Video Project Presentation

Honestly, I don't really have any ideas for this video project yet. I haven't really been hit by any inspiration yet, so I may have to do this the hard way - making a list of possibilities and then just choosing the best one.

Project ideas:

• Various clips (audio and video) from my interviews
• Stock footage of "vegetarian things" with narration about my project
  
• Shock video- factory footage kinda stuff
• Story video - my experience with killing an animal
• Video talking about arguments for vegetarianism

Personally, I think the story video would be the most powerful and easiest to make. I'd just need a camera or two, a nice day, and a few good takes. I feel pretty comfortable hearing my voice, and I'm a good story teller if I'm in the right mood. I probably just need some good takes of me telling the story, and then about 3-4 minutes of stock footage to break up the story.

I'm planning on recording most of this, if not all of it, at home. There's a lot of great nature trails and such, so that should provide a good natural background for my project, which is so related to the question of nature, specifically what in it we should eat.

Final Service Learning Reflection #2

Prompt 2: Consideration of materials and/or social space.

NALC is located in a building that used to be a high school, so upon entering one immediately has a sense that the building is for young people. Lockers line the hallways and the classrooms create that unique "high school" feel. Though I can only guess, this may not be the best space for adult learners. There's the potential of feeling out of place, or feeling too old for this building. Also, since high school was probably a place they felt alienated from, or a place where they really struggled, their initially feeling upon entering the building may be negative.

Regardless of the initial reaction, entering the tutoring area is definitely a more intimate and comfortable experience. Most of the times when I went to volunteer, there were people chatting at the entrance area, and anyone who arrived was always greeted warmly by the receptionist. The actual tutoring stations were a table with two seats divided by cubical walls. Some tutoring stations were back to back with no wall in between, and this occasionally created problems with four people all trying to talk at the same time. It posed a particular difficulty if the student really need to practice listening and speaking, but fortunately this occurred infrequently.

The books we worked with were better used as tools that could be used when needed, or as something to get us started. Though we always began with a lesson from the book, we usually branched off to a different topic or activity. The lesson plans worked about the same way. I feel like if a tutor was less comfortable and tried to rigidly follow the book exercises or the lesson plan, it would be a be a bit too constraining, but with the right attitude towards them they are a very useful tool.

Final Service Learning Reflection #1

Prompt 1: Connection to your own literacy experience.

A lot of the students I have had at NALC have been foreigners; they are learning English as a second language. Many of them were very literate and fluent in their own language, but simply needed more help with acquiring English literacy. This fact creates both and interesting parallel and and interesting contrast. I can relate to them quite strongly as a person that has spent some time, albeit a short period, abroad. Often when you are thrown into a new language, speaking comes before reading, and the struggle is often just finding the right words to express what you mean, not being unsure of what is going on. A few of my students were clearly quite intelligent, but just lacked vocabulary or practice. I know from my experience as a foreigner in Germany that the most frustrating experience is knowing what question is being asked of you, but not knowing how to respond in the foreign language simply because one lacks the knowledge of a verb tense or a few nouns. That's why I always tried to write down every odd vocabulary word, even if it wasn't part of the lesson, and if we were finished with the lesson, I always tried to teach them something new, be it a new verb tense, or a set of word endings.

At the same time I also had a few students who were simply illiterate in their native language. My experience with these students was quite different. I grew up in an upper-middle class family, and there was a big emphasis on school. My parents supported my sister and I by buying us books and always getting involved in our education, something I did not always appreciate. Learning to read and write were a matter of course. But for some of these students who are twenty years old and older, literacy is something they have to work for. I've been lucky enough that I gained a high level of literacy throughout my childhood, when I didn't have to work a job, support a family, or deal with other responsibilities. Becoming literate in adulthood is immensely difficult, and really require dedication.

Through my experiences at NALC, I've come to appreciate the problems that illiterate people, both foreign and native, have to deal with in their lives. It has fed my conviction that childhood is the most important time in any human life. The sooner you start to develop literacy, the farther you will go with it. The converse holds as well: the longer you wait to develop literacy, the more difficult it will be to make progress.

NALC 4th Week

Planned for November 28th.

Archive Materials

Just looking online for different vegetarian websites, I found that PETA's website was full of information. The first thing I noticed, after looking a bit at very old versions of their website, was that they've really promoted the fact that Paul McCartney is a vegan. Like, this is a really big thing for them. We're talking on the front page multiple times over the course of just a few years. As I continued searching, I noticed that they relied heavily on celebrity endorsement, and many of their homepages featured articles about famous people endorsing vegetarianism, veganism, or animal rights.

