Our names are Kyle and Megan Byard and we were sealed for time and all eternity in the Nauvoo, Illinois temple on December 30th, 2009. We're very excited to see what married life brings us! Both of us are English majors (he's creative writing and I'm education) and Spanish minors and we graduated from Ball State University in 2011. We work in the Jay County School Corporation where Megan teaches 9th and 10th grade English and Kyle subs for just about everyone. We're also members of the LDS church and love to serve our ward family! Most importantly, we're now part of an eternal family :)
Wow it's been AGES since I've last been on here! Unfortunately, there's nothing too new to catch up on...things have been super-busy with classes (try getting three hours of sleep every night for a week!), but what else is new, right? I feel like every time I blog, I say that. And it must be pretty boring for readers, because I have like a month in between each post and all they ever say is "well, my life has been pretty busy..." Great.
On an up note, I've recently embarked upon a new course of study for some of my final projects in my classes...comic books. This, of course, has Kyle pretty excited, because he ADORES comic books and graphic novels. Mostly I'm studying how they can be useful to use in a classroom setting to teach things like plot, character development, morals, etc. Mostly I'm focusing on comic book superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (along with other DC and Marvel superheroes), but I've also become intrigued with the idea of turning novels into graphic novels. For instance, last night at Maring-Hunt library I checked out a graphic novel of Pride and Prejudice. After reading the first few frames, I've decided it was amazing.
I'm intending to create a unit plan for one of my classes around using comic books to study English and I'm actually very excited about it. For my Young Adult literature class, I want to address the issue of using graphic novels in class and give some examples of my experiences in reading graphic novels of novels (not only did I check out Pride and Prejudice, but I also have Jane Eyre and King Arthur, and I'm looking forward to checking out Beowulf as well as Walden at Thoreau). For my digital literacy class, I'd like to take the information I found and publish it to a website and include a database of some lessons I've created around teaching comics and graphic novels and perhaps add a blog of my research (I'd update it more than this, I think).
So, there are only five weeks of classes left (eeeek). I need to work hard to get this together. But I'm actually quite excited about it :) For once, I'm into my final projects as opposed to being opposed. It feels pretty good.
Recently Kyle and I have taken to watching MST3K (or Mystery Science Theater 3000) in our spare time...what a neat find! For those of you who don't know, MST3K is a series that features a man (named Joel or Mike, depending on the season) and his robot sidekicks (Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo) who are trapped on a space station by evil scientists and tortured by being forced to watch a selection of bad movies, initially (but not especially limited to) science fiction B-movies. To keep sane, the man and his robots provide a running commentary on each film, making fun of its flaws and wisecracking their way through each reel in the style of a movie-theater peanut gallery. Each film is presented with the man and robots' silhouettes along the bottom of the screen.
Have I mentioned that the episodes are hilarious? We began by watching Cave Dwellers, a movie made in 1984 that borrowed props from other movies and had major continuity errors. I think it was supposed to take place in prehistoric times, but there were medieval castles, samurai swords, and hang gliders involved as well...fishy. Also, the villain's mustache was dreadfully fake, the lead woman wore a hubcap on her shirt, and the actors like to talk directly to the camera sometimes. There was no plot to speak of. We had a good time watching that one.
The next episode we watched was Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which, unfortunately, is a movie my family owns in real life. This movie at least had a plot! Mars children are unhappy and watching Earth programs all the time and in the Mars' month of Septober ("Oh man...have I missed Septober Fest?"), an equivalent of Earth's December, Mars' old wise man tells the Martians that children need to be children again...and they need Santa Claus. So the Martians go to Earth, kidnap Santa Claus (by holding him up with something that looks like a hairdryer) and two stowaway children named Billy and Betty, bringing them to Mars. After they're there, they have to deal with one of the Martians trying to re-kidnap Santa Claus and get rid of him as well as trying to make toys for all the little Martian children. In the end, it doesn't work out well, so Santa appoints the laziest (and most intellectually challenged) man on Mars to be the Mars Santa Claus while he and the children return to Earth. It's probably got the cheesiest looking Martians. Ever. And we're all pretty convinced that Santa's not sober at all during this movie. It's labeled one of the worst 100 movies of all time. And then of course after Santa Claus, we watched this awwwwful movie called Werewolf. Basically the plot of this one is that some archaeologists are digging around Flagstaff and they find a werewolf skeleton. And one of the archaeologists (whose hair style keeps changing in every scene) decides he just wants to make more werewolves so he can make money (which I don't know how he's connected that, but somehow it's supposed to work out), so he cuts people with the bones of the skeleton, and they turn into wrrrrrrrwolves! And eventually the whole town is wrrrrwolves! Check out the clip for yourself:
