Ramblings

Senior year...ugggghhh...

I'm supposed to be able to do St. John's stuff AND think about senior essay AND figure out plans for next year? Not happening. For the last month I have been shifting my attention from one of these from the other, but have yet to figure out the balancing act that will help me succeed at all three at once.

Ben and I have been talking about next year, but have nothing approaching a firm idea of what we're doing. Right now all we know is that we probably aren't going to be able to apply anywhere this year. I really really really want to be a midwife, but am not able to cope with the loss of respect I would have endure by entering a marginalized medical profession. Maybe I could become a psychologist and then see later if I want to be a midwife. At least then I'd have a real postgraduate degree. All I know is that I want to help people and get a little respect along the way. How would you, dear family, react to me becoming a midwife?

Meanwhile, I am listening to A LOT of Bach and have been slowly becoming convinced of the following: Just because I don't speak the language of Hegel or Kant or Hume (I'm still hoping I'll understand Kierkegaard) doesn't mean I'm a stupid or antiphilosophical person. Maybe people really do choose their philosophy, and I can choose the philosophy that is best suited to my intuitive, interpersonal way of existing. So maybe religion is emotional and maybe Bach (and most music) is emotional and maybe all the literature I like is emotional. I find meaning in it. I am more intuitive than analytical. I need to quit holding this against myself.

Grandma and Grandpa Callahan called and asked me all sorts of questions about my relationship with Ben. So to set the record straight: We are living together, I really love him, and we're not getting married. After what happened with Laszlo I will be waiting A LONG TIME before promising to marry anyone. I'm happy, so don't judge me, people.

Keirkegaard is supposed to be the most attractive man on the program. I bet Hegel isn't even in the running.

Regional Woes and Hippie Bliss

I am being forced to watch Iowa St. at Texas and USC at Arizona instead of Ohio State's and Notre Dame's games today. Evil regional programming.

On a lighter note, Ben and I went to the Farmer's Market again this week and it was just amazing. I wish everyone from the familiy could see it...roasting chiles, yummy organic meat and vegetables, fresh cider, delicious homemade spicy mustards and jams, rich hippies, cute little kids running around... it kicks North Market's butt. Last week we made a lamb roast (with Sam's advice) with kale and delicious corn, and baked spiced apples for dessert.

This week we're making chicken with tomatoes and honey, corn, and rolls (hopefully I'll be able to get ahold of Jennie before dinner tonight and can use her recipe). It's so satisfying to buy food from the families that grow it and to eat seasonal foods. I can't deny that I'm becoming a hippie...I've almost convinced myself to become a midwife and live on a farm and live all of my days in hippie bliss. There's something about living where there's too much sunshine that makes solar power and biking everywhere seem like viable options. Of course, I don't have solar power and I don't have a bike, so I'm just a hypocrite... I guess all I'm saying is that there's really something inspiring and beautiful about Santa Fe.

Senior Essay Topics II

I have been meeting with tutors, trying to figure out what I want to write my essay about and who I could ask to my advisor. I met with a tutor who is really into literature and was all about getting me to write about Tolstoy, then I met with a tutor who was clearly so laid back that he wasn't really into the conversation at all, and today I met with a tutor who is just right. I'm going to write about the St. Mathew Passion, and I will most probably ask Mr. Cornell, whom Ben assists in music class, to advise me.



So now I am procrastinating and listening to the Passion, because Hegel is "mad hard" and because (thanks to good old J.C. Maxwell and Einstein) I've already had a day full of imaginary steam engines and clocks moving at the speed of light. Senior year is the year of choices: you get to choose a subject to write an essay about AND you get to choose a preceptorial to take. I write down my top four choices and get assigned to one. Sadly, there are no music or art precepts being offered this year, and I am WAY over philosophy, so I'm debating between the following appealing options:
-Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
-Works of Love, Kierkegaard
-One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez
-Essays, Montaigne




-Heat and Heat Engines, with works by Carnot, Maxwell, and Morton Mott-Smith
-Ecological Readings, with works by Thoreau, James Lovelock, and papers on urban and conservation ecology
-Civil Rights Movement, with works by Douglass, B.T. Washington, du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and two Supreme Court Decisions.
-Collected Works, Jung



In other news, I was very sad to hear that Mandy lost her suitcase, incredibly excited to see Jaime and Mandy's posts about Jesus Camp (Jaime, you and Ben totally make me feel better about Christianity) and am starting voice lessons.

