August 23, 2017
My first day of second day classes, which mostly means we actually got into the lecture for the first time instead of just going over the syllabus. Honestly, I'm kind of dissappointed, I was expecting more debating. Instead we talked a little bit about the less interesting reading we had, even less about the actually interesting one and then watched two TED talks, which were good, but not a whole lot of participation goes in there. I had some stuff I wanted to say about the article, too, so, since I couldn't talk in class, I'll do it here.
The first reading we had was about the Nacirema, it was a satire of the way researchers in the past and sometimes now, talked about other cultures like they weren't as advanced and modern as their own and, as such, theirs was superior. He talked about the magical ritual of the Nacirema, their shrine of supposedly medicinal charms that they never get rid of even when their used, the basin of holy waters every member of the family gathers around at least once a day, the holy man who they visit at least once a year to inspect their mouths despite the multitude of terrifying instruments used, etc. Of course the reality is that he's just describing Americans and their daily hygiene rituals and yearly dental visits. It was an interesting little article all around, showing how researches used to and, to a certain extent, still do, go into their observations with assumptions and bias of superiority.
The second reading was about language and how it embodied more than just knowing the words and grammar, a dictionary isn't going to make communicating a breeze even if will help some. He talked about miscommunication between himself and other Americans, once because he was white and from a small town while his friend was black and from an urban area, another because he was a man and his colleague was a woman. This had nothing to do with the inability to speak English but just their own ways of thinking and perception that led to the errors. Then he talked about Austrian German and some issues he'd run into there when talking with native speakers. One of his biggest issues was knowing when to use the formal and casual forms of "you". that isn't an issue in English because we don't differentiate between them, not since we stopped using "thou" but a lot of other languages do have them. When learning the language there's usually some pretty straightforward ways of explaining when to use which one but rarely is that simple in real life. Reading about it made me think of my experiences with Spanish and the difference between "tu" and "usted", I'd never really though about which one to use when and where, I've always just said whichever one seemed the most natural in the context of my conversation. Of course I've been learning the language since I was in kindergarten so I don't know what kind of subconscious influence that's had on me. Still, it was an interesting point to make. Another issue he brought up was when an Austrian friend of his was in America and couldn't figure out what a "date" was and that he found he had difficulty explaining it to her. I though that seemed silly but then my roommate and I tried to describe one and while we could come up with an answer, "a romantic activity a couples does together" when we tried to clarify it like we assume would be the case if we were explaining it to someone who had no concept at all of what it was, we ran into a few roadblocks. For example, going to the movies is a date, but it can also just be an activity two friends do together. This would probably confuse people not from America and didn't know the difference between when a going to a movie was a date and when it wasn't.
I've had trouble with that too, and I'm American. My junior year of high school I really wanted to go see Deadpool but I didn't want to go alone and none of my friends were interested, I didn't want to go with my dad for obvious reasons and my sister was too young to see it no matter how much she insisted otherwise. One day I ran into a sort of acquaintance from the year I spent on my school's newspaper in the hallway, we ended up talking a little, I asked if he'd seen the movie yet and he suggested we go together. I jumped at the chance to get to see the movie without being by myself and agreed, we exchanged cell numbers and I headed to my car to go home. Later we texted to arrange things, he suggested we go out to eat before hand and that he could pay, I like the idea of free food so I agreed to that too. He didn't have a driver's licences so I picked him up and we went to Steak n' Shake before going to the movie. We had a pretty decent conversation about comics, we bother were Marvel fans. The movie was great, I loved it, I drove him home he said something along the lines of getting together again, he was nice, so I agreed, and that was that. I didn't really think anything of it, later he texted me about meeting up but at the time I'd just gotten home from a few hours of volunteer work at an elementary school sorting books and I was exhausted, I told him as much and he seemed fine with it. A few days later he texted again about meeting up, I just wasn't interested in going anywhere that day so I said I didn't want to go. He never texted me again. Afterwards I was thinking about the whole thing and I put a few pieces together, the dinner and movie was kind of a classic first date type situation and I started to think he may have had a different perception about it than I had. Oops. I'd always expected that if a guy wanted to ask me out he'd be straightforward about it and just ask me if I wanted to go on a date. I hadn't been prepared for accidentally ending up on a date. Which just goes to show how easy it is to miscommunicate even when there isn't a language barrier.
Ah well, I didn't actually want to date anyone anyway and he would be kind of annoying after a while so I wasn't all that concerned. Though I was a little surprised he'd be willing to go to a movie with me at all considering I was kind of a bitch to him whenever we talked during newspaper.
Anyway, this morning I had a math class and I've come to the conclusion that it is going to be absolutely mind numbing, I'm pretty sure it is way lower than my actual level of aptitude and the way the professor taught was like no one had any kind of idea about math that wasn't completely straightforward. There's some abstract to it but nothing remotely difficult, apparently most of my fellow classmates disagree with me. He taught about universal sets and prime sets, a universal set is a set made up of all the elements that are a part of whatever problem you're doing, your set is a list of elements and the prime set is every element in the universal set not in the regular set. Simple, right? Except at one point he gave an example problem, sets B and A prime are subsets of A, true or false? A subset is a set made up of elements inside a larger set. So, what's the answer? Well, seeing as the very definition of set A prime is that it's every elements not in set A, obviously the problem is false. He had to step by step explain that one out because there weren't any actual elements used for people to visually see it, you had to answer the problem by you knowledge on the rules and principals of set, abstract though, that evidently most of the class was incapable of. This might be even worse than my Spanish class, at least there they actually know their stuff, mostly. Bleh, it's going to be bad but I need a math credit and I've been told that after this first year I won't have to take another math class again. Yay! I hate math, I can do it, it isn't all that hard, I just don't like it.
