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Nov. 27th, 2007 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mari4212College is great for many things.
On an average day, I can answer a knock on my door and be greeted by someone who wants to show me a tiny little frog they'd just bought, or find someone interested in discussing topics ranging from costuming various Star Wars characters to inheritance laws and classical literature. I can sit down and bounce ideas off of a girl in Medieval society until we manage to create our personas together (late 14th century German Jews, cousins named Hannah and Rivka), and then listen to her discuss WWF wrestling without batting an eye. I can geek out about religion in Latin class, geek out about Latin in Physics, and utterly ignore physics in my religion classes until my teacher brings in the concept of paradigm shifts.
I can even sit there and laugh at the knowledge that no matter how wild and crazy my friends get, we've still got nothing on my little brother and his friends off at Hampshire. And yes, this is even with our Wizarding Family tree where I'm the grandmother of a badger and my current sister used to be her future husband's sister. (Don't ask.)
Acting as counterbalance to that is sitting in class on some days and having to mentally recite "I will not bash in anyone's head" over and over again. Sigh. We're sitting in class discussing an article on Christian non-violence and half the class was seriously sitting there and arguing that since living out the kind of active non-violence the article was suggesting would require sacrifices and changes to the way someone lived, no one should even try to do it. And, at the same time, stating that it had to be an absolute either/or situation, that you had to either be full on 100% active non-violent at all times, or not do it at all.
I was seriously about to throttle some of them, and class ended before I had a chance to do even a verbal challenge to that. This class, I love the subject matter, but boy do I ever wish I'd gotten a different group of people to take it with. I spend most of the classroom discussions feeling like I'm speaking an entirely different language from most of them.
On an average day, I can answer a knock on my door and be greeted by someone who wants to show me a tiny little frog they'd just bought, or find someone interested in discussing topics ranging from costuming various Star Wars characters to inheritance laws and classical literature. I can sit down and bounce ideas off of a girl in Medieval society until we manage to create our personas together (late 14th century German Jews, cousins named Hannah and Rivka), and then listen to her discuss WWF wrestling without batting an eye. I can geek out about religion in Latin class, geek out about Latin in Physics, and utterly ignore physics in my religion classes until my teacher brings in the concept of paradigm shifts.
I can even sit there and laugh at the knowledge that no matter how wild and crazy my friends get, we've still got nothing on my little brother and his friends off at Hampshire. And yes, this is even with our Wizarding Family tree where I'm the grandmother of a badger and my current sister used to be her future husband's sister. (Don't ask.)
Acting as counterbalance to that is sitting in class on some days and having to mentally recite "I will not bash in anyone's head" over and over again. Sigh. We're sitting in class discussing an article on Christian non-violence and half the class was seriously sitting there and arguing that since living out the kind of active non-violence the article was suggesting would require sacrifices and changes to the way someone lived, no one should even try to do it. And, at the same time, stating that it had to be an absolute either/or situation, that you had to either be full on 100% active non-violent at all times, or not do it at all.
I was seriously about to throttle some of them, and class ended before I had a chance to do even a verbal challenge to that. This class, I love the subject matter, but boy do I ever wish I'd gotten a different group of people to take it with. I spend most of the classroom discussions feeling like I'm speaking an entirely different language from most of them.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-28 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 04:34 am (UTC)Are we talking non-violence as practiced by the Quakers and Amish, or is this a more extreme version? Because if it’s the former then yes, it’s a challenge, but it’s obviously doable (truth be told, I can respect people for practicing totally non-violence, but I personally can’t follow that belief.)
On a personal note, I remember in my Anthropology of Religion class the most obnoxious debate was the “Are Catholics Polytheistic?” shouting contest that happened one day. I being the minority major in the class (non-archeology) kept quiet. Because they were talking past each other, not with each other, those kinds of debates seem most common with Religious topics, granted that might be because my Polisci classes were all pretty dead.