Jesus Camp

Ben and I saw a preview for Jesus Camp, which looks like one of those movies that sets out to reveal a strange but powerful American sub-culture...opening our sheltered eyes to what the "other side" of American society/politics looks like. The thing is, lately I've been obsessed with non-fiction. If I have a free moment, out comes a book about science or words or medicine or naturalism or less happy things (like Jonathon Kozol's books about inner-city miseducation or Fauziya Kassindja's Do They Hear You When You Cry). This obsession has been slowly overtaking my movie preferences as well. I loved Spellbound, Wordplay, An Inconvenient Truth, the movie about the dead grizzly bear guy, and Super Size Me...I'm a pretty easy mark as far as documentaries go. The point is, that as easy a mark as I am, I was conflicted about the preview for Jesus Camp. But I guess first you should go to jesuscampthemovie.com, if you can, and watch the preview so we're on the same page. My discomfort was caused by my familiarity with the kinds of messages the adults were feeding to children in bible camp. Here are some of the things the adults said,
"There are two kinds of people in the world...those who love Jesus and those who don't."
"How many of you would like to be those who would give up their lives for Jesus?"
"Are you a part of it or not?"
"I want to see young people...as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those places because we have, excuse me, but we have the truth."
"How long have you been a Christian?"

These quotes are extreme, but they sound familiar to me. Well, except the one about Pakistan. That one is clearly a reaction to things that have happened since 2001. I hate that these things sound familiar. They conjure up feelings of extreme guilt that I still feel to some extent. It's weird right, because my Mom was about the least pressuring mom a girl could have about Christianity, but I still have these feelings. They are left over from not fitting in as a child at East Side Grace Brethren or at Jersey Baptist and feeling like a bad, bad kid because of it. I tried really, really hard at Jersey, too. Still, I felt like a bad, bad kid.

The only (really Christian) place I really fit in was at Faith Ranch, which I just LOVED. It might, just might, have had something to do with the fact that every bit of fellowship was squeezed in between camping, horseback riding, and singing (which I was good at and so not a social outcast). Even at Faith Ranch, though, I have some difficult memories. The worst was from my last summer there, when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was going on a week long camping trip with a few other girls, and before we left I told on one of the girls for smoking. The assistant director came up to me later and commended me for doing what I was supposed to and for what "couldn't have been an easy decision." It was a damned easy decision, because I had been raised to do exactly what I did. I knew that smoking was bad and had never been friends with kids who smoked. What could have been easier? I didn't do what I did out of goodness.

As an adult, I still feel like the bad, bad, kid. I feel it around Christians (and especially around my family) constantly. I cannot enunciate an absolute to you. That doesn't mean that I don't believe in absolutes, or in an absolute power. It also doesn't mean that I don't strive to be a follower of Christ. I don't hate or look down on people who believe in saints, in transubstantiation, in consubstantiation, in miracles, in speaking in tongues (although I find this difficult to relate to), but I do look down on people who look down on, or hate, others. I also have a BIG problem understanding most of what Paul says. But I firmly believe that that's my fault. I don't understand much of what Plato says, either.

Back to the preview. On the website there's an interview with Victoria, the cute little ten-year-old blonde Christian heavy metal enthusiast dances for God and doesn't care about Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears (thank God for that at least!). She says, "When I dance I really have to be sure that that's God because people will notice when I'm just dancing for the flesh."

