February 3rd, every year is the Veterans Day in Thailand and it is the same as other countries that also have this day but depend on each country what date is announced to be the Veterans Day. Every war has many things to talk or think about and sometimes you may lose person you love in the combat.
According to "War across the generations", The Huffington Post, Bill Becker was a combat journalist, talks about his reaction from war that every war makes worst experience to both warriors and victims. For 50 years, he cannot understand about effect from wars and the new generation who are sent to combat may think and feel like him because some things about war never change in his opinion.
For me, I always feel sad when I heard the story about wars. I never know why people try to kill each other because everyone knows what happen after this situation or I might be young enough to understand why the war happen or why they do not find better way to avoid the war.
While I am writing this blog post, Thai people may still feel good about the result of Thai football national team that they won Taiwan last Thursday. Could I call this football match as a war? For me, it does not war, it just be a competition and then after a whistle blown you can see something that are called spirit and sportsman ship on the field.
This is my first blog. It's difficult to start and conclude it. Now, I'm waiting for see all of your blog post and try to adapt to mine next time.
Imagine your aim is for your pottery class students to produce the most beautiful piece of pottery that they can, not the primitive, rough looking Edomite figure Hartmann shows us on page 73 of Quest, but something really well designed and perfectly made. Which is the better way to tell them that they will be graded: by the total weight of all their work for the term, or by one piece of work chosen by them as their best piece?
In "Viewpoint: How creativity is helped by failure," Matthew Syed argues that creativity and excellence in art, technology, animated films and science come not from aiming at perfection the first time but by trying things out and making many mistakes (2015). Syed further reports that academic institutions increasingly show the series of failed attempts that often underlies brilliant finished products in art, science theories, cartoons, technology and elsewhere in order to help students better understand the creative process for their own work.
One of Syed's examples is the experiment that tested what my lead in question asks. The answer is that the students who had been told they would be graded simply by weighing how much pottery they produced over the term produced higher quality work than the students who were told they would be graded on the quality of one piece of work. That is, the students who turned up with 50 kg also produced, along with a lot of rubbish, higher quality work than the group who were told they would be judged on their one best piece of work weighting perhaps 0.2 kg, Naturally, this somewhat surprising result needs an explanation, and Syed has given it.
But what caught my attention was the relevance to our class. As Hartmann acknowledges when she includes both an academic writing exercise and a response writing exercise in every chapter of her book, it's important to work on both quality and on quantity. In the academic writing exercises we do, such as the almost concluded one on the image on page 165 of Quest, we worry very much about quality, even proofreading to fix spelling mistakes, wrong use of articles (a / an / the / -), and prepositions, along with more substantial errors such as part of speech, wrong word choice and lack of a main clause. In addition, and more importantly, we worry about the ideas and organization of a piece of academic work, which your revision, after reading your classmates' work, did much to improve.
Our response writing is more for quantity, but as Syed reminds us, that is a great help to quality. When we blog, we can write at ease, we can try out new ways to express ourselves, play with new structures and so on. And we get feedback in how our classmates respond to our ideas. Disagreement is especially important here as it is in our academic writing. When you were looking for ways to strengthen your answer about Hartmann's chosen image to introduce the topic abnormal psychology, the most useful of your classmates first drafts where the ones that said your answer was wrong: these presented you with ideas you needed to be able to overcome to persuade your classmates to change their minds. And of course, they were looking at your opposing ideas to persuade you that you were wrong. Similarly, disagreement, or a simple request to clarify, helps us to spot and correct possible weaknesses in our writing, and this practice gradually makes those weaknesses less likely to occur.
I always visit manyplaces that far from Bangkok.I love to look at the sky and many group of stars, and the one of my thinking is there are living things in these stars? If someone talks about alien you trust it?
