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 …
Category Archives: Courses
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 …
Strange Beauty and the End(?) of a Block
During fourth week, we finished writing our catalogue essays for the Strange Beauty exhibition—a project that we were working on for essentially the full block. Writing the catalogue essay was a kind of cathartic exercise for me, the chance to articulate all the ideas, insights, and research of the last few weeks into a final …
Luncheons, Exhibitions, and Reflections
As third week began, we turned our attention from the Baroque objects we’ve been getting to know intimately over the last couple weeks to the contemporary pieces featured in the Strange Beauty exhibition. Researching current artists is surprisingly more difficult than those of the 17th century, as there is simply not the same vast quantity …
What a Wonderful Change of Pace
Let me just start off this blog with this sentiment: Wow, the world looks different outside of Neuroscience! It’s easy to forget what being in a humanities course is like. Luckily, it’s also easy to remember. Seeing as it is already third week and this is my first post, I have a lot to say …
The Excitement of a Field Trip
For the latter half of class Thursday, we went on a little excursion to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, which is conveniently right across the street. The purpose of this outing was to examine a couple of the temporary exhibitions at the FAC and begin thinking about the design of our own exhibition. We discussed what …
Opening Up the Discussion
One of the great things about having twelve people in a class is that everyone can get a chance to bounce their ideas off each other and get a fresh perspective when you’re just too deeply involved to see clearly. Especially when trying to nail down a thesis, as we are now, an open environment …
End of Week One
It’s only the end of first week, but it feels more like the end of the first month on the block plan. Our class started out seven days ago with almost no previous knowledge of the subject, and now we are deep into the core issues of the Baroque period and the research on our …
A New Block, a New Course, and a New Relationship
Art of the Baroque is the kind of class you only get a chance to take once. Instead of the normal slide memorization and lengthy, essay-filled tests, we get the chance to combine art history and museum studies, making direct connections between the 17th century art we are exploring in class and the contemporary art …
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