There was one day in class when someone mentioned an episode of the TV show Portlandia (a parody of Portland, Oregon) where a couple in a restaurant is so concerned about where the chicken on the menu came from that they drive to a farm 30 miles south of the city to see exactly where the chicken, …
Category Archives: Block 4
Ignorance, Knowledge, Dejection, Power, and Contextualization of Self in Outer Space. A Cycle.
We’ve just come to the end of third week, which means that we are approaching the dreaded FOURTH WEEK. This is when students survive on pizza, candy, and coffee. Lots of coffee. The end for my class in particular involves a systematic organizing of the concepts we’ve learned. Part of this is asking questions: Have …
Hellenistic Poetry and Philosophy
Last week we moved on from Herodotus and began to read selections of poetry from the Hellenistic period in Greece from around the fall of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. up until the eventual conquest of Greece by Rome in 146 B.C. The selections included Appollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, Theocritus’ Idylls, and the Epigrams …
DATA
I sometimes find quantitative, number- and statistic-based data to be like porcupines: prickly, pointed, and good to look at but not so good to touch. But for the past week, our class has been using a lot of data, and I like it. In groups of two or three we were assigned a city where …
Ancient Multicultures Week 1
This picture has been haunting me for the past week or so. Ancient Multicultures is the first class for which I have had to read substantial amounts of text or write a paper since seventh block of the last academic year. Coincidentally, that class was also with legendary Professor Owen Cramer. Interestingly enough the …
Just Because You Drive a Prius Doesn’t Mean You Can Stop Worrying About the Environment (and other musings from week one of Environmental Sociology)
What are you doing right now? Are you eating food? Drinking coffee? Wearing clothes? What about shoes? Are you in a house? Is there a car outside? Whatever specific things may be happening, you can be sure that your arrival at the current situation has taken some sort of generalized toll on the environment. No …