According to "Coming soon: first weather report from super-Venus exoplanet" (2015), The MEarth team of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported they discovered a new exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun) called GJ 1132b. The planet’s atmosphere is not suitable for living thing because of too high temperature,and more bad chemical or ore, but this discovery is a good starting for researching geography of it and looking for the other planets in the same system that is similar to the Earth.
duplicate of GJ 1132b
While I write this blog I think of many movies about alien that I have watched since I was young such as Alien vs predator, E.T., ID 4, Star war, etc.There are two type of alien.First one is aliens that are friendly with humans. The second one is bad alien that want to acquire or destroy the world. what are you think about alien? It is real? For me I think the universe has many stars. At-least one of it should have living thing like a human.The next question, it knows the world? it is friendly?
Alien (movie: Alien vs Predator)
Although many movies are made by Hollywood that show a bad side of alien,we maybe discover some documentaries to show that the alien contact with human for helping them invent beneficial things. For example, the Mayas invented the 5000 years calendar. It would simply mark the beginning of another 5,125-year-long cycle. This innovation people in 5000 years ago can invented? or it was made by alien. In addition,we have doubtfulness about alien that can not prove such as statues that have appearance like an alien in Mexico, And pyramids the huge building in 6,000 years ago. The human can construct these things? It is unbelievable.
Mayan's calendar
Statues in Mayan
This morning, I appoint my old friend for visiting Amphawa .I am going to eat a fresh seafood.Then I maybe think of the alien while I am seeing stars at night.
This is a colour version of the image that Hartmann chose to introduce the topic of abnormal psychology for chapter 6, which is also titled "Abnormal Psychology" (2007).
Ward in the Hospital in Arles. Vincent van Gogh, 1889.
___________
Reference
Hartmann, P. (2007), Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
When I see the title 'George Clooney visits cafe in Edinburgh to support homeless people' on BBC 's webpage, it piqued my interest on the event. To be a famous actor like George, whenever you visit, whatever you do, all make people excited and look forward to the time. The excitement and expectation to meet the stars are the major parts that make this event successful.
According to the article, George visited the cafe' which donated all their profits to homeless people; in addition, the star also donated 1,000 USD for this cause. During this visit, many of the fans were waiting for him outside the cafe.
I think it would be very ideal if all the famous people get up and follow George's step. This is an example of a famous star who knows how to give. Being a part of the founders of a charity explains his true character better than any other actions or words. In a society where there are a lot of underprivileged people who are waiting for a chance for a better life, their hope will not be true if no one is willing to give them an opportunity.
In Thailand, some stars have done the same things, but since they are not internationally well-known, their deeds will never be mentioned in a global scale like George's. For example, Bin Banluerit- a very famous actor in Thailand, he helps many handicapped and support many sick people to get an appropriate treatment. Another is Yai Fundee who is a volunteer in a charity called Ruamkatanyu foundation which help people in accidents.
The coat of arms of Australia features our two national animals, the emu and the kangaroo. Both are delicious.
The British hedgehog at home
The BBC News article "MP Oliver Colvile calls for hedgehog as UK symbol," which concludes with examples of public and private efforts to protect them, reports that in order to "enthuse people to protect it," a British politician has proposed that the British hedgehog should replace the lion as the national symbol, although the environment minister has opposed this, suggesting that its sleepy and timid habits do not make the animal an appropriate symbol for the United Kingdom (2015).
Coat of arms of Australia
When I saw the title on the front page of the BBC News as I sat down to my invigorating and delicious morning drug dose, I thought immediately of my country's national symbols, two of which are the kangaroo and the emu. These animals symbolize my country well because they are unique to Australia, but I don't know that they have any special quality that makes them great symbols: emus are very large birds that look awkward and are prone to violence, kangaroos are pests that look cute, but have also been known to attack when threatened and I can't think of any other particular virtue that either animal symbolizes. They are just unique to Australia. But the kangaroo is especially useful as a food source.
It's probably only in the last 20 years that kangaroo has become widespread as an alternative to beef, pork and the other tasty animals that our species kills to eat because we like the taste, which really is the only reason today, whatever might have been the case for our ancestors. I usually enjoy at least one kangaroo steak on my annual visit to Australia. Emu is OK, but not so tasty in my opinion. I've never tried it, but have heard reports that koalas are fairly disgusting as meat, which isn't surprising considering that their sole diet is one type of strongly flavoured lead. In fact, I think koala meat might be poisonous: I remember my brother, who has koalas on his property, telling me that when they die, other wild animals don't eat them, but leave them to rot as a feast for the local mould and bacteria.
