Last Sunday, as all of you know, was Lantern Night, so all the new BMC students congregated in the cloisters in complete and utter silence (required singing notwithstanding) to get their lanterns (myself included). I was amazed how Thomas was kept in complete darkness and everything was planned out so neatly so we could have this magical night of BMC tradition even with the looming hurricane. So being in the cloisters during Lantern Night with all the other students there was an experience starkly different from what I'm used to when I visit the site. Different, but still as nice.

One of the readings that really stuck out to me in particular was Evelyn White's Black Women in the Wilderness. As we can see White's heritage has played a prominent in role with her relationship with nature. I thought it was interesting to see that White was so afraid to go outside, so traumatized by the bombing and possibility of being raped or assulted that she wouldn't even go outside. For me that is difficult to understand because ever since I was little I played in the woods and was never afraid to go outside. It makes me wonder how vivid these stories must have been for White because they had such a profound affect on White's life. I remember when I was younger I watched the movie Jaws and after that I was extremely hesitant to go in the water. I feel like this is a similar case to White but on a dummed down level. Has anyone else had a similar experience to this and grown out of it? Or tried to embrace it like White does at the end of the chapter?

What? 

I think I'm getting to the point in my placement that I can expect how the day is going to go. But today, it seems as though the students had a lot of energy that I attributed to post Halloween sugar rushes. Thus, while the students followed the schedule as per usual, it was a little bit difficult trying to keep up. 

In the technology classroom, the students had the choice of either playing a game that involved building monsters and going on an adventure, or playing a game online that was meant to help them with their maths skills. 

So what?

Coming out of last week's discussion, I was more attuned to the choices that students were making about which choice they made the technology classroom. I assumed that more boys would pick the math option whereas the girls would choose to play the monster game. However, this wasn't the case. There did not seem to be any preference by either gender.

this exercise made me realise that there was a mass inequality in the class that I am observing. There are more boys in the class which makes me wonder if that has any effect on the way that the girls feel as though they can assert their own gender identity. Also, it was interesting to me to see that it was the girls that were more excited about technology class, rather than the expectation of it being the boys. In fact, the girls even came up with a chant as they were lining up to go. 

Now what?

Today, as it was the last day of Family Weekend, my parents were here.  We had brunch at Wyndham, which was a pleasant affair, and then my mother suggested we go walk the labyrinth before they left.  So, of we went.  In my head I was thinking, "How convenient!  I can multitask!  Parent weekending and site visiting at the same time!"  So, we walked the labyrinth together, I said goodbye to my parents, and I sat on the bench near the labyrinth for a while longer.  As I was sitting there, I realized what a difference being alone versus being with other people made.  I mean, the whole time going through the labyrinth none of us were speaking, so it wasn't the noise level or the presence of conversation.  I guess it was just sharing a space with an outsider, the feeling of presenting something that I love to people who do not really understand it yet.  There is a certain nervousness like when you peek over the shoulder of a person reading a book you reccommended, thinking, "Like it!"

When reading Olsen's "Silences," I was particularly interested by what she said about female writers and the silencing they've experienced for so long in the literary world. I think even now, it's very difficult for female writers to be taken seriously in "literature" even though they make up a large proportion of the writers in more specialized genres (such as romance novels, young adult novels, children's books, and popular fiction). In my senior year of high school, I took an english class called "Great Books." Of the twelve books we read, only two were written by women. I think, in general, women are simply taken less seriously in the literary world. S.E. Hinton, for example, wrote under that name because she hoped readers would assume she was a man if they only saw her initials. 

Thursday’s class was full of tensions. Everyone wanted to speak. I felt like I have to express what I intended to say at class.

During the first period of our class, Kim and Markus mentioned the educational experience of East Asian students in American culture. This topic was brought up again in class. When I first run into this account of this perspective of Asian students, I really thought to myself that “Come on, again? Leave Asian students alone” However, when I thought about his question more seriously, I realized there was a need to repeat such a topic. Every time, when I am with a freshmen coming from China, I seem to see the similar behaviors, the way we presented ourselves in class and interact with others, which I did two years ago. I think I don’t have a general answer to such complicated question. However, from my own experience, I think everyone has a distinctive background. Many factors decided one person’s way of learning in a new environment. For me, I usually made mistakes and then learnt from them and tried my best to fit in the new environment in order to achieve optimal results.

The class discussion about Hurricane was really interesting to me, but we still concentrated on ourselves--we are considering nature, but considering in a way that focused on how to change the behavior of ourselves in long term or short term.

I was about to leave this topic behind when I read Jan Narveson's article "on the survival of humankind", in which he pointed out that we have no OBLIGATION to think about the lives of our next generation. In addition to this, he analyzed the relationship between our happiness, number of human beings and prolonging the existence of our species on earth, and stated that even if we do many things nice to the nature, a huge, unexpected natural or universal disaster could bring the whole species to an extinct.

So what I was wondering was--do we have the obligation to prolong the existence of the species? If not, what motivated us to take action to think about it? Do we do everything based on "rational" decision? In economics, "rational person" means a person who maximizes his or her personal benefits.

While I was sitting on the moon bench today, I felt overjoyed while looking at the world around me. One of my favorite things about Bryn Mawr (among many) is that it truly does not care what your gender, race, religous affiliation, or sexual orientation is. Looking at the women and men bundled up in their fall gear walk by me either alone, in pairs, or in packs, this was especially apparent. There was no sexism or racism, there was just people drawn together by the common pursuit of knowledge interacting regardless of superficial details like the color of one's skin. This is what I notice at Bryn Mawr every single day, and it was wonderful to enjoy it at a distance. This is the first time in a while that I have felt full satisfied by my experience at the moon bench, I am actually looking forward to next week. 

As I've been reading Sweeney, I've been seeing some parallels to Haney's work in the Visions and Alliance facilities, in terms of how penal institutions try (and sometimes fail) to regulate women's desires, and what they feel like they need. In Visions and Alliance, it was obviously a very flawed system, despite the fact that it was an "alternative to incarceration", and the directors of the program seemed to want to shape what the women wanted extensively. In the more traditional prisons that Sweeney writes about, the main regulation of desire is over books--especially, as I've read, over the women's complex and diverse desire or lack thereof for urban fiction, which prison librarians try to unify to fit what their rules are for keeping urban fiction on the shelves. 

Is anyone else making this connection? What are your thoughts?

On another note, if anyone would like to borrow my book before Tuesday, let me know!