I can has easy semester??

When my grades from Spain finally arrive, I will have the hours necessary to be classified as a senior. Wow. It seems only yesterday we were having our first Paideia meeting; and the day before was when I moved into my dorm room in Mabee, my first time living away from my parents.

This rollercoaster of an experience they call college has been above and beyond any of my expectations. The best part about it, however, is that I still have three semesters to go!

So, down to business, this semester. For this semester, I want to: 1) maintain a 4.0 GPA; 2) get an off-campus job (currently on the lookout, if anyone knows of anywhere that is hiring); 3) move towards a clearer view of what it is I want to do for the rest of my life; and 4) enjoy myself! How Paideia fits into these goals, I am not really sure, but I do know that I have a newfound interest in doing some volunteer work in the Georgetown community. I am also not really sure how we go forward with the Paideia program from here, thus I am coming into this situation with an open mind and hoping that we get a chance to shape what we want our group and personal experiences to be. The last time I did anything with Paideia was Spring 2009, as I studied abroad during Fall 2009, thus my knowledge of the program and its newest developments is very little.

Though I may not know a lot about what we are going to do this semester, I do happen to know quite a bit about studying abroad. I culminated my undergraduate study abroad experience this past fall when I studied in Madrid, Spain. This past summer, I also studied in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the summer before that, I was in Guanajuato, Mexico, for six weeks. As you might have noticed, these are all Spanish-speaking locations and as you might have guessed, I am a Spanish major (in addition to being a Communication Studies major). I must say, these were all very rewarding experiences, but Spain was downright life changing.

Not only did I learn more Spanish in one semester than I did in the 5 years of classes prior, but I also had an internship where I was able to work on improving the condition of human rights throughout the world and strengthening the condition of democratic governments in newly democratic countries. I am sad that I am no longer in Spain, but happy to be back in the United States (right now, that is, until the SU homework load takes its toll on me).

I am taking a lighter course load this semester, which includes two Spanish classes and one of my core classes in Communication Studies. I am starting to think about the two Capstones I will be required to do and even though they are months away, I can still see the heavy, dark clouds forming over my social life. No pain, no gain, right?

Oh ya…I almost forgot that I am planning on becoming healthier this year with the help of the workout program P90X. I will keep you all updated on this as the semester goes on.

Until lunchtime,

Brady

On-Campus Event: Late Blog Penalty

Hello,

As I write this, it is the Friday before Finals Week and I couldn't be happier that this semester is finally coming to an end. This semester has been a pretty difficult one for me, as is evidenced by the fact that I am waiting until now to complete my last two blogs. 

So, for my on-campus event I chose to attend my friend Colin's biology honors thesis presentation. Colin and I studied abroad in Mexico together during last summer. I knew that he was very busy this year because most of the time when we ran into each other, he was either coming from or going to the laboratory. For a double humanities major, it is sometimes hard to realize there is this whole other area on campus where they do experiments and write lab reports...ick. 

Colin's honors thesis was over the reproduction habits of pomacea insularum, or the apple snail. From what I could gather during the presentation, he was studying their reproductive habits in order to evaluate their potential as an invasive species. Not only was his presentation informational and enjoyable, but he also took his project a bit farther by using the shape of the snails' shells (logarithmic spiral) as a metaphor for their reproductivity, which delighted me because metaphors are something that humanities majors DO understand. He used the shape to show how rapidly the snails could expand in number, even though many of the snails never make it to adulthood. Then he showed the potential implications this has for the snails to be an extremely invasive species.

His experiments were mainly focused on what type of surface the snails prefer to lay their eggs. He tested many surfaces, including the two different kinds of natural plant surfaces where their eggs have been seen, wooden rods of varying shape (i.e. cylindrical, rectangular) and some metal rods, also of various shape. All of his surfaces were of different length in order to examine the issue from all different angles. If I remember correctly, the snails didn't lay any of their eggs on the metal surface and their was a wide distribution on the plant and wooden surfaces. Also, I don't think there was a height preference displayed by the placement of the egg shoots. He told us a story about one of his excursions to collect a plant species on which the snails could lay their eggs. On this particular occasion, he had to travel to Houston to collect the plant and upon seeing a pond with the species growing around it, they stopped and asked a homeowner if they could go through her backyard to access the pond. Once they were collecting their specimens, Colin saw the plants near him rustle as if something was moving through them. Once he let his eyes scan to the area, he saw an alligator moving towards him in the water. He was standing in muck wearing golashes and while trying to get out of the muck and to safety, he had to leave one of his boots behind in the muck. From then on, one person was collecting specimens and the other was on alligator watch.

