Best of the week: Do You Mind?

When Mr. Allen first introduced Do you mind? I was intrigued and that it was a very interesting thing to do. We get to answer two questions every day that we usually don't get to answer or think about. Answering the questions was only part of the beauty; the real thing that caught my eye was how people answered those questions.
Everyone sees the world in different ways and we often don't realize this. There is a psychology approach that talks about this. The Phenomenological Approach. Even though this is a very long and complicated approach name, all it really means is that people see the world in different ways.
Through answering the same questions and then talking about our answers, I noticed how very true this is. People would answer the question in ways I would never even think of.
People experience things in very different ways than us that is why we are not able to just assume that what and how we see things is the right way. It might be the right way for us, but the completely wrong way for someone else... this is what makes the world so interesting and every person so unique. People find beauty in the randomest things for the most random reasons. This is the whole reason there is so much creativity and uniqueness in the world.  It's Awesome!

Blogging around

From Me to Debra's Entry of Captured Thought: Free Will.
Your entry made me wish I was in that class, it seems like a very interesting one. I also wish to believe that we have free will but I think that our free will is very limited. Past our simple choices like "to go to the bathroom or eat some food," everything is influenced by something else. We choose to do something but past that someone influences us to make the decisions we end up making.
I feel that "freedom" is just a word. In reality we are far from free. Every action that actually matters is somehow limited. The bill of rights are even limited when they actually matter.
I feel that even in classes where we are supposed to have the freedom to say anything we want, we are limited by the teacher and their opinion. Many teachers shut down our opinions because they think that there's is more important.
A Response to Lizzie's Metacognition: First Semester.

I took humanities for the opposite reason than you did but I definitely agree that it opened up my creativity as well. I admire your want to take a more difficult class for you to explore the other part of your brain that you usually don't use, for me, I use my creative brain all the time but in the end of junior year and the summer I had a lot of trouble with creativity and coming up with my own ideas; this class opened up my mind and let me create new things instead of just taking from others.
I agree with you that the Mindbook was probably the best part of the class. It opened up my mind and let me explore assignments completely lacking in boundaries. That helped my mind the most.
I just wish the class was as easy going as it is now, the whole year, instead of being so tight-knit and 50 projects at once.

Final Blog for Lit. Circles

For the literature circles books I read the novel Thinking in Pictures: My life with Autism. By Temple Grandin.
 For this final blog I reviewed and compared my book to The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks from Haley Mooney's blog entry. Both books talk about challenging the status quo with oppression. In Temple's book she talks about how autistic people get oppressed in life and the disabled get pushed aside because they are thought of as incomplete. Many people see it as easier just to label disabled people and not worry about maybe they actually have something to offer. No one spend the time to figure out what their strengths are; Temple Grandin is able to see images in her head that no other "normal" human can see and yet she also at first was just labeled like everyone else. Henrietta had a similar story but she was not labeled purely by who she was, this played a role but really the problem with her was that no one ever tried digging to the bottom of who she was and what her real story was.
People in this society find it much easier to just go along with the rest of the crowd than spend time actually trying to find out the truth.  Haley sums this up well in her blog saying that "people are afraid of change and therefore when "signs" show that something may not go so well, the idea is quickly dropped and moved on from." This is what happens with autistic people too. No one wants to spend the time to actually find their strength and work with it, that is why it is hard for them to get past basic level job work. Yet if one was to actually spend the time to find their strengths and utilize them in the future, for education and job preference (like Temple did) they would flourish and be able to accomplish much more than then the average person.
Society needs to stop being lazy and get around just normal stereotypes, there are deep secrets that are hidden in things we choose to ignore, all we need to do is actually spend the time looking in them. They could help up solve our biggest problems.

Lit. Circle Response #3

Thinking in Pictures: Life with Autism. Temple Grandin.

Meeting #3. 123-184.

Summary:

In this section Grandin talks about the medication associated with autism. She talks about the new methods as well as the old. Afterwards she goes on to talk about autism and relationships and how autistic people see relationships in physical ways better than in mental ways. Then she goes into connecting with cows and how it helped her with her work; she was able to see things through the cows eyes and because of that she was able to accomplish more.

“One should not always be a watcher- the cold impersonal observer- but instead should participate” (Grandin, 153).

This is a quote from Temple; she talks about how autistic people often don't get involved but really should; people without autism are no different. There are always children that stay far away and just observe because they aren't courageous enough to participate. Children need to understand that they can not always be observers- they need to take part in things and become involved. Becoming involved is scary but it widens a person's horizons and lets one experience more than they ever could by just being an observer. Autistic children are often thought to be so different from normal children but they really aren't; they have the same problems that normal children do, like not fitting in and not being accepted, again as Temple says, one just has to step out and try something new and that problem is gone.

Captured Thought: Post-modern art

I never understood why people enjoyed a dot on a white canvas and why that was called art. After spending weeks learning about modern vs. post-modern art I finally realized why people liked this art. It is the only next step.
Artists have already shown everything that is visibly seen; now they have to dig deeper and show what we can't see with our eyes. Because we can't see these things with our eyes, people have the freedom to explore any type of image. Someone's personality can be represented by a black canvas or by millions of crazy colored paint splatters. There is no limit on that which we can not see.
Modern art is hard to accept for me, but knowing where it comes from definitely helps. It opens up doors to things that are otherwise impossible to represent. A persons feelings, personality, anything really.
Some modern art seems very simple as well but when you dig into it: not everyone can come up with a certain way of arranging colors and making it represent a certain feeling or emotion.
I will stay loyal to super photorealistic art as my choice of favorite, but i definitely understand now why many like modern art; it opens up a door that was previously closed shut.

Connection: Dreams and Einstein's dreams

Einstein's dreams, the novel, talks about different dreams that have a running theme through all of them. This theme is: time. If one reads each chapter separately, they really don't make much sense, nor do they when read together. The only thing that ties them all together is time and the way that each speaks of time.
My dreams often have a running theme through out them as well. They are colorful and random, super vivid, and more real than life but the thing that ties them all together is that they let me explore my hidden secrets. Things that I try to avoid in real life, come out in my dreams.
Some times having your secrets revealed in your dreams can be a good thing and some times they are too hard to face. If I am struggling with friends or enemies, I often have dreams that I am running away from something.
Couple of years back, I had the most vivid dream of me running away from my two enemies. They had guns and I didn't. It was snowy all over and there was one path that I could run on. I ran and ran and found some card board that I decided to hide under. As I'm sitting there, breathing like a long time smoker, one of my enemies runs up and points the gun at my forehead. In the blink of an eye she had shot me and next thing I know: I am laying in my bed, scared to open my eyes because I think that all I will see is white nothingness... in my mind, that was heaven. Finally I open my eyes only to be releaved to see my room in perfect silence and peace around me.
These dreams are hard to face, but after I do, normal life becomes much easier.
People who I don't want to think about come up in my dreams in ways that I want to see them, or the way that they are that I am trying to pretend is false.
Overall, just like in Einstein's dreams, my theme of facing hidden thoughts in my dreams is a very broad theme, just like time is in this novel. It leaves room for much imagination and makes me want to sleep forever just to see what my mind can create.
Dreams really are fascinating and it is a shame we can't always remember them.

Metacognition: First semester

This semester definitely did not turn Out how I thought it would. Shadow catcher taught me to pay more attention to languAge in books and I started to pay more attention to the double story lines. Sophie's world was the first book I ever read that was philosophy for teenagers and it let me remember much more information than I would from a normal class.
The videos that we watvhed were very random but all interesting in there own way. I learned much more than I thought I would this semester.