Veiled Sentiments and human brain evolution

September 18th, 2008 • education
Tags: education

I’ve been busy since my last post, somewhat with school but more with work. Due to Hurricane Ike, our headquarters in Houston (smack dab in the MIDDLE of downtown) has been powerless and waterless since last Friday. Since then, we’ve worked all weekend and this week and are frankly pretty tired. Classes have come and gone, I too think some brain cells have as well.

Politics of Identity is actually getting to be a bit easier. We’re transitioning from metacontexts and rote theory to applicable situations and more grounded contexts. This week’s discussion was about spatial identities and the specific identities and meanings groups and individuals place on space. Our reading focused around the identity placed on Stonehenge by both hippies and Britons alike and how identifying yourself by country or homeland is becoming less meaningful in globalization. I also started reading Veiled Sentiments by Lila Abu Lughod tonight. I’m only about 50 pages in but it’s very interesting so far. It’s an ethnography about the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin of Northern Egypt, with a very specific focus on both poetry and the women of the society. We’ve got a paper due on it on my birthday so I need to buckle down and read.

Evolution and Creationism is starting to drone for me. The class has gone from what could’ve been decent discussion, even with oddball opinions, to displaying that nearly everyone is in the class for an easy grade. Those of us who participate are the only ones who took the class because it was a discussion-based class and want to discuss. We spent all day Tuesday discussing the evolution of the human brain in terms of what’s drastically different versus other apes and other animals. Most people had no idea what the frontal cortex was (or that we had one) or that brain size has little to do with intelligence. And that IQ tests don’t determine how intelligent you are. The only time so far that most of the class participated in any discussion was when we watched South Park last week and that was only because it was a topical cartoon. I suspect that when we watch Expelled, most people will fall asleep or…actually believe the crap Ben Stein flings. That and all of the side conversation that goes on while Professor McCarthy is talking really makes the class not only less interesting and inviting, it also dismisses the entire framework of a discussion class.

I hope tomorrow’s class will prove to be much more eventful than the last two have been but we’ll see how that works out.

The wonderment of creation myths

September 3rd, 2008 • education
Tags: creationism, education

This week’s class focuses on creation myths, specifically the one in the Book of Genesis. Most of us know the story, God creates everything we know in 7 days including the Earth, heavens, and all living creatures. That was the first book. In the second one, basically the order of events is changed slightly but the story remains the same. For an allegory, it’s not bad at all. For literal fact, it’s absurd. But if you take one of the creationist screeds and attempt to work within that framework, it makes slightly more sense. The belief that each of the 7 days it took is roughly 1000 years can make sense except for the reliability of radio carbon dating showing things are much older than 7,000 years. By leaps and bounds. Although, still, if you want to believe wackaloonery that belief is much better than man and dinosaurs and everything lived at the same time and it only took a day to create things like humans, cypress trees, and birds.

But this discussion finally got more people talking in class, it’s always boring hearing the same people talk over and over, myself included — although, I’m beginning to just sit there and keep quiet as to not laugh. The religious folks have some interesting rationale and the wannabe Bible scholars keep floating about as much as they can. I appreciate that there are other people who’ve looked into things like this as I have but when they don’t cite where it came from, I tend to put less credence into it. I wonder what we’ll talk about tomorrow since we’re supposed to watch part of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth (wikipedia).