Tr

English, as a subject, and I have ave a tenuous relationship at best: I usually don't 'understand' English, and English seems to enjoy grinding me into Julia-paste. As other similar classes, we are parting with a healthy respect for each other and a polite hat-tip, and quietly grateful for a break from each other. In this class, I’ve been learning about labels, about information, about other peoples’ points of view.

So, guess what I found on my computer!  ...yeah, I'm really sorry about this.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Class began with administrative some posts from last week.

A sizable percentage of the class posted about how labels were perhaps not desirable, but necessary.

For our final project we chose to play "Mafia" as an exercise in communication. In this game the participants have to discuss with one another who they think is the mafia. It could be anything from a funny  look, to an intuition.  This also tied into our conversations about information. What constitutes information? We were curious with this game to see what our classmates would chose as information to decide who they were going to accuse. I found it interesting that the people who were more vocal about their accusations were also most likely to be accused by the majority.

When thinking about what kind of a project I wanted to do for the end of the semester, I tried to think about the different ways our class had learned and been taught to learn over the course of the term. For me, the two most important things I came to understand where the way I presented myself in arguments, and the ways I learned to hear more openly, and allow my views to shift. Consequently, my group decided to create a human barometer in which our classmates would line up on a spectrum ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ as they responded to prompts inspired by the works we studied in class. In keeping with the ‘evolution’ centric topic, we ordered our prompts in the same order as we read/watched them.

 About two weeks before we gave our final presentation our group sat down over lunch and we discussed ways that we could represent what we leaned this semester.  All of us agreed that this class helped each of us to see the thin or overlapping boundary between science and literature.  Our original intent was to go through our notebook and select a few key terms that we had repeatedly discussed throughout the semester.  Thinking back to our lower school days (maybe for some of us middle school...or college) we decided to organize these terms into a venn diagram with the two main circles being science and biology.  We expected that most of the terms would correspond to either biology or literature, but that some terms would find a home in the middle circle.