Courage and Creativity

Being holed up writing papers on space security and international cooperation sometimes just really drains the creativity out of you. There are so many things to consider in the realm of cooperation, and the small details and thoughts of different side that makes the policy what it is today. Luckily my friend Jenny sent me the link to www.flip.com, and to the Vivienne Westwood flipbook. I'll open it up later since my flash player has issues. But just being on that site sort of revitalized my mind with new fresh thoughts, even the entire artsyness of it since I can't really get that aspect in my field of International Relations, especially the dense field of space policy. I have so many loves that it is hard to choose which one is the best, but I decided in the end space policy was the way to be. I'll just dabble in international exchange programming, arts & crafts, cooking, yoga, and sewing my gaucho pants on the side.

On the other area of courage, I have been thinking carefully about my courses, especially the ones at a lower level, yet the professors grade quite difficultly. Talking to some other students and analyzing the reason why there was something missing from the class, I finally figured out a good amount of it and thought it would be good to talk to the professor. Every week there are blank stares in the room that are sort of disheartening, and when people present their chapters each week, they tend to say it is difficult. Cross cultural communications should be fun and a way for international service students to be excited in their future careers. So during office hours and after finally figuring out what was the missing component in the class, I went to him and told him what I saw from my point of view with constructive criticism and explanations to back up my POV. It appeared on ratemyprofessors.com that he was quite a hard professor and a little stubborn, so I took that into account before walking into his office.

Appraisal works wonders as I cannot deny he is a wealth of knowledge, but fails to connect his use of theories in such a way students can fully comprehend, leaving a loss faces and now some to the point of no return. He then comments how it was only in our class that no one ever goes to his office hours and prides himself a little how his honors class students, Masters, and PhD students all line up at his door, eagar to learn. In that area, he was quite pissed no one went to office hours. As it was a cross cultural communication POV, I told him how its also a different way of learning and sometimes not to dumb ourselves, but some don't know how to approach professors, especially the younger ones, and the ones with less eager experiences by the way they were taught in high school. Though he refused to "babysit" or "dumbing down the course" and believed a cross cultural communication course is not about feelings and talking about emotions and getting easy A's as other professors do in this area, I told him how students cannot truly connect to the theories though he hands up those tools unless he helps make those connections and slowly bring the students up to that level of connection. Luckily he took my words quite seriously and tried to fix a little bit in the beginning of class. It is difficult to make complete changes in his course structure after having only 4 more classes left, but he did try. There was a level of pride and spite when he allowed us to fix up our papers for a better grade, as he hasn't done it ever in those 22 years of teaching. Nonetheless, it was good to see a bit of change and I could see there was a certain bit of conflict within himself by my words.

Sometimes I wonder why people are too shy to stand up for their thoughts, but half of it is also a power struggle between teacher and student. Where teacher looks down upon the student, and the student has difficulty working with the teacher as an almost equal. Sometimes those lines are meant to be there, and sometimes this line should be erased. Of course, I am shy too when it comes to my graduate level classes, where I think I really don't know much about the area and let my professor feed me the information. But in time, we will be all be adults and respected equally.

Oops, my first Made In China product- So it lasted for 2 months

So, I ordered a Honeywell Humidifier off of Amazon.com about two days ago, and it arrived today. After my coughing I got in China (that never seemed to go away unless I leave the country), I have been a little cautious about my lungs. I'm sure ten years of my life got cut off just from being there for half a year. So I thought its cause of the dry air, especially since its getting to be winter now. I happily opened my new toy, and started looking at the label- lo and behold, it was indeed Made in China. While even my Lg Chocolate phone was made in Korea, I made the mistake of assuming the humidifer may be been made in Vietnam or somewhere else. I basically lived without China for about 2 months, then it got caught up with me. Ah well, it was good while it lasted. But I'll still just going to try not to buy anything made in China just for safety concerns. Sorta like ending up at Wholefoods, ya know?