Spring course final grades are due at the university today. Seeing today’s Daily Create, I quickly decided to do something (other than submit grades) to mark the day. Paul Revere’s midnight ride came to mind: “Final Grades are Coming! Final Grades are Coming.” I played with that idea for a meme or GIF while making coffee. But by the time the water was ready to pour into the French press, I has moved on to “ring the bell” as a very special, celebratory activity for the conclusion of a pandemic spring of college.
Faculty, students, and friends! Join us in celebrating all the effort we have made to adapt to the changes brought on by COVID-19 by helping to ring the bell at Chion-In Temple (Kyoto). Especially, celebrate our graduating seniors! @ds106dc #tdc3042 @eng304cripps pic.twitter.com/okwJPMq7BB
— Michael J. Cripps (@michaeljcripps) May 11, 2020
Some end-of-term celebration is particularly important this Spring. Students have effectively been forced to complete classes in practical isolation, seniors will graduate without a ceremony, and faculty cannot come together to congratulate, to exhale, and to mark what is always a very important moment.
A quick Google search turned up a video of Buddhist monks practicing for the New Year’s ringing of the Chion-In Temple bell, the largest in Kyoto, Japan (https://youtu.be/NlvRvsDUkdM). I turned to a pretty solid, watermark-free video-to-GIF tool called GIF Run and quickly trimmed the clip to create a reasonable looping GIF. I added some explanatory, celebratory text and threw in @ds106dc, #tdc3042, and a time stamp to lock it all in as a daily.
ds106dc