Rider University - Shadow Yearbook (Lawrenceville, NJ)

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1' N 4, 'T 1'-f' iii? '1 Uk.5g5 H5-9 :Num The idea of having college students spend one month doing nothing but assembling puppets and a stage and then putting productions on for outside audiences is not as offbeat as it might sound. Puppetry is a very old art form, and is popular in other countries, where adults as well as children watch puppet performances. Attempting to bring this idea to America land this Col- legej were members of Donald Veix's Puppet and Mar- ionette Play Production ISP course. It was initiated to bring puppet performances to deserving groups, and to pass on the art of puppetry design and stagecraft to young people who plan to use such skills in their edu- cation careers. In the second week of the project, with headquarters in Maurer Building, disaster looks like it has already struck. Scatterred about the room in every corner are groups of two and three, busily working on their aspect of puppet play production. On the blackboard is a chart showing the schedule for completion of each stage. Veix has been in puppetry for a long time, so he thought it would be fun to have college students work- ing in this art form, too. He said that the puppet as an art form in this country is regarded as a form of chil- dren's entertainment, i.e., Bill Baird and his Muppets. In Europe, on the other hand, puppetry is an all-encom- passing medium. Keeping with his desire to have puppetry become a universal art form, Veix selected Beckett's classic Waiting for Godot from which to do an excerpt. Since younger school children were among the groups' ea- gerly-awaiting audience, a fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast and a Dr. Seuss story, Horton Hatches the Egg, were two of the other productions. Bay Brad- bury's The Martian Chronicles was also chosen. When Veix was asked why he offered such a project, one coed interjected, Cause he's crazy, that's why! Even in jest, that was the only negative comment heard about either Veix or the project. Almost all of the group had had him before and considered him to be extremely creative. The course description in the catalogue said that the third week would be for rehearsal of the productions and for suicide attempts. The suicides never occurred, 26 f . li 1 ff' A4 ,fxif I ,IPS Q -K Q L: 44. V! ,. n VU ,- V 5 Y I. 4 t 2 ' H i 44 however because of the dedication of the group's mem- bers. They spent every day from nine to three working on their separate tasks and enjoyed doing it. Most were taking the course because they enjoyed being creative and because they felt it would help, them as future educators, especially teaching the elementary grades. The final week was spent actually performing the plays at an orphanage, a high school, an old age home and even at the college. Which audience reacted best to the puppets? lt was hard to discern, but that's not really too important. What matters is that all those in the course got something out of it, whether a broken nail from hammering andfor Chopefullyj a greater appreciation of the art of puppetry. S5

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lg.. As today's society expands more and more, new uses for computers in many facets of our life are developed. All of us have been affected by computers in one way or another, it is a computer that sets up our schedule cards, it is a computer that processes some of our bills and pays us from the government treasury. It was also a computer that worked so fast on the Fall, 1970 grades that it had most of them delivered by Christmas Eve. Many people feel that in our technological society, computers have become the masters and have reduced us to mere numbers. More than one person is dying to fold, spindle, or mutilate the next punch card he gets. Many more have the impression that persons who oper- ate the computer are cold impersonal extensions of the system, unswerving in their loyalty to its accuracy. Many of these notions were swept right out the win- dow with one visit to the Computer Center in Fine Arts and a talk with Barton J. Perlman, its director. For ln- 'T i... V4 .. ff terim, he taught a group of about twenty in basic com- puter programming in Fortran, one of the languages of computers. Perlman took in students solely on the basis of their curiosity and desire to learn. At first I was going to re- quire some math but dropped that since my program- ming problems were very basic. Fortran is the com- puter language that is most based on mathematics or algebra. Before one can use a computer as a tool in problem solving, he must learn how to program it for the sake of programming it. The first problems that the group had, said Perlman, are no more than learning exercises. Each person follows several steps in each problem. First, he draws up a flow chart solution to the problem, or a pictoral diagram of the solution. Second, he writes the program onto a coding sheet. Third, he keypunches the information onto punch cards, sorting them out if necessary on a sorter. Finally, they fthe cardsj go through the computer. Each project member is required to do seven prob- lems. One of them had the group working up a program for the scoring, averaging and billing of persons who have taken examinations in a hypothetical situation. In another, the group was to develop a program to find the root of an nth degree polynomial. Here is an excerpt from the instructions: B. SUBBOUTINE DIFER fA,B,NJ Using a subroutine similar to the title above compute the coefficients of the first derivative of the polynomial, given the A array as the polynomial coefficients and placing the derivative coefficients in the B array for use in the main program. Consider an nth degree polyno- mial in general form as: at + azx + a3x2 + -1 a,. ', xf' The students who entered this particular project did so out of mere curiosity, but found the problems harder than they first expected it to be. One coed in the group expects to transfer to Drexel soon and major in Com- puter Science. Perleman hoped that the members of the group would use the knowledge gained in January to solving prob- lems that they get in other courses. This is already being done, he said, by other courses-especially in- statistical analysis and quantitative methods. Comput- ers, given a set of circumstances can give us an objec- tive solution, one not swayed subjectively. 'W 25

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'V-kg, .,?fv1Qa4'vj2 'Q . . ,,,g-F'-5,-. If this was supposed to be one of those cliche stories about an unusual or offbeat course, one would expect that it begin As I entered the English office, I saw that none of the lights were on, that a fire with a large black cauldron on it stood in the middle of the room, being stirred by Dr. Scherr's secretary dressed in a black cone-shaped hat and black shroud . . But the occult is just as valid a subject for study as mythology, so said Dr. Paul C. Scherr. It should be said before proceeding that the part about Dr. Scherr's Secretary did not actually happen. During the entire Interim period, however, she was ad- dressed The Witch by the College switchboard operators. The world of the occult was opened to Dr. Scherr about 25 years ago in England, where he was roaming among the ancient Roman ruins with his flute. While playing under a tree, he met some gypsies, with whom he spent some time. A British friend later told him of an author, George Barrow, who had lived with these gyp- sies and discovered that they were practitioners of oc- cult religions. Dr. Scherr studied the occult intensely for two years after that, then forgot completely about it. The idea of an l.S.P. project devoted to the super- natural came to Dr. Scherr when he took up the task of I advisor to a coed who was studying it independently last year. What motivated the group of about 20 to spend Janu- ary studying witches, goblins, the devil, and things that go boomp in the night? Mere curiosity, said Dr. Scherr. For the first two weeks the entire group studied oc- cult religions in a general manner. Then either they want to meet persons involved in particular fields or had workshops with such outside specialists at Flider. Some of the workshops dealt with practitioners of yoga, palmistry, astrology, and tarot card reading, as well as hypnotism, reincarnation, dreams, and meditation. One day the group took a trip into the Pennsylvania hills to visit a real live, honest-to-goodness witch. Hexi is her name, and she is a white witch, or one devoted to acts of goodness, as opposed to black witches such as the Wicked Witch of the West. Hexi, said Dr. Scherr, is part of a particular group that believes in the ability of the individual to create a constructive life. They accept some of the principles of Christianity, but reject the Judeo-Christian myth of a God. When asked how an educated man could believe in the supernatural, Dr. Scherr said that there were defi- nite cases of mind over matter, and also that the Ameri- can Academy of Science had recognized para- psychology fthe science of mind over matterj as a valid science. Dr. Scherr expected the group to gain a broad, but not necessarily a deep understanding of the occult. Above all, he concluded I am not here to convert anyone. W 27