the only easy day was yesterday

Monday, February 11, 2008

i have to do a history paper. its open ended, but i dont know about anything i dont know about enough to want to learn about it....

ideas....

6 comments:

The W said...

write on something you do know...perhaps?

Jasper Yate said...

i could and get an easy grade, but i want to learn something, thats why i took the class, i dont really know history well. i dont necessarily want to do something strictly history, but i dont want to do something that i know...

The W said...

but if you know it then you wouldnt be learning something. that is, unless your knowledge of the subject was false, and you knew only that you dont know. in which case you never really knew it in the first place, and thus you would learn something, solving your problem.

Jasper Yate said...

i hope that was a joke. either way i said i want to learn about something, which requires my not knowing about it. the original post was playing on my inability to know about something that i dont know about, becuase i want to learn about something (in a deeply educated sense) that i dont know about (in an awareness sense)...

so if i minced my words, what i mean is that i am struggling to find things of interest inhistory which i dont yet know about because im so oblivious to most things in history.

ive sort of though a lot about doing a thing on the rise of philosophy and the historical and humane circumstances that drove people to that kind of thought. i also thought about maybe doing some high renaisance art stuf cuz id like to know about that.

an idea came to me earlier in class, though. i keep thinking of things to do on specific topics in history, but rather, you know what i was saying about the difference in the experiences of things on the phone the other day? i, and most people, have prejudices aobut times in history, but hard-to detect oens. not like i dont like ancient greece, but rather a feeling, and aura that you feel when dealing with a certain thing. its like i feel a certain way that connotes ancient-greekness when i deal with anything ancient-greekish, and i get a particular feeling about the dark ages, etc. i thought maybe i could do some sort of focus including a survey or somehow observe or explore this prejudice we probably derive from our first experiences with these times in history. that would be a big project and take a lot, though...

Jasper Yate said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

maybe you could do a project on what was considered luxgerious during different time periods of "hightened enlightenment" like the renaissance and the englightenment and...
or maybe times in history where there were simultaneous discoveries like that of calculus cause that would also deepen your experience in calculus