Grades
I didn't mention this, but I got my grades for the last quarter: 3.8 and 3.9 in my classes, for a cumulative gpa of 3.61 so far.
After two years I've maintained a 3.5+ GPA...
This has become less of a wonder for me as time has gone on. I am a clever individual. I know many things. I integrate my learning like a mother fucker. I tend to look at the problems given to me by my instructors with a larger world view in scope than most. For example, my intro to law class this last quarter covered a large range of subjects and the one I found the most interesting was jurisdiction. Based on a few difference in words the application of some pretty simple laws are handled very differently from place to place.
That has a great deal of application in a modern sense when you think about the possibility of a constitutional amendment to do anything. Only 14 states can halt the process, so organizers dumbed it down to the state level to get things like DOMA passed, and each state doesn't have the same language or application of DOMA. When you start to get into things like various applications for mental health law and campaign finance it can get pretty convoluted.
Which is pretty darn cool.
My history classes have challenged a few ideas and enhanced others. I did Greek history this last quarter, and Roman history the quarter before it. Roman history focused on the transition of the Republic to the Empire, and having spent some more time on it I cannot see the Republic as having survived as such - Empire was inevitable.
The same is true for the Greeks, specifically Athens. For three or four generations it maintained a supremacy amongst the Greek city-states, but where it failed was in placing limits on it's own democracy. Far too often charismatic leaders were able to hijack the Athenian state for their own purposes, and after they lost most of their capable leadership those elements grabbed the mob and ran with it. A failure to understand precisely how threatened the other superpower of Greece, Sparta, was in the nature of the culture of Athens...
I mean, when you look at the 2500 years that has passed and you recall who we remember and for what, even though the Athenian's lost their wars with Sparta it was their ideas that persisted. Spartan philosophies were conservative in the extreme, it's foreign policy isolationist, and it's government a monarchal apartheid.
Athenians on the other hand were entrepenurial, supported a strong middle class, and never saw a city they didn't want to pillage. They would adapt ideas and technology four times over before the Spartan's did in civil matters. In the military they were certainly no where near as good as Sparta, but we don't remember them for that. We remember them for Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, their poets and playwrights; it was their ideas that made Athens immortal.
And that is a damned nifty concept, but hardly a new one. Nor is the idea that the struggles between those with resources and those without have been a human constant in Western Civilization, and that the manipulation of those struggles have fueled our political processes for millenia.
Just a recap of what I learned in class.
After two years I've maintained a 3.5+ GPA...
This has become less of a wonder for me as time has gone on. I am a clever individual. I know many things. I integrate my learning like a mother fucker. I tend to look at the problems given to me by my instructors with a larger world view in scope than most. For example, my intro to law class this last quarter covered a large range of subjects and the one I found the most interesting was jurisdiction. Based on a few difference in words the application of some pretty simple laws are handled very differently from place to place.
That has a great deal of application in a modern sense when you think about the possibility of a constitutional amendment to do anything. Only 14 states can halt the process, so organizers dumbed it down to the state level to get things like DOMA passed, and each state doesn't have the same language or application of DOMA. When you start to get into things like various applications for mental health law and campaign finance it can get pretty convoluted.
Which is pretty darn cool.
My history classes have challenged a few ideas and enhanced others. I did Greek history this last quarter, and Roman history the quarter before it. Roman history focused on the transition of the Republic to the Empire, and having spent some more time on it I cannot see the Republic as having survived as such - Empire was inevitable.
The same is true for the Greeks, specifically Athens. For three or four generations it maintained a supremacy amongst the Greek city-states, but where it failed was in placing limits on it's own democracy. Far too often charismatic leaders were able to hijack the Athenian state for their own purposes, and after they lost most of their capable leadership those elements grabbed the mob and ran with it. A failure to understand precisely how threatened the other superpower of Greece, Sparta, was in the nature of the culture of Athens...
I mean, when you look at the 2500 years that has passed and you recall who we remember and for what, even though the Athenian's lost their wars with Sparta it was their ideas that persisted. Spartan philosophies were conservative in the extreme, it's foreign policy isolationist, and it's government a monarchal apartheid.
Athenians on the other hand were entrepenurial, supported a strong middle class, and never saw a city they didn't want to pillage. They would adapt ideas and technology four times over before the Spartan's did in civil matters. In the military they were certainly no where near as good as Sparta, but we don't remember them for that. We remember them for Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, their poets and playwrights; it was their ideas that made Athens immortal.
And that is a damned nifty concept, but hardly a new one. Nor is the idea that the struggles between those with resources and those without have been a human constant in Western Civilization, and that the manipulation of those struggles have fueled our political processes for millenia.
Just a recap of what I learned in class.