Of course, I don't kill the kangaroos that I eat myself, although when I was growing up, I did kill, or at least actively participate in the killing of the ducks, chickens, pigs and cattle that my family bred to eat. No, these days, I pay other people to kill animals for me. I guess that makes me, and every one else who eats meat, animal killers who, like a mafia godfather, order and pay others to do our killing and cleaning up for us. But we are still the killers and we are still responsible for the deaths of the animals that we eat - I think its a bit dishonest to pretend that if you order a beef steak, or some tasty kai yang, or yummy salmon sashimi that you are not ordering and paying other people to kill animals. And most of us seem happy with being killers of other species, although this does raise an interesting question: why is it OK for us to kill and eat other animals? Is it OK for us to kill and eat other animals? Always? And if its OK to kill and eat elephants, chickens, kangaroos, pigs, dogs (also very tasty), and lambs, is there any good reason why it is not also OK to kill and eat human beings?
For breakfast this morning, I'm following my coffee, which I've just finished, with some beefy beans; definitely no hedgehog was killed for my breakfast. And you?
Physic is my favorite subject because I like to solve problems. When I was young, I prefer to study mathematics because I like the number and after I grow up, I think mathematics is related to physic.
In physic, I can solve the problems by using the formula, and I graduated in civil engineering so physic can help me find the result of number that related to build the building, road and every construction.
My favourite academic subject is the human's brain. I think it is the most mysterious organ of the body. When It gets sick, It affect not just to a biological function in form of the disease only but also your personality and social function too. Many people don't even know that their problem caused from the impairment of their brain. The psychiatric problem is also the main affect of the brain's illness, but many people and society still has lack of information about it or a lot of misunderstanding. I think it would be great if the society can have many way in order to access the information for understanding and fixing their own problem.
I like all academic subject that relate to supply chain. the supply chain is important skill for industrial engineering should has such as, production planning, inventory planning, and logistic.
Actually, I graduated in industrial engineering and do research about logistic tools.
My favorite subject is Marketing. Marketing is used in many field. especially in business.Companies use marketing to attract costumers. Each company has each marketing. Evrything is different, none is same. So I'm interested in this subject.
it's really hard to pick just one subject as a favourite. I read in economics, history, psychology, science (popular, easy accounts these days) and other areas all the time. They all interest me. But I guess philosophy is still my favourite if I have to pick just one.
I first became interested in philosophy in high school when one of the Catholic brothers introduced me to it. In fact, he was also my maths and physics teacher. I'm not sure why introduced me to philosophy. Perhaps he thought that because I loved science and mathematics I might stop believing in Christianity and that the philosopher he introduced me to would save me. He suggested I read Kierkegaard, a very gloomy Danish philosopher and founder of existentialism, but unlike his existentialist followers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Kierkegaard was a Christian and tried to give solid reasons for maintaining a faith.
It didn't work out as Brother Graham had hoped. I became really interested and read as much as I could from Plato onwards, and that did not help me keep any religious faith. In fact, 73% of professional philosophers are atheists, only beaten by scientists, of whom I think about 80% are atheists. (I need to check this last statistic.)
I love biology and it is the most interesting subject of all when I was a student.I got my bachelor degree of biochemistry two years ago. Biology leads you to a totally new strange world which is made up with cells. Life is amazing and so is biology.
My academic subject is about pollution in Thailand. Since Thailand's economy has been dramatically develop over the past few decades. There are many factories built and many areas are transformed into towns. Many towns are transformed into cities. However, unfortunately, those quick changes happen without proper planning. Many factories are built in communities, resulting in a lot of pollution which can be consumed by people who live in those communities.
My favorite subject is English. I love to know new things that mostly are in English. Nowdays the new technology or new acknowledgement come from abord and be published in English.Reading all these need a skill of English. Globolization is in your hand , you can go around with your English.
