Matt

The past two weeks have felt rough. Exceptionally rough. Like this semester is some sort of test. To see if I really want to stay in school. Tomorrow I have 2 essays and an exam due. I'm not super confident about any of them. The one silver lining to all of this is that I know all of my fellow classmates are experiencing the EXACT same thing. And it really does help. For some reason I feel comfort in the collective suffering. Like its a bond that we all share together. If someone is having a good time at this point in the semester then I think they're being selfish. I get it though. We all signed up for this. It's extremely cheesy but we go through the grind to get to the dream. It turns out this class has already been huge for me in my writing development. Pretty much a whole new world of writing has been opened up to me. One of my essays due tomorrow is something that doesn't even resemble an essay. It's more of a how to manual. And that's exactly the way I wanted it to be. It fit the subject perfectly. A year ago if I'd have had the same assignment I would've turned it into your boring conventional blocked essay that Tekla complains about lol. Anyways, even though I feel like I've accomplished nothing this semester, it's nice to see that it's only in my head.

I never know how to approach these posts. This would be why I'm only at #8. Anyways, I've reflected a little bit one of the article we were assigned to read on the subject of meetings. In this article the author ran down a list of the different types of people you get in meetings. They all were the typical characters you would expect. As I was reading the section about the person who, "has no idea what's going on". I found myself assuming that this person wasn't me, as I'm sure everyone else did (I still am fairly confident it's not me.) Its natural To have this thought and I think most of us are not this person. But I think it's important to realize how easy it is for any of us to be this person at any given time. What I mean by this is-- that person in the meeting who doesn't know what's going on probably has a reason for not knowing what's going on. The reason doesn't matter in this context. What matters is that any one of us can be this person at any point in our lives. That clueless person probably isn't clueless in everything that they do. The only requirement to being that person is laziness. I learned this the other day when I went to one of our group meetings. I hadn't gone over our project plan and was sort of in the dark about what we were doing for that particular meeting. As a result, my questions were mostly irrelevant. This is because most of the questions were answered in the project plan. This didn't make me feel good. All I had to do was read some stuff before the meeting and I didn't. The reason doesn't matter. What matters to the group is that I didn't. I know that others have found themselves as this person before too. I guess my point here is that nobody is just one type of person. People are dynamic. You and I are just as capable of being the clueless one as anybody else. It's completely up to us every day to make sure we aren't that person.

Another reason I enjoyed the midterm was because it was peer reviewed. The feedback I got was helpful, but the most important information I gathered from peer reviewing came from the essay’s that I reviewed. I was able to see other people’s way of breaking the assignment down. I wasn’t very satisfied with my original first draft and I was able to turn it into something much more organized. All thanks to my peers. Thanks peers. 

There is an importance in the design of the instruments we use on an everyday basis. I think that is why Professor Hawkins kept bringing up the desk in the front of the classroom. It has a purpose, it exist as a techńe. A tool used to bridge the unseen (knowledge/information) with the seen (us humans.) It does this by supporting the information we are taking in. Professor Hawkins emphasized that it was obviously a product of our military industrial complex. At first that assumption puzzled me. I wondered how she came to that conclusion. Had she seen these desks all over military bases she’d been to? I don’t know. But after I read the WunderKrammer project I sort of made my own meaning of that statement. I think she said that because the desk is about as standard of a desk as you could imagine. There’s nothing special about it. It is what you would expect from the military. But the blandness of the desk works against it. It doesn’t inspire creativity, it doesn’t do anything for the user other than support weight. There are no features that make the desk more useful than other desks. Those are the reasons, I believe, that most of us don’t own a standard boring desk, and it’s at the front of a classroom doing nothing more than serving as a barrier. Blandness and boring design do nothing for products, writing, architecture, etc. Even tools that are essential for humans need to have some visual appeal. Because the more we’re drawn to the tool, the more likely we are to use it.

Knowing all of this, it is much easier to see why we work in groups so often. It also easier to see the recurring themes of the group work. It’s all about trying to understand the audience. 

To close, I’d like to say that I think copyrighting is getting out of hand. I’m not sure how prevalent it is in the music industry as a whole, but from our discussion, I learned that it has been abused in the past. Obviously you can’t just outright copy another person and make money off of it, but there should be some more leniency for creativity. 

I’d love to get better at everything listed in the course assessment section. But especially “skills and strategies”. I dream of a day when I have an established way of tackling assignments or tasks.