Nacirema and Turning Points

One, after the English class with the Nacirema society, I felt like a total idiot for not cluing in. I am not sure if I was not reading attentively enough or if it was just totally over my head. I understand that the article was a mockery of the extremities of the American society and ridiculing what they hold dear NOW and I was getting the hints that yes it was familiar to some of the North American values but I was either too tired or too stupid to entirely understand the concept that it was the american society. Plus never in my life have I ever read things backwards in hoping that it would reveal something. I am sorry that I do not look at an article and grab a mirror and see how it looks backwards. How others came across that so easily made me wonder why in elementary school my teachers felt the need to forget that little detail. I did not understand how the article related to Religious Studies but I understand the purpose of looking closely at a text. Journalism was important this week because with the journalism task I was worried on how to write a great piece without putting in too many quotes. I am glad that Michael Camp decided that he would explain to the class which details he would find important. The story is clearly more important that each little quote that the person I was interviewing, even though i am now finding it difficult to determine which quotes are the most important due to the fact that looking at all the quotes seem meaninful to me.

Documentaries and Paden

Over the Thanksgiving weekend we were asked to read an article called "Interpretating the Sacred." Paden explains how views, especially religious ones, come into light differently for each person. Some people see their beliefs as views and some see it as the solid truth. It made looking at Sister Aloysius a more challenging tasks even though some people said "oh now I completely see her in a different light" but for me it was like now I have to evaluate both her beliefs and mine and what type of person she is and whether or not she is mature enough to understand what her belief is in comparison to everyone else. There was so much more that you have to look at in applying it to the text and to the characters. It made life a little more difficult. Then in religious studies on Thursday, Michael Higgins came to our class. Going to be perfectly honest here. Did not understand much of what he said due to his complicated vocabulary and his sophisticated ways. I mean nothing mean out of this but it is hard to listen to someone talk when they seem to only be talking to impress others. I did learn a little bit about the Irish Catholic hierarchy though and how it applies to Doubt, but seriously, Doubt is a dead horse and we need to stop kicking it. If I analyze it anymore then we have I am going to mentally collapse. People are discussing their valued opinions on what they believed happened in the play and everytime someone disagrees with it, people feel once again the need to talk about their side. Okay everyone has their view, leave it at the fact that people have their views too.
In Journalism, i loved the documentary because of how hilarious it was. It was funny to see the different characters in University and how you can take a camera and look into peoples lives and see how people vary. The idea that in journalism you have to have a story to catch people's attention was well proved.
I enjoyed this week because I feel as if we broke off into some new directions.

Separate Classes Review

Hmmm what have I learned this week? Well, it was nice to have a piece of writing that the classes could all evaluate in their own ways. I was worried we would get back into the routine we did with the "Rwanda war criminal" article and talk about the same ideas (no offence) to death. I did not want to sit around and just butcher the piece until there was nothing left of it so to be able to go to two different classes and discuss the same piece but with two different teaching styles was intriguing. There were much more questions from the religious perspective then I had originally come up with in my head as I was only looking at it from the most obvious standpoint and not looking at the little details that were quietly written in. It was refreshing to have a time for everyone to inform one another and talk about something so important in today's society. In journalism, I was bored with the class because it was just the most basic points of journalism and it was hard to be involved but once everyone was included and we had that discussion about which headlines were more important, then my attention was caught. Looking forward to the interview.

End of Rwanda

With the large discussions we have been having on the Rwandan war criminal it was really intriguing to listen to people and there views on the whole topic. Everyone's answers were so broad and people were really passionate and defensive about their ideas. I was hoping since day one that people would want to discuss and want to debate and challenge each other and I thought the topic was a decent dicussion idea because it had the touchy subject about immigration, death penalty and justice. It also gave everyone a great chance to see what experiences some of us had and what high school taught us. Some of us were taught in very different ways with very different topics. As cheesey as it sounds, it feels like we are little closer for finding all this out about each other and some of us, this sounds mean, some of us know where we stand with others. I am more intrigued than ever.