I alwalys love subjects relating to human and pyscology. I find out in the university that my favorite acedemic subject is organization behaviur or any subjects in sort of this field. What I enjoy with it is the knowledge reveal how people hahave, what are their intention behind that and what liely they are going to do next, according to the pschological theory. I proved myself passion I have toward the course that I receive an A.
The subject predominently employs several knowledge in the domain of psychology
Now that I am no longer young, I'm sometimes reminded of the good old days of my childhood, of rushing home after school to watch Adventure Island on our wondrous new TV, or of buying a bag of lollies after mass on Sundays: 5 cents would get a choice selection of cigarettes, teeth, mint leaves, milk bottles, and other delights. Those days are long gone.
Zoe Klienman of the BBC, which itself still has archival material on Betamax tapes, writes in "Sony says goodbye to Betamax tapes" (2015) that Sony, which stopped manufacturing the machines some years ago, has now decided to also stop producing Betamax format tape, which was always less popular than the competing VHS format for recording video to play back at any time.
I'm not exactly sure how my mind got to Adventure Island as I read Klienman's short article. It was probably the connection with TV and thinking about things long gone. When I was in primary school, there were no such things as video tape in any format. I don't think it even occurred to me and my first grade mates that it might one day be possible to record what was on the TV. It was possible to record audio. In the 1960s (I said I wasn't young), tape recorders were large machines that recorded sound onto large spools of tape. They were very, very expensive and definitely not portable or convenient. And our TV was black and white. Colour TV was another thing still in the future. Inspired by my memories of things past, I did what anyone would do today: I googled. And there was Adventure Island, conveniently available, at least in short bits, on YouTube.
Thankfully, I had no illusions about the artistic or other merits of Adventure Island, so I thought it was probably safe to watch a few seconds of the clip. Although I found the full 30 minute episode on YouTube, I only inserted the one minute excerpt - I'm sure my audience will think that's enough to get the general idea about the sort of rubbish I loved when I was a child. But it was wildly popular with my friends and apparently lots of other primary school kids at the time because it was entertaining, and after a hard day with the nuns, all we wanted was to be entertained. Actually, as I watched the clip, it seemed also to be teaching, or trying to teach, some moral lessons, which certainly wasn't why my classmates and I watched it, but perhaps it had some influence. I really don't know - I certainly did not reflect on the moral implications of the content of the things I watched when I was in school. Or did I?
Another show, also awful in different ways, that I loved, this time in high school, was another Australian series called Number 96. And of course it, too, is on YouTube. This time I chose a slightly longer excerpt, and discovered an amazing thing in the notes on the YouTube information for it - this episode, number 649, broadcast in 1974, was the first one ever in colour! Of course, we didn't have a colour TV at that time, but I guess my mother got one a bit later, some time before I finished high school.
Actually, my mother was a bit naughty by the standards of the time, because Number 96 was pretty revolutionary and showed late at night. I think about 10:00 PM, when all good school children should have been in bed, or at least doing homework, definitely not watching TV shows undermining society's morals by showing nude young women, by presenting gay men as decent people who were not effeminate, and by showing real life as if it were ... real life.
Happily, despite all the warnings from miserable moral guardians and other self-appointed dictators trying to control what Aussies watched on TV, Australian society did not die or become full of sex maniacs. The opposite happened, and scandalous TV shows such as Number 96 probably helped Australian society to move to make moral progress away from the bad old ways of thinking that had strictly controlled, or tried to despotically control, people's thoughts, speech and behaviour.
Australia had not yet got Beta or VHS tapes, but those and other changes were on the way in 1974, and they all made life better. I'll pass on Adventure Island, but I might actually watch a full episode of Number 96 to recall those far off days of my early teenage years when my wonderful mum broke the social rules and let me stay up late watching TV full of sex and other things that reflected life as it was, sort of, in Australia in the 1970s.
I wrote the title for this post, which now seems not very appropriate, because my initial response was to write about how my young nieces nephews have never seen things like music records or cassette tapes, but I rather enjoyed the distractions of old time Aussie TV. LP records, cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs can wait, perhaps they will come up in a comment, along with Michael Jackson's Thriller, taking me back to my late days at university, and which Klienman also mentions.
