On Blogging

This semester, I was given an opportunity to do something that I have never been able to fully do until now. I was given the ability, and full artistic license, to react. That ability was completely freeing and, at least to me, very useful. Having the chance to release my thoughts to the throes of the internet was liberating. I was able to release my opinion to be fully supported or completely decimated by my peers. Getting support was helpful. Getting rebuttals was better. One of the best reasons for a blog was to experience a difference of opinion. It was a collection of open minds free to bounce or bond as they saw fit. The only problem, and I do mean the only problem, was writer's block. Sometimes after a Monday class, I simply did not have anything meaningful to write about. Maybe these blog entries should have been graded by content quality and not content quantity. I really appreciated this alternative method of assessment and hope to have more opportunities to work with tools like Blogger in the future.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

For a project in Educational Psychology project, we had to link a book that deals with large global problems to the problems that educators and citizens face every day. Our group chose the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. The book followed the career of one Dr. Paul Farmer who traveled the world with his organization, Partners In Health, and worked to cure every person he possibly could, wherever he was, whatever the opposition.

Our group faced several challenges with this book. We were to take a book about health and medicine and relate it to education. How were we to do that? What does one have to do with the other. Then, someone in our group mentioned that education was the same as working with a disease, because there was no such thing as a panacea. Not everyone can be cured by the same medicine, and not everyone can be educated by the same method. By this motto, we gathered our thoughts and drew on the theme of "Think Global, Act Local" to further illustrate how unique approaches are necessary to solve the issue of education problems in the United States.

When we had all of our major talking points outlined, we got together and wrote a script for a video. This video was to creatively present all of our information and completely present our ideas about how Paul Farmer's quest can possibly help us as educators. Please watch the video that we created. It represents all of the work that our group did with Mountains Beyond Mountains.

You Can't Afford to Get Drunk

Your brain is a fantastic organism. By sheer electricity, it has the capacity to learn, to remember, to dictate, to follow, to impulse, to react, and to retain. It's responsible for every inane action in your body that we take for granted, such as breathing and beating our hearts. The brain is the most precious and the most fragile thing in the human body, and here at Luther College, there are people that willingly destroy their own brains every weekend with a substance we all generally accept as college students. That substance is alcohol.

Our educational psychology class was treated to a lecture about alcohol's affect on the human brain. What we learned could scare anyone off of liquor for the rest of their lives. The brain, as explained to us by our quirky lecturer, is a slurpy sponge. It takes in all that it is exposed to and absorbs information at an incredible rate. If that sponge is taken up by alcohol, no information can be sucked in, and the brain is immediately impaired. In fact, when a person becomes drunk, the first function of the brain to shut down is complex judgment. That's why those girls across the bar that you would never talk to in a million years don't seem so bad after a couple of brews.

As the presenter went on, we learned that the long-lasting effects of alcohol impairing the brain are very much like the effects of a concussion. These symptoms can include severe bouts of dizziness, memory loss, spatial unawareness, and a loss of balance. The bottom line is this. Alcohol is not a harmless substance. It kills your brain, and if you kill your brain, you kill yourself. As an epileptic, I cannot afford to impair my brain any further than it is already affected. In light of the information presented to our class by this lecture, I say hold on the wonderful brains that you have. You can't afford to get drunk.

Role-Playing

Yes, role-playing. And we're not talking about Dungeons and Dragons. A while back, our professor encouraged us to wear a different pair of shoes for an hour and completely immerse ourselves in a new kind of educational experience. We were to play the roles of parents, concerned citizens, business owners, teachers, and counselors who are pondering a new educational system proposed by the community high school, High Stakes High. The proposed system would create a highly competitive school environment, not letting any students pass the bar if they did not meet grade standards. As I was reading this proposal, all I could think of was how horrible it sounded. I was chosen to play to role of an adamant supporter.

I was almost dreading to go to class that night. I hated the idea of the new system, and I had to be a supporter by 6PM. I was a hypothetical parent of an over-achieving, highly academic, and very bright son, and I had to start kissing the feet of this plan and quick.

After a long period of thinking how exactly I was going to pull this all off, I realized exactly what I needed to do. I needed to put myself in the position of the role that I was going to play, and look at the plan from that person's eyes. From this new perspective, I saw so many positive things about this highly-competitive school. I was completely shocked that only ten minutes previous I could not think of one saving grace that this plan had. Later that night, I played a successful devil's advocate, and learned something crucial about how people operate. We are all biased. We all have our own opinions, and most of the time, we let these opinions cloud the facts. I let my own bias cloud the fact that this proposed plan may have a few good points. I had to see it from a different person's point of view to understand that. That's what this role-playing exercise was all about.

Later on, when I am working in the field, I can remember that you have not given a fair to the other side of the table until you sit there yourself. This will prove to be extremely valuable as I will have to deal with delicate family situations, proposals to change educational plans, conflict resolution, and other matters that will require fresh points of view.