It's been a fun (and busy) semester. Ready for summer!

Catch ya on the flipside,

Brady

March 10th Reading Blog

Hello everybody (aka Dr. G),

I wasn't able to attend the first half of the March 10 meeting as I was attending a mandatory study abroad session. I am completing this blog over the assigned readings for the day in order to offset my absence. I hope that this blog post finds you well. I know that writing it suited me as I was laying on my bed in my house, taking a couple days of rest before finals week.

I'm not a big fan of reading the transcripts of dialogues, which is one reason why I like the style of the piece, "Is the Welfare of Disadvantaged Children Improving?" Rather than presenting the issue with the two people engaged in a dialogue, it merely presents the writings of each side. My stylistic preferences aside, I thought the sides were distinct and each side was represented by a more-than-capable person. I would have to say that I don't think the welfare of disadvantaged children is improving, but not for the same reasons as Bennett. I don't think it is the decline of the traditional family or some type of moral confusion that is hampering improvement in the disadvantaged children's welfare. I think that the problem lies with failed policies that haven't addressed the issues that need to be addressed, not in some arbitrary measurement of moral stability.

I read an article a while back that talked about how rich people are more likely to be healthy and fit than those who are not rich. This surprises me none in the least, especially when looking at the prices of the healthier fresh foods. There are many other reasons that Gary W. Evans', "The Environment of Childhood Poverty," identifies some of these as: increased chance of exposure to violence and an increased presence of television programs instead of books or computers. This all seems to stem from their status as disadvantaged children. Most parents of these children do not have time to engage in learning with their child, as many of them are merely concerned with putting food on the table.

I'm not sure how well the class conversation went for these first two articles, but the third article ("Is Spanking Detrimental to Kids?") had its discussion pushed back to the next meeting, at which I was present. Our entire cohort engaged in the conversation, each one of us defending our ideas. I liked this activity because it got a lot of the class talking and it helped give our group a more group-ey feel, rather than being a basic three-man show.

I was spanked as a child and every school I have ever attended has practiced corporal punishment, so I can see both sides of this argument. One the one hand, spanking does seem to have a negative effect of the psyche of a child. One the other hand, it seems to stop the behavior immediately. I really feel that a child's development depends more on their own discoveries and through talking with a parent than it does on pain enforcement. 

Sincerely,

Brady

Final BGCG Session

Okay,

I wanted to take some time to distance myself from our conflict-resolution program at the Boys and Girls Club of Georgetown so that my thoughts would be coherent and well thought out. Having taken that time, I do feel like I can look back at the program and deem it successful, something I could not even have imagined myself thinking after completing our final session on Tuesday, April 14. 

I feel like taking some time to evaluate the program and the individual sessions allowed me to see that our central goal remained intact throughout the program and that some of the participants probably absorbed some small sliver of the things we were saying. To repeat the old adage, I feel that if we had a positive effect upon just one the participants' ways of dealing with conflict, then we must considers ourselves successful. There were many obstacles to completing the program, as well as the presence of unanticipated complications which caused the restructuring of the curriculum. The fact that things didn't really happen as planned only served to increase my appetite to participate in more civic engagement projects, as I feel that with a new group of children we would be able to learn from our mistakes and put on a better program. That's the thing about civic engagement: even though the program didn't achieve the ambitious goals we had set for it, it did serve to give us real-world experience and to illuminate the frustrations and the joys of civic engagement.

We had originally planned to conduct two sessions during the same week to introduce the participants to conflict resolution and to allow them time to understand the concepts behind the process before our third session, in which we had planned to take the participants to a ropes course. But, the third session fell apart due, basically, to lack of interest from the participants. Also, some amount of culpability lies with the Club's administration and their failure to emphasize the importance and rarity of opportunity of the event and to mobilize the participating kids to return parental release forms and make sure they showed up on the Saturday of the ropes course. 