When I was a teenager, perhaps around 15, my mother and an aunt were one day talking about the evil communist threat still lingering at that time in the form of labour unions, and I could not doubt their obvious sincerity when they said that "if the men didn't, they would go to fight to stop the commies taking over Australia." It was a sort of revelation to me because they were as wrong as they were sincere, although I didn't say anything on that occasion.
In "The US inmates charged per night in jail," Jessica Lussenhop (2015) describes the sincerely believed arguments for and against some US county and city prisons charging fees, at apparently capricious rates, to people locked up, leaving them with sometimes substantial debt burdens on release. Lussenhop also reports that the American Civil Liberties Union is collecting statistics in a bid to have the practice ended on the grounds that it is not only ineffective as revenue source, but also "fundamentally flawed."
This article reminded me, again, of the one about the moral harm that religion does to children. In both cases, people get an idea that sounds plausible to support an opinion they have about what should be done. And the idea that sounds plausible (religion makes children more moral) and the opinion about what should be done (religion should be taught in schools and encouraged by governments) are both wrong. In this case, some people think it's right to make prisoners pay for the cost of their imprisonment and that charging them rent for being in prison is a good way to do this. I think both parts of this opinion are wrong. As even the most committed prison rent supporter admits, it just doesn't work, so the idea that it's effective is false. But I think it's also a false moral belief to think that prisoners should pay for the cost of keeping them in prison.
To be fair, the ex-prisoners whose ideas and words are presented by Lussenhop also seemed pretty weak to me - they were just whining about having a debt. Their idea that the pay-to-stay system is unjust seems to me right, but I'm not sure that their supporting reasons are very strong.
So, what is the strong reason?
The Multi-County Correctional Center in Marion, Ohio
When a society decides to make some acts crimes and to take away the freedom of people who commit those crimes, that society also takes on the obligation to care for those citizens, who do not stop being either citizens or human beings because they have been found guilty of a crime. If tax payers are unwilling to support in a decent and humane way the people they put into prison, then should stop putting people into prison and return to the bad old days of our primitive ancestors in jungles and caves who took justice into their own hands. Part of the responsibility that comes with the security, the comfort and other benefits of living in societies ruled by (more or less) impartial law is that you pay taxes to fully cover the cost of that, and those who have the most, who benefit the most, should be paying those costs. That they might very sincerely believe otherwise does not make a wrong idea right.
This is why free speech is so very important to a healthy society, not just economically but morally. My mother and aunt, in fact several of my aunts, had and still have some pretty awful ideas, apart from a desire to murder communists (I think this one might have passed over the decades). Although I usually try to keep my mouth shut, they sometimes say something so awful that I have to comment. I think my brothers and sisters let their elders get away with far too much. For example, when I was at home last year, my mother said to a visiting aunt that "something needs to be done about all the foreigners coming in and taking Australian jobs, living on the dole and being an economic drain on tax payers." Since my own family, as my last name suggests, have not been Australians for many generations, having arrived from Italy as economic immigrants in 1888, it seems a bit cruel to be saying such things of modern economic or political immigrants seeking a better life in a strange land. Her comment is also irrational: you can't both be taking the jobs of other people and living on tax funded welfare. In fact, modern immigrants are, like my own great grandparents from Italy, very hard working because they want to succeed, and in doing so they contribute a lot to the economic development of a country. And without it's immigrants, Australia, like the US and many other great nations, would be nothing.
This need to strengthen how people understand issues is one reason why I think it would be good to get religious teaching out of schools and replace it with philosophy. A better way, I think, to produce morally good children and citizens is to teach them how to think critically, especially about social and political issues so that they cannot be so easily fooled by politicians and others with ugly political agendas that make use of racist, nationalist and other tools to persuade normally good people to sincerely believe false ideas and support immoral laws.
