Assignments for 7/03

THINK, DISCUSS, WRITE:

What have we been doing for the last week?
What does it have to do with me?
What has it made me think about differently?
What is it that Dr. Fisher just doesn’t seem to understand about me/us/life/the real world, etc.?
What has changed since he started college (in the 1980s!)?
How are the questions different for today’s young people?
 

PREPARE:

A video presentation (of no more than 3 minutes play time) that expresses your answer to one (or more) of the above questions in a creative (and tasteful!) way.

Use whatever media you would like, post your video to the blog under the Category ‘Video Projects’, and tag the entry with appropriate terms or phrases. Those terms and phrases that have already been used will appear as options when you go to tag your post; please select from there first in order to maintain consistency, and then add other terms or phrases as appropriate, making sure to capitalize all words except for conjunctions and prepositions.

You do not have to post the video to YouTube first, if there is some better way for you to get it onto the blog.

If you would like some technical assistance, or just a state of the art machine to work up your project, you can go to the Knowledge Commons at Pattee Library

I’m not looking for a comprehensive grasp of everything we have talked about so far boiled down into three minutes.

I’m looking to you for an understanding of where you are in your approach to these issues.

(Uh oh, he’s about to ramble…) I’m over forty. I’m married. I have a daughter, two dogs, and three cats. I’ve been studying philosophy for twenty years (as an undergraduate; a graduate student at Virginia Tech and at Emory; a visiting graduate student and researcher in Marburg, Germany; a lecturer at Emory and at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and as a Lecturer, TLT Coordinator, and Assistant Director of the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State).  I grew up during the height of the Cold War; My Dad’s generation fought in Vietnam (or got out of it, legally or illegally); When I was in elementary school, we had drills to prepare us to hide under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack; My senior trip in high school was to Soviet Russia during the height of its openness to the West and just before its collapse; I worked at a record store during the transition from LPs and Cassette Tapes to CDs; (Some of) My generation was fighting back against the materialism, the cultural imperalism, and the social conservatism that characterized ‘mainstream’ America in the 1980s; During my second year of college, we stayed up late to watch the first Gulf War on TV, we saw classmates who were serving disappear as they were called to active duty, and we worried about whether the draft was going to be reinstated.    

I was ‘in your shoes’ once… a long time ago and in a place that looked very different from the place you are now (at least in some relevant ways). 

Help bring me up to date, so I can see the same world we both inhabit with fresh eyes.

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