I'm also planning on exploring the vegetarian sections of Reddit, a huge online community made up of different various smaller communities called subreddits. Each subreddit can be searched by various criteria, and since Reddit is such a popular website, I feel like it would be a great resource.

Glossary

Vegetarianism is a general term that includes different gradations of strictness concerning the definition of what an animal is, or how one should eat. Below is a sampling of different types of vegetarians, as well as some vegetarian-ish diets.

Pescatarianism: is the practice of a diet that includes seafood but not the flesh of other animals.

Flexitarianism: is a term used to describe diets that are vegetarian based with the inclusion of occasional meat products. No specific definition, usually seen as a transitional diet to vegetarianism.

Lacto-ovo-vegetarianism: a vegetarian who does not eat animal flesh of any kind, but is willing to consume dairy and egg products. One of the most common types of vegetarians, often motivated by ethical concerns about the slaughter of animals.

Veganism: "the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals." This excludes all animal flesh and animal products, including milk, honey, and eggs, and may also exclude any products tested on animals, or any clothing from animals.

Raw Veganism: includes only fresh and uncooked fruit, nuts, seeds, and vegetables. Vegetables can only be cooked up to a certain temperature

Macrobiotic: a diet consisting of primarily whole-grains and beans. Emphasis on not overeating, chewing one's food well, and buying local and unprocessed food.

This glossary of terms will get us started, and will inevitably be refined with further research.

SOURCE: Wikipedia

Cohesion and Coherence

Prompt: Write a paragraph that treats one of the following questions... (a) How are you connected to the culture of your project? (b) How is your project important/significant? (What might it help an audience understand?) (c) What is the culture/literacy/Discourse you are studying? (an overview).

This past summer, I ended my two year commitment to vegetarianism. Though I still have a largely plant-based diet and hold vegetarianism in high regard, I found myself unconvinced by arguments I had previously believed, and unmoved by thoughts that had previously disturbed me. My understanding of nature had changed from a fuzzy, peaceful picture to a world of struggle and conflict; if nature is violent, who am I to deny it? Yet I still felt the pull of vegetarianism, and was not ready to completely leave it behind. When I had to choose a topic for this project, I saw it as an excellent opportunity to explore vegetarianism more broadly. My hope is to explore vegetarianism outside the bounds of my reasons, and to get a broader perspective on why one might become a vegetarian.

NALC 3rd Week

During my third week, I worked with two students that I tutored previously. The Hungarian woman came in for the first hour. We worked on some new vocabulary and just chatted about our plans for the next weekend. Again, my (limited) German skills were helpful, but I made sure that we only spoke in German when absolutely necessary.

My second student was the Chinese woman that I had tutored before. We started out reading a story, which she read quickly and with ease. But after we finished, she just kept going through vocabulary, getting almost all of it correct. I finally realized that the lessons we were doing were far too easy for her, and she agreed. After that we worked on verb conjugation, especially with the verb “to be.” I made a verb-chart for her of the present and past tense of ‘to be,’ and then we practiced by changing present tense sentences into past tense sentences. It was actually quite fun. At the very end of the lesson, she taught me a little bit of Chinese, and described in general how their language works. It was really fascinating how different their language is from English.

So far, I have really enjoyed tutoring. I have always had the hunch that I would be a good teacher, and my experience here at NALC has really confirmed that. But not only am I good at it, I really enjoy it. It’s something I will keep in mind when trying to figure out a career.

Interview 1: Elli

My first interview was with a friend of mine named Elli. I chose her because I know that she has thought a lot about why she is a vegetarian, and has some unique views about vegetarianism, among other things. She became a vegetarian her first semester at Belmont as part of a bet she made with a friend: if he quit smoking, she would quit eating meat. From this humble beginning her experience with vegetarianism grew. She joined the Service house at Belmont and met a few new friends who identified themselves as Christian Anarchists. Many of these people were vegan, and as she met more people who questioned her about her vegetarianism, she began to think more deeply about it. She realized that vegetarianism was an expression of compassion, one of the supreme Christian virtues in her opinion. By being a vegetarian, she was showing compassion not only to animals, but also all the people that are negatively affected by the mass-production of meat. As she put it, "I don't think there's such a thing as overly caring about a living creature... I don't think you can have too much compassion for anything."

