Learning Journal

I liked how the presentations were connected this week. It was interesting to see how The Greatest Showman portrayed P. T. Barnum within the lens of the American Dream and almost as a hero for all the people that were in his show. The movie did demonstrate how he twisted reality around the people's backgrounds and conditions to generate more curiosity, but it left out how a lot of those explanations played to racist stereotypes. I enjoyed the activity where we guessed how he advertised the different circus entertainers. It was interesting to see how some were easy to guess and how he strayed from his pattern with others like the really tall woman. About a week ago, I saw this ad for a company named Synthesia that allow you to make training videos but with deepfakes. I found it intriguing, because we had talked about the growing ease of making deepfakes earlier in the semester. I looked up the company and watched a short video about them from a few years ago, and it was weird. You c...

Today, in class, we discussed the Waco Branch Davidians and the movie The Italian Job . It was interesting to see the overlap in our discussions on the two topics. For the Branch Davidians, we talked about whether you can determine if a cult is becoming dangerous. Additionally, we talked about whether you can distinguish between a cult and an unconventional religious movement. The answer to both was that it is quite subjective and that it can be hard to make those evaluations especially when facts may support both sides. For The Italian Job , we discussed if motivation justifies a theft and if it can make you consider a thief less of a criminal. It was interesting to see how other students felt about Stella's actions and if she was as guilty as Charlie or Steve even though all of them stole things. We also brushed upon how movies often make you feel like there is a lesser criminal. They make you believe that the characters are justified in their actions, because they underwent a tr...

 This week was calm other than a midterm that I had to study a lot for. I have really enjoyed my immunology lab as we look at case studies related to what we have talked about in lecture. It was especially apparent this week the specific pathways that were affected in different conditions. Additionally, the groups that were presenting were engaging, so I was locked into what they were saying. The test in that class was hard because, even though I knew all the concepts, I mixed a few similar terms together in my brain. Now, I know I need to focus more on that for the next two exams. In my other honors class, we learned how the settling of artists into an area can be indicative of future gentrification. We also learned how media often portrays the artists rather than the previous residents as the victims when gentrification does occur. Virology was fun, because it reviewed and connected what I was studying for the immunology exam with specific anti-viral pathways. Finally, our class ...

This week was more chill in terms of classwork than the previous months. In one class, we played a board game to demonstrate spacial justice which showed me how competitive I can be in a room full of mostly strangers. I did not want to lose even after it was announced that everyone would get a reward for how well we played. In our class this week, I learned about werewolf hunts. I did not even realize that was a thing until reading those articles on Thursday. It was interesting to see how people were trying to use it as an excuse or explanation for their killing sprees. I had always thought that the story of werewolves had an origin more like that of big foot where someone saw something weird in the wilderness and it grew from there. In my immunology class, my team gave a presentation on a mutation that led a child to be extremely susceptible to herpes simplex virus type I. She had herpes encephalitis meaning it spread to her brain and spinal cord. After the presentation, we had to res...

After reading the articles, it seems as though many of these werewolf fables or hunts found their root in the fear of something strange or unnatural to the people at the time whether it be foreigners, medical conditions, or even human savagery. Around the same time period, there were a lot of changes in Christianity and changes in how we viewed our world (with European discovery of the Americas) that promoted tensions between groups and could have exacerbated their fear of the unknown. At the time, they did not have a lot of scientific knowledge or technology which they could use to somewhat quickly discover the truth, so they relied on the culture they lived in to explain what they saw. The wolf in sheep's clothing made me think of that scene in The Odyssey where Odysseus and his men dress as sheep to escape the blinded cyclops.

I thought the film Die Welle  that we watched portions of in class on Thursday was interesting. It reminded me of some articles that I had read in The Guardian about the recruitment strategies of some fringe groups in England and other parts of Europe. Like in the movie, those groups create a sense of belonging and can target individuals who feel isolated in different aspects of their lives. In Tuesday's class, I enjoyed the ending activity. I had actually thought it was going to be one of those exercises where no one was the witch. However, seeing that there was actually a "witch" in the game demonstrated a different perspective to me which may have led those Salem residents who did not really believe in witchcraft to still get swept up in the hysteria over the tiniest of doubt that one may have possibly been in their midsts. For one of my classes, I went to the Best Maid Pickle Emporium and analyzed how they designed their store environment. It was funny to see all the ...