I got a bit off the topic of the BBC News article, but that's no problem with response writing. The previous paragraph again reminds me of Roger Scruton, and I think for tomorrow I will summarize and respond to his article in the BBC News a couple of days ago. I was thinking we might read an essay about why it's morally wrong to eat meat, in which the author cites Scruton as the source of a bad reason to eat pigs but not baby human beings, but Tan has already read that essay last term, so we might read something different, leaving my blog response to Scruton as possibly your only introduction to his ideas this term. And that sounds like a good enough reason to be controversial.
Tomorrow.
If you would like to know why, if it's OK to eat pigs, then it's also OK to eat human babies, I'm sure that Tan can explain that for you, and also tell you how Scruton's opposing argument fails to separate babies from pigs.
If you are like many in the US and elsewhere, but especially the oddly religious US, you might have been unpleasantly surprised by the discoveries I reported in my blog post a couple of days ago, "Putting our beliefs to the test: Check everything!" Today, I passed on an even more controversial article in the BBC News by British philosopher Roger Scruton and on a story about the disgusting Scottish traditional dish haggis in favour of something comforting.
Unlike the study showing that religion appears to make children less moral, the results here did not surprise me: there has been no such leading down garden paths with respect to popular beliefs about the benefits of some regular gardening or close contact with natural environments. I haven't gardened for years, but one of the things I always do when I visit my family for my Songkran escape from Bangkok is to walk around our family property to enjoy the plants, especially the wild plants that my father left untouched when he converted most of the land into economically productive fields. He also appreciated the calming beauty of wild things growing as they wanted, with bright native Australian flowers and berries adding dashes of colour to the greens. When I was growing up, my brothers, sisters and I used to love playing around in the virgin scrub hunting for edible berries, following tracks (often imaginary or made by ourselves), getting a glimpse of a fox, a spiny ant eater or a possum. Watching out for snakes was all part of the fun.
On the less wild side, my mother has always kept a house garden for fresh veggies. She doesn't really go in for flowers, but she does like to plant attractive trees around the house. I suspect that with eight kids, being able to escape to her garden for a bit of work among the carrots and lettuces was a very welcome relief, and one that she continued long after we had all grown up and left. Every time I visit, as we drive up to the house, she seems to be out with a trowel in her hand, digging, complaining about the ants attacking, or pulling off dead leaves. Except of course when she is at her club dining, gambling and fighting with her equally ancient mates of many decades, all beneficiaries of lots active gardening.
One small surprise was the new use of a word I learned, allotments. The article talks constantly about allotments, but it presumes readers know what they are. Although I could guess, I don't recall ever having heard the term used the way it is in the article. That might be because although I greatly prefer living in the city to the country, I didn't grow up in the city; also, all of my school mates in town lived in houses that hard large yards, most of which also had veggie gardens and often also flower gardens. Both sets of grandparents lived in town, but they had large gardens, so there was never any thought that they might get some small patch to garden somewhere else. Or perhaps Australia just doesn't have allotments of this type the way that the UK does.
Still on vocabulary, the excellent Oxford Dictionaries Online has an entry that explains the phrase from my title that I repeat in paragraph 3.
While I can happily continue to give haggis a miss, having tasted it at least once too often during my university days (thankfully at the end of very formal so highly drug fuelled meals), if I don't respond to Roger Scruton's piece of work tomorrow, we might come across some of his other work in a reading later this term.
As I read it for the third time, or maybe the fourth, I realised just how complex the language, both the vocabulary and the grammar holding it together, were in a BBC News article that I would normally skip over. I can't remember now what attracted me - perhaps the title or the image fit my mood, but I clicked and enjoyed it.
In "Where winter is cold, dark and beautiful," Antonia Quirke (2015) presents her very personal account of the lives the people of Greenland, describing how the long winter and landscape of varied ice forms shapes the expectations as they enjoy the "season-long bruised purple." Quirke also tells some history of explorers of this frozen land, and how the people still hunt in peril using sleds drawn by huskies.