This interview was extremely helpful because Elli was the perfect example of someone who is a vegetarian for religious reasons. Even though the initial cause for her vegetarianism was something as playful as a bet, her ultimate justification for it that she has grown into is rooted deeply in her Christian faith.

NALC 2nd Week

During my second week, I tutored two new students. The first was my first American student. He was an African-American man born and raised in Nashville, and came to NALC to work on his reading so that he could graduate from Barber School. He didn't say too much about himself, but we did some great work together. It was clear that he had a firm grasp on speaking, and could use visual clues to guess at what words meant. But it was also clear that he wanted to sound words out for himself and do his own work. It was encouraging to see that he really desired to learn.

My second student was a man from Korea. He told me he was studying at Vanderbilt's business school on a grant from his company. He had been reading English for about five years, but admitted that his biggest weakness was listening and speaking. After blazing through our written lesson, we worked for the rest of the time on speaking different sounds he had difficulty with (th, t, d, and l) and just talking, so that he could practice listening. I was amazed that he was able to get through his classes based on his reading skills alone, even though they were quite advanced.

After I left, I reflected on how different my two students were. One was a native-born speaker who struggled greatly with reading, and the other was a foreign speaker who was a very good reader. In a brief encounter, one might be inclined to write off the poor speaker as uneducated, but my experience with these two students proved just the opposite. An inability to speak and listen well does not indicate a lack of education, merely a lack of experience with the spoken language. This experience really brought the old saying "don't judge a book by its cover" to life.

NALC 1st Week

During my first week at NALC, I tutored 2 different students. The first student was a woman from Hungary who lived in Nashville with her husband. She had been in the US for a few years but wanted to improve her English, so she decided to start coming to NALC. Her English speaking skills were surprisingly good, and she was anxious to improve her reading, which was the area she struggled in. One of the coolest moments was when she told me that she spoke a bit of German. I too have been learning German, and it gave us another way to communicate with each other, and even helped while I was trying to explain the differences between 'could,' 'should,' and 'would,' (using the german verbs können, sollen, and wollen).

The second woman was from China. She had moved to America many years ago and had learned to speak English fairly well, but had never learned how to read. We practiced reading a few new words, and she did very well. It was interesting to see how quickly a speaker can pick up reading without much encouragement.

I was a bit nervous about my first time tutoring, but both students made a point to thank me for being such a good teacher. I was taken aback. I think it wasn't so much that I was a skilled teacher, but that I was willing to help them, something which is probably fairly rare among people they encounter in their average day.

Mini-Ethnographic Study

The third floor of the Massey Business Center is a quiet place. Students go there to study, work on group projects, or just relax for a little while. But the quiet, study atmosphere is a thin veneer that masks the multitude of action occurring every minute. For those who are willing to pay attention to subtler details, it's as busy as the cafeteria.

To someone passing through the room, it appears that everyone is simply engaged in their work. But upon closer inspection there are a multitude of activities going on. I observed people studying, but also eating snacks, talking to their friends, texting, and even falling asleep for a bit. But even beyond these activities were the odd temporary relations between people in the room. There was an obvious but unspoken agreement by anyone entering the room that he would be quiet, and when anyone spoke, it was only quietly to people near them. Also, whenever someone entered the room, there was a slight increase in tension - where would this new person sit? During my observations, no one ever invaded anyone's space when choosing a new seat; if there were a group of chairs that had even one person in it, no one would sit with them. The smaller tables filled up much quicker than the larger tables.

Once established in their "area," though, the action did not stop. Though most people seemed committed to doing their work, every now and then you could see a smile or a twitch or a shift in posture that indicated otherwise. Perhaps that person on the computer who just smiled was watching a Youtube video. Maybe that person who just slumped down in their chair is frustrated with a passage they are reading. These and many other things gave little hints to the variety of unseen, unheard activity.

Rafia Zakaria: Stories of Women in Karachi and Islamic Culture

Last Friday I had the chance to see Rafia Zakaria speak about how she grew up in a Muslim family, and the challenges she faced throughout her life. She grew up in a fairly strict Muslim household, and when she was young she lived through a crisis in her family. Her aunt's husband had been unable to have children with her aunt, and supposedly for this reason was taking another wife. This devastated Rafia's aunt, who spent the rest of her life becoming more jealous of the other wife. When Rafia was 17, she was married by arrangement to a man living in the United States. Part of the contract was that she would be educated, and she ended up at Belmont University. Later, after she had graduated and had a child, she found herself at an abused women's shelter, trying to escape her abusive husband. She learned from another person staying there that things would not change if she returned home, and so began the lengthy and difficult process of divorce under American law. Her divorce had far reaching consequences in her family as well, but she did her best to try and repair the damage that had been done between the women in her family. Her's was an interesting story that opened my eyes up to a completely different idea of marriage, one with its benefits and negatives.

