(no subject)
This weekend has been very good, especially considering how disastrous it seemed like it was going to be on Friday.
Work appears to have calmed down (possible agreement and end to negotiations!), I got to Robin's dinner, babysitting, and the club all in plenty of time...
Today I slept in, went out for lunch with the family, and actually accomplished significant amounts of homework. I even vacuumed and tidied my room... hooray!
What I have discovered, though, is that one of my textbooks (which I didn't crack until today, whoops) is a big crock of shit. It's about the geography of the Canadian north, and it's a huge heap of crap that sounds like it was written in the 1960s (yet was published a measly four years ago). It makes these flippantly confident statements of "fact" about issues that are actually sensitive, incredibly subjective, and complex. It actually argues that there is one region in Canada that can be decisively categorized as "the north", to the complete exclusion of all other regions. Hell, it doesn't even ARGUE. It just STATES it, and gives no explanation whatsoever as to how it came up with this supposedly concrete dividing line between The North and The South. It's got a whole chapter about "nordicity" that only serves to reinforce crass generalizations and common misconceptions about the north.
Alas. The lecture notes, on the other hand, seem quite decent (although badly edited! I wish I had a dime for every comma splice/typo I've run into so far). I was pretty impressed with this quote from a Dene woman named Mary Carpenter who lived in the north: (from an interview with Farley Mowat in 1966)
"Isn't it goddamn obvious?" she replied with fierce intensity.
"Learning useful stuff never was what it's all about. It's about breaking the connections that keep people together, that make them into a people. If natives stay united they're always going to be a problem and you probably have to kill them to get rid of them. But break up thier society, alienate the kids from their parents, make a mockery of their beliefs, take away their language, turn the different generations against each other, graft a lot of alien ideas into them, and pretty soon they'll be gone. Not dead...but gone. They'll fall through the cracks of your world. And you bastards won't even have to feel guilty, though you've destroyed them as sure as if you'd lined them up and shot them."
"Education!" She paused significantly.
"I call it eradication - and it was used deliberately on us by you people through your government with lots of help from the missionaries - not for our good, but for yours!"
I think the class overall is going to be quite interesting, albeit more culturally-focused than most classes I've taken. *shrug* A challenge is good.
Work appears to have calmed down (possible agreement and end to negotiations!), I got to Robin's dinner, babysitting, and the club all in plenty of time...
Today I slept in, went out for lunch with the family, and actually accomplished significant amounts of homework. I even vacuumed and tidied my room... hooray!
What I have discovered, though, is that one of my textbooks (which I didn't crack until today, whoops) is a big crock of shit. It's about the geography of the Canadian north, and it's a huge heap of crap that sounds like it was written in the 1960s (yet was published a measly four years ago). It makes these flippantly confident statements of "fact" about issues that are actually sensitive, incredibly subjective, and complex. It actually argues that there is one region in Canada that can be decisively categorized as "the north", to the complete exclusion of all other regions. Hell, it doesn't even ARGUE. It just STATES it, and gives no explanation whatsoever as to how it came up with this supposedly concrete dividing line between The North and The South. It's got a whole chapter about "nordicity" that only serves to reinforce crass generalizations and common misconceptions about the north.
Alas. The lecture notes, on the other hand, seem quite decent (although badly edited! I wish I had a dime for every comma splice/typo I've run into so far). I was pretty impressed with this quote from a Dene woman named Mary Carpenter who lived in the north: (from an interview with Farley Mowat in 1966)
"Isn't it goddamn obvious?" she replied with fierce intensity.
"Learning useful stuff never was what it's all about. It's about breaking the connections that keep people together, that make them into a people. If natives stay united they're always going to be a problem and you probably have to kill them to get rid of them. But break up thier society, alienate the kids from their parents, make a mockery of their beliefs, take away their language, turn the different generations against each other, graft a lot of alien ideas into them, and pretty soon they'll be gone. Not dead...but gone. They'll fall through the cracks of your world. And you bastards won't even have to feel guilty, though you've destroyed them as sure as if you'd lined them up and shot them."
"Education!" She paused significantly.
"I call it eradication - and it was used deliberately on us by you people through your government with lots of help from the missionaries - not for our good, but for yours!"
I think the class overall is going to be quite interesting, albeit more culturally-focused than most classes I've taken. *shrug* A challenge is good.