A Resolution
A resolution has occured (at least, I hope it's a resolution). Our math professor decided to step down and not continue to teach our class. I hope that the students are remorseful and begin to understand the consquences of their words. My bigger hope is that the prof doesn't take this experience as the only one of her university teaching career. I hope that our class' actions do not reflect her opinion of what teaching university is like..I was talking to a friend this evening during our "peace and global institute" conference/workshop/professional development (whatever you want to call it) session and she was in full agreement with me. It felt good to have someone understand exactly what I was feeling. Anyways, hopefully the class will be satisfied with the new professor and it will be on with our lives.
As I mentioned, I attended a workshop called Peace and Global Institute this evening (and tomorrow!). It has been interesting so far. My first workshop was from Engineers without Borders. The engineer that came into talk to us set up an activity that really got the point across. She divided us up into small groups and each group was given 2 sheets of paper. One with the name of your country (we had to act in our roles) which listed the annual GDP, amount invested in overseas sponsorships, literacy levels, life expectancies, etc. The other page gave us instructions on how to construct a water filter.
My group was Ethiopia. We were given $20 (Monopoly money). We also had the USA and Canada in our class - they received $1000 and $600 respectively. Since Ethiopia isn't as wealthy as the latter two countries, we had no where near enough money to purchase the materials we needed to construct a filter for the dirty bottle of water we were given. So we borrowed. Eventually we did get sponsorship through Canada (nice!) and did manage to get the filter to work.
The whole point of the exercise was to stress the amount of money developped countries contribute to overseas sponsorship (turns out Canada sponsors about 0.2% of our GDP while the US sponsors 0.1%). Additionally, our group had jibberish as instructions to get the point across that literacy was a major issue.
Interestingly enough, our keynote speaker this evening was Alexa McDonough (MP). She mentioned that Canada had set a target of 0.5% of our GDP as an investment for sponsoring poor countries. Of course, this target hasn't been met for quite a few years.
Anyways, I need to get to bed so that I may actually get up tomorrow morning to attend the last part of the conference. Just wanted to say that this conference so far has been really eye opening and that I'm starting to see why we had the Live 8 concert recently (plus reasons for why it's so critical to introduce these subjects into the classroom).
Gnite!
posted by jaryee @ 9:01 p.m.
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