feed them, then you have to feed them something. And in some ways, that’s true. But I don’t believe that is our choice here… if we think of countries’ development as either fossil fuels or nothing at all, we’re faced with an unsolvable problem. Using fossil fuels will have negative effects on them in the long run, so we have to think creatively about how to harvest energy in ways that do not prevent that country’s development.”

For students who are interested in the issue of climate change and would like to show their support of COP21, two events will be held by Eco Reps on December 8 and 9. The first is a day of silence which will represent solidarity with people groups who are unable to speak out against the deterioration of their land by climate change. The second is a 24 hour prayer service for climate action, the success of the conference, and for Brian, Becky, and Lauren. Students interested in either event should contact Eco Reps Intern Daniel Bellerose for more information.