Campus:

            OED:

                        Etymology: 

Latin campus: field. First used at Princeton, New Jersey.

I was honestly fascinated by the Kim & Markus piece, Speech and Silence: An Analysis of the Cultural Practice of Talking. It intrigued me from the very beginning with the description of Asian American students in the classroom and how teachers have found these students "do not participate in class as much as [they] want them too". This point really hit home for me. While I am in no way Asian or East Asian, I did grow up in a predominantly Asian community. I went to a school that was 90% Asian and had all Asian friends. For this reason, Asian culture is a huge part of who I am, and my early exposure to cultures other than my own was very influential in shaping the person I am now. Part of me would really like to use this influence to explain why I find it so difficult and uncomfortable to speak up in class. And maybe it plays a part. I know that my mind is a busy place -- overflowing with thoughts most of the time. Just because I don't speak them doesn't mean they aren't there. It would make sense that I am a product of the culturally-infused academic environment that I grew up in. But of course, not all my time was spent in school. My house was never a particularly loud or expressive place. How much of who I am in the classroom comes from home and how much comes from primary school? 

As I was reading the piece by Greg Dimitriadis, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether or not he was a white author.  The name Dimitriadis sounded Greek and when I google image searched him, he appears to be white.  We discussed this in Jody’s class a little, but I’m interested in continuing to explore ideas of representation across race and ethnicity.  I must admit that when I read for class, I generally assume the writer is a white, and also probably a man.  Although part of me knows this is a dangerous assumption, part of me also knows it is a safe or practical one because many of the writers ARE white men.  As I was reading Dimitriadis’ piece, I began to become more and more uncomfortable with the idea that a white man was representing African American children, but don’t quite know how to articulate why this makes me uncomfortable.  As we read in the Ellsworth piece for our Voice class, issues of understand and correct representation are an ever present problem.  But I guess I question if that problem is further exacerbated when a white author is writing about African American youth.  I’m sure Dimitriadis has the “credentials” and education to do such work, but how far does that go? I became especially uncomfortable when he wrote about the students interest in the violent or more action scenes and when he said they associated gangs with the Black Panther.  I don’t doubt that this is true, but was he missing something important or not giving enough explanation?

I have read the Delpit reading in multiple settings and for different reasons. Once for my ED 250 class where my classmates and I explored how dominant forms of literacy marginalize groups of students because their way of speaking, writing and native languages are left out of public education. During the summer, again, I was told to read this same Delpit article as I prepared to embody the life of a full-time 7th grade writing teacher. This time, I took away from the article that explicitness in the classroom was key. As I taught, I was always conscious of what I said, how I said it, and the different forms I could say it so that my instructions were clear and catered to different learning styles.

As I go through my sophomore year here at Bryn Mawr, I've been finding myself constantly making comparisons about my experiences in high school and Bryn Mawr. My high school was a great place and I know I recieved an exceptional education there, but right now I can't help but feel like I've been wronged in terms of how I had to learn things, as if I didn't have any other options to choose from. I've been slowly coming to the realization about why I began to lose interest in classes where the subject I once used to love seemed to be working against me. English used to be my favorite and best subject (perhaps it was my favorite because I was good at it) in elementary and middle school. I loved reading and writing because I was able to use my imagination and I could be creative. But when I took AP Lang and AP Lit in high school, I was miserable. Both of my teachers were wonderful people but I would always get this sinking feeling in my stomach when I stepped into their classrooms because of how difficult of a subject English was becoming to me. I felt rejected, rejected because the subject that I had enjoyed the most was now helping me realize how weak of a student I actually was. A particular activity that helped me feel this way was the Socratic Seminar. Half of the students would sit in a circle and have a discussion about the text and ask each other open-ended questions while their partners (who were sitting outside of the circle) tallied the number of the times their partners were speaking. It was my worst nightmare.

Know

The Oxford English Dictionary

I chose the wall with alumni's words (at the campus center) as the best representation of Bryn Mawr. I believe it shows our school spirit that has remained for decades, and the words are still enlightening every Bryn Mawr woman passing by. The natural view outside changes rapidly, and the society fluctuates, but Bryn Mawr kept it's original shape by passing on the spirit that encourages her students to be independent and strong, to challenge the authority and to make a difference in this world.

The place I would like to stay, however, was on an edge of the campus near my dorm in Brecon. It was not so high, but it gives me a clear vision of many important components of the campus: the artificial road and lamps, the stairs that I have to climb everyday, the crowded yet scattered green plants, the play field, the seemingly faraway central campus, and people passing by. The scenary I observe from this spot is like a physical "sample" of the campus, including everything I am interested in, and makes my mind become peaceful. I would like to sit here, wondering, observing, thinking...

The inner space of the campus center was indoors, always warmed by light and fulfilled by the school spirit. It has a relatively stable environment created by human.

So...This is not a homework post...(By the way, professor, could you give us a title format, like adding a few words before title, so that we could distinguish our posts for HW and for spontaneous thoughts? )

After Thursday's class, I've been thinking--why we weren't able to escape from the odd trap of using verbal-noun (gerund)?

Personally speaking, I believe it is because the noun is the source of the motion. I mean, the noun produced the motion, right? The motion itself can be describe by one or a few words, like "running", "flying"...etc. I don't know why this quantum physicist was so into this motion-centered idea, and I think it's really not necessary.

In my junior high physics class, my teacher introduced a concept:"motion is eternal while stability is relative." I may have translated it badly--the meaning of the words could be lost easily during translation--because in Chinese this sentence was a poet-like motto. The main idea was that everyone, everything in this universe is moving, and you can only discribe one thing as stable because it can only be stable relative to sth. else. (This may explain why the physicist focus on motion so much.) But everytime we studied a form of motion, accelerated or not, we draw diagrams, and in the diagrams, the major object is represented by a dot, or a square.

Therefore, even in physics, the major object could be represented, but could not be eliminated. Similarly, in language, the noun denotes the thing we are looking at.