So, kind of the gist of my day so far, I have my next class at four and I want to head over, I also have to go to the bathroom. So I'm gonna go.
Thanks for reading!
The first reading we had was about the Nacirema, it was a satire of the way researchers in the past and sometimes now, talked about other cultures like they weren't as advanced and modern as their own and, as such, theirs was superior. He talked about the magical ritual of the Nacirema, their shrine of supposedly medicinal charms that they never get rid of even when their used, the basin of holy waters every member of the family gathers around at least once a day, the holy man who they visit at least once a year to inspect their mouths despite the multitude of terrifying instruments used, etc. Of course the reality is that he's just describing Americans and their daily hygiene rituals and yearly dental visits. It was an interesting little article all around, showing how researches used to and, to a certain extent, still do, go into their observations with assumptions and bias of superiority.
The second reading was about language and how it embodied more than just knowing the words and grammar, a dictionary isn't going to make communicating a breeze even if will help some. He talked about miscommunication between himself and other Americans, once because he was white and from a small town while his friend was black and from an urban area, another because he was a man and his colleague was a woman. This had nothing to do with the inability to speak English but just their own ways of thinking and perception that led to the errors. Then he talked about Austrian German and some issues he'd run into there when talking with native speakers. One of his biggest issues was knowing when to use the formal and casual forms of "you". that isn't an issue in English because we don't differentiate between them, not since we stopped using "thou" but a lot of other languages do have them. When learning the language there's usually some pretty straightforward ways of explaining when to use which one but rarely is that simple in real life. Reading about it made me think of my experiences with Spanish and the difference between "tu" and "usted", I'd never really though about which one to use when and where, I've always just said whichever one seemed the most natural in the context of my conversation. Of course I've been learning the language since I was in kindergarten so I don't know what kind of subconscious influence that's had on me. Still, it was an interesting point to make. Another issue he brought up was when an Austrian friend of his was in America and couldn't figure out what a "date" was and that he found he had difficulty explaining it to her. I though that seemed silly but then my roommate and I tried to describe one and while we could come up with an answer, "a romantic activity a couples does together" when we tried to clarify it like we assume would be the case if we were explaining it to someone who had no concept at all of what it was, we ran into a few roadblocks. For example, going to the movies is a date, but it can also just be an activity two friends do together. This would probably confuse people not from America and didn't know the difference between when a going to a movie was a date and when it wasn't.
I've had trouble with that too, and I'm American. My junior year of high school I really wanted to go see Deadpool but I didn't want to go alone and none of my friends were interested, I didn't want to go with my dad for obvious reasons and my sister was too young to see it no matter how much she insisted otherwise. One day I ran into a sort of acquaintance from the year I spent on my school's newspaper in the hallway, we ended up talking a little, I asked if he'd seen the movie yet and he suggested we go together. I jumped at the chance to get to see the movie without being by myself and agreed, we exchanged cell numbers and I headed to my car to go home. Later we texted to arrange things, he suggested we go out to eat before hand and that he could pay, I like the idea of free food so I agreed to that too. He didn't have a driver's licences so I picked him up and we went to Steak n' Shake before going to the movie. We had a pretty decent conversation about comics, we bother were Marvel fans. The movie was great, I loved it, I drove him home he said something along the lines of getting together again, he was nice, so I agreed, and that was that. I didn't really think anything of it, later he texted me about meeting up but at the time I'd just gotten home from a few hours of volunteer work at an elementary school sorting books and I was exhausted, I told him as much and he seemed fine with it. A few days later he texted again about meeting up, I just wasn't interested in going anywhere that day so I said I didn't want to go. He never texted me again. Afterwards I was thinking about the whole thing and I put a few pieces together, the dinner and movie was kind of a classic first date type situation and I started to think he may have had a different perception about it than I had. Oops. I'd always expected that if a guy wanted to ask me out he'd be straightforward about it and just ask me if I wanted to go on a date. I hadn't been prepared for accidentally ending up on a date. Which just goes to show how easy it is to miscommunicate even when there isn't a language barrier.
Ah well, I didn't actually want to date anyone anyway and he would be kind of annoying after a while so I wasn't all that concerned. Though I was a little surprised he'd be willing to go to a movie with me at all considering I was kind of a bitch to him whenever we talked during newspaper.
Anyway, this morning I had a math class and I've come to the conclusion that it is going to be absolutely mind numbing, I'm pretty sure it is way lower than my actual level of aptitude and the way the professor taught was like no one had any kind of idea about math that wasn't completely straightforward. There's some abstract to it but nothing remotely difficult, apparently most of my fellow classmates disagree with me. He taught about universal sets and prime sets, a universal set is a set made up of all the elements that are a part of whatever problem you're doing, your set is a list of elements and the prime set is every element in the universal set not in the regular set. Simple, right? Except at one point he gave an example problem, sets B and A prime are subsets of A, true or false? A subset is a set made up of elements inside a larger set. So, what's the answer? Well, seeing as the very definition of set A prime is that it's every elements not in set A, obviously the problem is false. He had to step by step explain that one out because there weren't any actual elements used for people to visually see it, you had to answer the problem by you knowledge on the rules and principals of set, abstract though, that evidently most of the class was incapable of. This might be even worse than my Spanish class, at least there they actually know their stuff, mostly. Bleh, it's going to be bad but I need a math credit and I've been told that after this first year I won't have to take another math class again. Yay! I hate math, I can do it, it isn't all that hard, I just don't like it.
So, kind of the gist of my day so far, I have my next class at four and I want to head over, I also have to go to the bathroom. So I'm gonna go.
Thanks for reading!
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