Practice Field Notes: Pictures and Reactions

Prompt: What surprised you? What intrigued you? What disturbed you?

I was immediately surprised by how much there was to observe. I picked a fairly "boring" area, with not a lot of conversation or activity. However, as I sat there and observed, I realized there was much more to see than at first glance. Nervous habits, smiles, body positioning, choice of seat, and many other things were ripe with meaning that needed to be unlocked.

In my notes, I focus a lot on the relationships between the people. From where they choose to sit to who the talk to, I noticed many subtitles of interaction between people. I also spent a great deal of time describing where people were located in the room. Perhaps I did this to help jog my memory.

Since there was not much action in the first place, there weren't many things for me to be disturbed by. However, in the future, I will try to be aware of what disturbs me, and try to keep it from getting in the way of my factual field notes, as opposed to my reflections on them.

Long Term Project: Why Vegetarianism?

Recently, I stopped being a strict vegetarian. I gave it up because I was going to study abroad in Berlin in July, and I wanted to fully experience German cultures, which includes their largely meat-heavy cuisine. I also felt as if I was no longer convinced by some of the arguments for vegetarianism. This made me rethink why I had become a vegetarian in the first place, and the nature of the arguments that had convinced me to make the change. I came to the conclusion that arguments for vegetarianism are largely based on how one feels about the arguments, not whether they are "right" or "wrong."

So keeping this class in mind, I thought that I might investigate the Vegetarianism subculture and explore why other people are vegetarians. I think it will be a good project because I was/am a Vegetarian, and it will keep my interest. I'm also interested to explore other peoples' reasons for abstaining from meat, and how they might differ from my own reasons. I also believe that there will be sufficient people to interview and talk with, where other topics I was considering were more limited in who I could talk to.

Colliding Discourses

Unfortunately, embedding is disabled for this youtube clip, but you can follow the link below:

Crash - "Car Jacking"

In this clip from the movie Crash, we see examples of conflicting Discourses, as well as the differences between learned and acquired Discourses. Anthony (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) and his friend Peter (Larenz Tate) are two black men living in Los Angeles. They live the Discourse of the socio-economically lower class black man, but they have also learned a Discourse that allows them to talk about their lives in relation to other people. Here, I will call their learned Discourse the Black Victimization Discourse. Anthony is particularly caught up in this way of seeing the world, and sees everything from poor service at a restaurant to Jean (Sandra Bullock) grabbing her husband's arm as evidence that the world only sees him as a thuggish criminal, and only thus because of his skin color. It is interesting to note that although he disdains this label that he perceives others give to him, he actually fits it fairly well, especially at the end of the scene when he ends up stealing a car with Peter. This movie presents an interesting idea: the ability to learn and master new Discourses through learning does not necessarily mean that one can or will practice a different Discourse.

Writing Taboos

Prompt: What were you taught NEVER to do as a writer? Come up with about two or three such mandates, and write some of your reflections about each one. Was this rule a good one? Are there sound reasons for it? Are there times when you can/should ignore it?

Rule 1: Do not use unnecessary words.

This rule has come almost exclusively from my Philosophy professors, but I do not see it as a Philosophy-specific rule. When I look back on my writing from freshman year (an experience that is always simultaneously humbling and encouraging), one of my biggest problems was that I used too many words and sentences to convey one, simple idea. By following this rule, I was able to make my ideas clearer and easier to understand. It has been an immensely helpful rule, but I do not believe that it applies to all types of writing. There are many wonderful, short poems and stories, but an experienced writer knows how to use all lengths of sentences and paragraphs to his end, and should never follow this rule as a Commandment.

Rule 2: Never write and edit on the same day.

This is one of my personal rules, and it is one that I try to adhere to as much as possible. On a very practical level, it prevents you from procrastinating. You should never turn in a rough draft, and by choosing to edit on a different day, you force yourself to plan ahead. It is amazing how a sentence that sounded excellent in the moment you wrote it turns out to be quite silly the next day. The creative/writing mindset is quite different from the critical/editing mindset, and it is often helpful to give oneself a day to transition between the two.