Quirke did a good job in her description: as I wrote the last bit of my summary above, I shivered, although that could also be a result of my air conditioning. I could never live in any such place as Greenland, however icily beautiful it might be. I hate cold weather. Even Sydney is too cold for my for half the year, so I always time my visits to Australia to coincide with Songkran. In Australia, summer has just ended and autumn is cooling things nicely with a little rain, but it's not cold. Actually, sometimes the nights are chilly, but my brother is always happy to lend me a sweater if I need one before snuggling under the blankets and looking up at the stars through the windows of his home in the country.
One of the words that Quirke uses is melancholy, which she describes as "intrinsically wound into [the] landscape" (2015), and as well as suggesting a cool title, it reminded me of a poem I love by John Keats. It isn't his best, but "Ode on Melancholy" (1819) is still pretty good. In fact, Keats is so good that even having had to study him in high school, I think in year 10, couldn't turn me off him. His images are precise and used to create the moods that often contrast with the themes he develops over the course of a poem. My favourite is perhaps his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," (1819,) where his question: "To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies"? (stanza 4) Shows us, along with the other details, exactly what is painted on the ancient Greek pottery container that is the topic of his poem.
And Keats' ancient pottery topic reminds me of the rather less sophisticated pottery figure that Pamela Hartmann (2007) uses for her introduction to approaches to works of art on page 73 of Quest 2. Compared to the Greek works of about the same period, the ancient Edomite figure really isn't very impressive. But I suspect that Keats could have turned this topic too into a source of enduring, if also melancholy, beauty, "and be among her cloudy trophies hung" ("Ode on Melancholy", last line).
___________
References
Hartmann, P. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. [There is a slightly expanded version of Hartmann's reading with colour images of the Edomite figure online here.]
I usually begin my first blog posts for the term by responding to articles published on the BBC News website, but they seem to have missed the one that has been everywhere else, so I've chosen The Economist's account of the recent academic paper that has so excited so many people.
In "Matthew 22:39,"The Economist describes and comments on a study to test the belief that being religious makes people behave better than they otherwise would (2015). Although noting that the results need to be tested in repeat experiments, The Economist reports that the study found solid evidence that the opposite is true, that religion in fact made children less caring of others in society despite their parents saying the opposite.
With the example of violent, government approved brutal Buddhist intolerance of the Rohingya fellow citizens in Myanmar, with the extremes of Islam inspired violence in the news regularly, with the historical record of Jewish suppression of thinkers with new ideas such as Jesus, Christian crusaders, inquisitors, witch burners and killers of gay men, and with the current Hindu hatred and prejudice against Muslims in India and other religiously inspired intolerance and violence, it sort of surprised me that the study's findings surprised so many people. But perhaps I should not have been surprised.
My family in Australia were good Catholics and sent me to the best religious schools for my entire education from kindergarten to high school graduation, and we were regularly taught that although the followers of religion often abused it for evil political purposes, the religion itself was good and made people more moral. But this is what the study, by an international group led by an academic in developmental neuroscience at the University of Chicago, says seems to be wrong: religion seems to make individuals less moral in their respect for and treatment of other human beings. The children of atheist families, who believe in no gods and have no religion, behave as the more moral human beings.
What I really liked about this study is that it tests a common belief to see whether it really is true. We human beings have a very long history of believing things that seem "obvious" and so don't get tested as they should be, and they are often false. Good academics check everything.
The job of academics is to find what is really true, and then explain why it's true and how the false belief became so popular. And that is very much relevant to a reading and writing class in an academic English program, where we need to check everything.
And I like The Economist's clever title - Matthew 22:39 points to a verse in the Christian Bible where Jesus commands his followers to "Love your neighbour as yourself."
Welcome to our Reading and Writing level 2 (CD) class for the term.
Over the next six weeks, we will be working through a few chapters in Quest, which involve reading and writing several different kinds of texts. We will also add some extra reading and writing to keep things interesting every day; we will, for example, be reading a short novel and regularly writing on this class blog.
I hope you find the class useful and also enjoyable.
In the meantime, you might like to have a look at the blog posts below that students in level 2 (AB) wrote last term, and the new ones that I write over the coming days in response to recent articles published in the BBC News.