As our third meeting had to be canceled, the program was changed to four sessions rather than five, with the next club session concentrating on teamwork activities where the participants could utilize their conflict resolution skills to communicate effectively with their peers and reach the common goal of, in the case of the game Human Knot, undoing the "human knot" created by the crossing of their arms. Then, it seems that Daniel decided to sit in on the meeting and periodically stop the activity to interject with tidbits about how it emphasized aspects of peer mediation. What? Peer mediation? We hadn't yet spoken of peer mediation and now, we have all of 30 minutes during the next session, whose lesson plans have to be completely changed, to teach the participants (the number and individuals of which changed each session) how to, basically, act as authority in situations of conflict between others at the Club. So, during our final session we did this as well as we could while still using the same vocabulary as the first three sessions. 

I do think that our program left its mark on the Club, whether it be through some of the kids simply thinking about what they say prior to speaking, or through the lessons learned by the administration about working with outside programs. I hope that this program not only served to teach the participants the message inherent in its name, but also to provide an interesting case study about interaction between volunteer programs presented by external sources and the Club itself. 

Brady

Student Works Symposium

Helloooooooooooooooo,

Oh, wow. The end of the semester is near. Another year of college under my belt. Yet, when I arrived at the Student Works Symposium paper session, I felt like I had accomplished absolutely nothing.

I was expecting to see the Capstone and thesis presentations of seniors packed into a 15-minute time limit, but seniors made up only a slight majority of the participants in the Symposium, if even that. There were underclass-wo/men (from here on referred to by its patriarchal name), dressed in suits and running around carrying laptops and notes and standing next to their research posters. This left me wondering if my degree plan was hiding some strange, necessary class involving underclassmen research that I had not yet taken. After ruling out this option by looking at my degree plan, which I keep in my planner, I moved on to the next option: that all of these underclassmen had some required research class inside their majors. While this was true for some of the presenters (coughResearchMethodscough), I found that the majority of underclassmen who participated in the event were just presenting research projects for the purpose of getting their hard work out there. And then, after both of my options for explaining the proliferation of underclassmen were proven incorrect, I felt like a lazy bum who will never get accepted to graduate school, work at a fast-food restaurant to pay off my student loan debt (not that there is anything wrong with working at a fast-food restaurant) and never realize my full potential as a human being. Yay!

What the symposium made me realize is how incredibly lazy I must look in contrast to all of my peers' overt display of a semester's worth of hard work. Since then (haha, last week), I made a promise to myself that I would: 1) watch less television and reduce my time spent mindlessly-surfing the Internet; 2) be more productive during the day so that my awake hours didn't steal from my sleeping hours and cause me to not only walk around in a zombified state, but also cause my body to prematurely age; and 3) get on a diet to jump start my "getting into shape" hope, also giving me more energy and a healthier immune system to prevent sickness.

Okay, enough of that bitching and moaning. Let's move on to the rest of the Symposium. I saw a paper session first, then went and mingled with the poster presenters in the Bishop's Lounge. Most of the posters presented a graphical representation of some aspect of the student's research, which led me to believe that a large majority of these presenters were from science majors. Yet again, I had misread the situation. These students came from a wide-range of majors and represented many different departments. However, what was most puzzling to me about the Symposium was the lack of communications majors presenting their research. Not a one communications major presented at the Symposium or, at least, they did not list their communications major next to their names in the schedule. After realizing this, I think that I finally came to the correct explanation: that all communications majors are either lazy or find this event too passé to be worthy of their attention (or a combination of both). Obviously, this is not the correct explanation. I think that the correct explanation probably has to do with a communications departmental lack of encouragement to participate, because I honestly didn't know what this Symposium was until I attended.

I also attended the gallery exhibit, in which the art of SU students Casey Grier, Sarah Reesor and Bernardo Schirmer. Of the three, I thought Grier's, "Shades of Inequity," exhibit was the most compelling. Her art display drew its inspiration from a research study she conducted about inequalities observed in the classroom setting. Her piece, Least Restrictive Environment, is constructed from wood slats painted to represent the cornucopia of differences shown in the makeup of a classroom, accomplished by using pink, blue and varying shades of skin tone colors to create a unique identity for each slat in terms of gender, race, sexual identity and, on some of them, disability. It was a beautiful ode to the hope of a non-discriminative future for our children and subsequently, society.

Whew...long-winded,

Brady

JDA Lecture

Howdy Ya'll,

To start off with, I want to make plain the fact that in this blog I will not only be talking about the lecture and readings and my relation to them as a college student, but I will also be expressing my raw feelings and reactions in relation to the lecture and, less so, the readings. My initial reactions will serve as my starting point and should not in any instance, unless otherwise specified, be interpreted as my definitive opinion of these specific issues.

