(no subject)
So. Last semester when I took the first half of world lit (same teacher), he does do "discussion groups" in class - they only affect your grade in that you lose some points if you don't at least make a show of participating. Discussion group last semester were all freshmen that had no frame of reference on half of what we talked about, but if someone put things in words they understood, they ran with it - they were actually interested and it was an entertaining class.
This semester, my group consists of: A very quiet hip-hop type that adores the literature who is getting scared out of our group/lured over to another group. Two airhead cheerleader types who, even when you explain things in simple words, go "...I don't get why we're reading this, it's stupid and doesn't make any sense", aaaand...Oooh...to protect the stupid, let's call him Jacob.
Jacob kinda killed a lot of my involvement, because he made a show of being interested and finding interests in common (and attempted to flirt a few times :P ) in the first week of class. This was when we were studying Xi You Ji, nobody else in the group had a CLUE what was going on with it (whee midieval Chinese), I knew it pretty well and was filling things in. As soon as I was done speaking, Jacob would join the cheerleaders in "LOLbutit'zdum" and spend half the period making fun of it...until the teacher walked over, at which point he would beat his brains out to parrot back what I'd said as if it was his idea and he'd been talking about it that way all along.
Needless to say, I started sitting on anything vaguely intelligent-sounding I had to say until the teacher was in earshot or after the teacher'd been through.
Here's the FUN part. Jacob is apparently a pastor's son. The poet we were reading today referenced Nietzche. Jacob looked up Nietzche on his laptop, trying to do his short homework assignment during class, and proceeded to spend five minutes making fun of Nietzche's mustache. Then "Oh hey, isn't he guy that said God was dead?". I pointed out that the infamous "God is dead" quote was a part of a larger passage about how institutionalized science and organized religion destroyed most-of-mankind's ability to perceive anything divine. Jacob then went off on a tangent that went for most of the rest of the class, with one of the cheerleader types trying to edge away, me deciding to bury myself in browsing Tropeswiki, about The Bible and how science was proving the Earth was only six thousand years old because the right kind of pressure and cataclysm could make a fossil in a matter of minutes, which would be the Flood, so the dinosaurs had been part of the day to day ecosystem pre-flood and might've still hung around for a while after that.
Enter two moments of annoyance - the first was that yannnooooo I DID grow up listening to pastor that very carefully went from the original Greek and Hebrew, and would have long-winded explanations of the linguistics and the EXACT meaning of the words that often DIDN'T make it into the English translation, and there's several words that get simplified where basically creation goes "Everything was created not-a-waste-and-void, then it -became- a waste and void, then it was restored" in the first few words of Genesis, the restoration being the part that gets detailed. Important bit of linguistics that, because it means that if someone is going to honestly follow the Bible, the original writing before all the Church translators decided what it -really- said was "The Earth/universe is a Hell of a lot older than we really know, we're starting from here". He didn't want to hear what the original Greek and Hebrew words in ANYTHING meant because "it raised too many theological questions".
My other small attempt at "MY GOD MAN, LOGIC" was to point out that in all of the body of scripture, INCLUDING the stuff referencing pre-flood, when the writers of scripture wanted to name an exotic and dangerous animal, it was a lion or a bear or a cobra. Beasts of the field? Deer, cows, sheep. You'd kinda think that if raptors, rexes, iguanodonts, etc. were stomping around out there, those would make a LITTLE bit more of an impression and get referenced a hell of a lot more often, and the most fearsome beast the writer could think of would be the thirty foot multi-ton killer death lizard, not the kitty. "but, that just means they weren't very close to where people lived!" ...last time I checked, lions didn't exactly hang out in the village stables. :P
I gave up. He spent twenty minutes on that tangent, complaining about how going back to the original languages made it too complicated and you only really needed the King James and he was SURE he was right about how the Earth COULDN'T be more than 6,000 years old, and yeah there was that verse about "creation existing to bring many sons into glory and show God's wisdom to the ages" but that didn't mean God would put ANYTHING in the universe besides little old us and there couldn't be alien life, the dinosaurs lived alongside the writers of scripture, there was no ice age, etc., etc., until the teacher came up and asked how far we were in our group work.