While watching the JDA lecture, I was constantly searching within my knowledge base for some material with which I could analyze the issue that faced me. But, in hindsight, the thing that provided me the most effective way of analyzing the issue were my own emotions in relation to it.

To be frank, I had a hard time paying attention to the parts of the lecture when Eli Clare was speaking, due to the pace and general fragmentation of his speech. This, in contrast to my ability to listen and interpret the speech of Matt Richardson. I think that the juxtaposition of a speaker who, for me, was easily understandable and one who was not so easily understandable provides a good framework to analyze their point of valuing bodies. As an effect of my listening habits, I carried away more from Richardson than I did from Clare. Thus, I valued the speech of Richardson more so than Clare. This devaluing of Clare's words came from my arbitrary standard for judging "good" speech. Richardson was able to communicate more effectively with my sensibilities, thus enhancing my perception of him as a good speaker. For me, their speaking abilities decided which "body" would be valued more than the other. In this case, the devaluing of Clare's words line up with the talk about what bodies are valued in society, his disability causing his speech to be devalued in my mind. What is interesting about this is that my mind's ability to appreciate the speech of each person depended upon their speaking ability, not upon the content of their actual speeches. Thus, I could very well have walked away from the viewing of the speech with a very different view of the issues than I would have had I read a transcript of the dialogue, where Clare's disability would not have been evident.

I used the previous example of my reactions to get at the issue of devaluation. I think that the valuation standard with which certain bodies are placed above others is only a arbitrary standard. Imagine if Clare's way of speaking was the "normal" way of speaking and Richardson's speech was the one affected by his disability. Would Richardson's speech still be considered, by me, as the superior and more valuable one or would its difference from the "norm" cause me to feel like I was being forced to listen to it? Here, the argument that there is some universal aesthetic style that forms the basis for all our standards falls to pieces. We only operate on culturally-defined standards that could change at any moment. So, it is unfair that a devaluation of Clare's speech occurred for me, as his speech might have, in another context, been the more striking contribution to the dialogue.

Thanks for reading,
Brady

1st BGCG Session

Woah...what a week this has been! I know that everyone on campus is really busy and really tired at the current time, but it seems like my professors just all got together and talked about how best to screw me over by giving me really full plate this week. On top of all my school work, this week was also the beginning of my, Cait, Megan and Laurel's mini-/crash-course in Conflict Resolution with the Torch Leadership Group at the Boys and Girls Club of Georgetown. Our first session went pretty well, but there is definite room for improvement, in terms of what the Torch Club members get out of the sessions and also what we get out of these sessions.

Some of the kids in the group showed a real interest in listening to what we had to say and providing insightful, constructive feedback during the activities. But others showed more of an interest in answering their cell phones and carrying on conversations with their friends during the middle of our session. I think that we decided as a group that this next meeting would set down a ground rule that everyone has to silence their phones when they are in the sessions, a rule which will also apply to me and the fellow members of my group.

I bought cookies from Wal-Mart before the session and they ate less than half of them. So, this next time they get cookies again...Haha!

We took extra care in preparing the specific aspects of the activities we have planned for today's meeting, even though we had to go off-topic at some points last week in order to gain their attention. So all our well-thought-out plans might go to waste, just depending on how the kids respond to the activities and the scenarios we have chosen.

Tuesday's session focused mostly on helping the Torchies get oriented with the concepts we were talking about. In today's session I hope we are able to keep their attention help them to start identifying conflict in different scenarios and also helping them to realize when it might be best to walk away from a conflict. I think that being able to recognize when, despite repeated attempts, the lines of communication between yourself and another person have been broken.

In everything that we talk about, we are trying to emphasize the concept of Wants versus Needs. In short, not only being able to recognize that all of us have a good amount of Needs in common, whereas the Wants change in terms based upon whom is being asked. Thus, we asked the kids during our Tuesday session to try to remember what we had talked about that way we don't have to start from scratch.

Our next meeting is in less than hour and, just like last time, I am feeling a little nervous. I just feel like I could have an adverse effect upon these Torchies, despite our high goals for what the program could be. I am writing down all the thoughts that pop into my head in reference to our curriculum in hopes that I will have a stroke a genius (smartness, haha). But, I really don't think that we will need a stroke of genius, as I have a good feeling about today's meeting. But I am a glass half-full kinda guy...

Brady