I enjoyed the exchange of "Nowhere" "What have you been doing all this time?" "Listening to him hijack the class and ramble.".
This semester, my group consists of: A very quiet hip-hop type that adores the literature who is getting scared out of our group/lured over to another group. Two airhead cheerleader types who, even when you explain things in simple words, go "...I don't get why we're reading this, it's stupid and doesn't make any sense", aaaand...Oooh...to protect the stupid, let's call him Jacob.
Jacob kinda killed a lot of my involvement, because he made a show of being interested and finding interests in common (and attempted to flirt a few times :P ) in the first week of class. This was when we were studying Xi You Ji, nobody else in the group had a CLUE what was going on with it (whee midieval Chinese), I knew it pretty well and was filling things in. As soon as I was done speaking, Jacob would join the cheerleaders in "LOLbutit'zdum" and spend half the period making fun of it...until the teacher walked over, at which point he would beat his brains out to parrot back what I'd said as if it was his idea and he'd been talking about it that way all along.
Needless to say, I started sitting on anything vaguely intelligent-sounding I had to say until the teacher was in earshot or after the teacher'd been through.
Here's the FUN part. Jacob is apparently a pastor's son. The poet we were reading today referenced Nietzche. Jacob looked up Nietzche on his laptop, trying to do his short homework assignment during class, and proceeded to spend five minutes making fun of Nietzche's mustache. Then "Oh hey, isn't he guy that said God was dead?". I pointed out that the infamous "God is dead" quote was a part of a larger passage about how institutionalized science and organized religion destroyed most-of-mankind's ability to perceive anything divine. Jacob then went off on a tangent that went for most of the rest of the class, with one of the cheerleader types trying to edge away, me deciding to bury myself in browsing Tropeswiki, about The Bible and how science was proving the Earth was only six thousand years old because the right kind of pressure and cataclysm could make a fossil in a matter of minutes, which would be the Flood, so the dinosaurs had been part of the day to day ecosystem pre-flood and might've still hung around for a while after that.
Enter two moments of annoyance - the first was that yannnooooo I DID grow up listening to pastor that very carefully went from the original Greek and Hebrew, and would have long-winded explanations of the linguistics and the EXACT meaning of the words that often DIDN'T make it into the English translation, and there's several words that get simplified where basically creation goes "Everything was created not-a-waste-and-void, then it -became- a waste and void, then it was restored" in the first few words of Genesis, the restoration being the part that gets detailed. Important bit of linguistics that, because it means that if someone is going to honestly follow the Bible, the original writing before all the Church translators decided what it -really- said was "The Earth/universe is a Hell of a lot older than we really know, we're starting from here". He didn't want to hear what the original Greek and Hebrew words in ANYTHING meant because "it raised too many theological questions".
My other small attempt at "MY GOD MAN, LOGIC" was to point out that in all of the body of scripture, INCLUDING the stuff referencing pre-flood, when the writers of scripture wanted to name an exotic and dangerous animal, it was a lion or a bear or a cobra. Beasts of the field? Deer, cows, sheep. You'd kinda think that if raptors, rexes, iguanodonts, etc. were stomping around out there, those would make a LITTLE bit more of an impression and get referenced a hell of a lot more often, and the most fearsome beast the writer could think of would be the thirty foot multi-ton killer death lizard, not the kitty. "but, that just means they weren't very close to where people lived!" ...last time I checked, lions didn't exactly hang out in the village stables. :P
I gave up. He spent twenty minutes on that tangent, complaining about how going back to the original languages made it too complicated and you only really needed the King James and he was SURE he was right about how the Earth COULDN'T be more than 6,000 years old, and yeah there was that verse about "creation existing to bring many sons into glory and show God's wisdom to the ages" but that didn't mean God would put ANYTHING in the universe besides little old us and there couldn't be alien life, the dinosaurs lived alongside the writers of scripture, there was no ice age, etc., etc., until the teacher came up and asked how far we were in our group work.
I enjoyed the exchange of "Nowhere" "What have you been doing all this time?" "Listening to him hijack the class and ramble.".