So my question is, why would parents and other adults hound kids about giving up their lives for Christ or the perils of "dancing for the flesh"? I have never (and certainly not when I was ten) understood the battle lines Christians draw between themselves and others, and I will never understand or condone teaching that to children. I want feedback from those of you with kids who do church stuff with your kids. How do you feel about pledging allegiance to the Christian flag (something we did in Sunday school when I was little) or drawing lines between Christian and non-Christian children?
It seems like there ought to a way of addressing children which will teach them what they need to learn in order to grow into spiritual (and in this case, Christian) men and women, without burdening their little (potentially very joyful) souls with worries about dancing for the flesh or not saying the Christian pledge appropriately or not being on the right side of the Christian/non-Christian divide.

I guess all I'm saying is this: Christian adults, think twice before you put a piece of red duct tape with LIFE written on it over your little kid's mouth at a rally. She probably doesn't get it, which means it's doing more harm than good. Two more things: First, I don't at all blame my parents for the guilt I feel. Second, I apologize for the length and poor organization of this post. It's something I'm working on.

Teeny, tiny oil drops

Where to begin? So, the idea behind lab at St. John's is that we not only read the books great scientists wrote and figure them out, we also perform the experiments they did to the best of our ability so that the process of discovery is more active than it would be if we were only sitting around a table talking. Now, for those of you who think that St. John's is outdated and about "old stuff" (which is probably no one reading this, but that's ok) how about THIS: we're discovering the electron! Wow! How modern!

Faraday and Thomson figured out that all matter has some sort of definite quantity of electricity in it, and that it takes the same quantity of electricity to chemically decompose a substance as it does to keep it together. Then came Millikan, who is super-cool. I found a quote on wikipedia that shows just how super-cool:

"At the close of my sophomore year [...] my Greek professor [...] asked me to teach the course in elementary physics in the preparatory department during the next year. To my reply that I did not know any physics at all, his answer was, “Anyone who can do well in my Greek can teach physics.” “All right,” said I, “you will have to take the consequences, but I will try and see what I can do with it.” I at once purchased an Avery’s Elements of Physics, and spent the greater part of my summer vacation of 1889 at home … trying to master the subject. [...] I doubt if I have ever taught better in my life than in my first course in physics in 1889. I was so intensely interested in keeping my knowledge ahead of that of the class that they may have caught some of my own interest and enthusiasm."







How St. John's is THAT!? And although 1889 may seem like a while ago, he didn't die until 1953. Super modern. So, the reason I'm writing about Millikan and oil drops and electrons is because this experiment is worth writing about. The experiment is designed to find the absolute charge of electricity (i.e. the charge of a single electron) as well as to find the mass of the electron. Doing this requires a lot of math which I find pretty boring, but the apparatus and the concept behind it are very comprehensible. Here is a drawing of the apparatus. Sadly we didn't get to use thousands of volts yesterday...only a few hundred.




So those two plates, one above and the other below the field marked "uniform electric field" are electrically charged plates. Say the top one is charged positively and the bottom negatively. We spray teeny, tiny, oil drops into the large cannister on top and some of them float down through a hole and end up between the two charged plates. We can turn off the plates and the oil drops will float down really really slowly (about 15 seconds/2mm) because of the viscosity of the air, and then we can give the plates charge and the oil drops, depending on whether they were charged negatively or positively, will go up really fast or down really fast. If you measure the speed of the oil drops as they float down (at a constant rate) and as they shoot up (with one that is positively charged) you will notice that every once in a while they will change the speed at which they shoot up. This is evidence that the oil drop has "captured" an ion and picked up extra negative electric charge. The intervals between the speeds at which they shoot up provides evidence that electricity comes in discreet packets, electrons, and we can use our measurements to determine their charge and mass.

Anyway, this experiment means squinting into a microscope for hours on end flipping switches to make the oil drop go up and down while remaining in sight and timing with a stopwatch the times they take to go up and down. Sounds boring but is actually pretty exciting, especially since I got to use one of the set-ups that had a very small tv and camera instead of a microscope. I worked with Sarah Bern, a really nice Toronto-an I've just met (it's always exciting to make new friends at St. John's-one would think I would know everyone already) who was really fun to work with. After we collected all of our data we were supposed to begin doing the math to get the numbers we need for our lab report, but instead we just talked. It was a really nice college moment.

Senior Essay Topics

Possible Senior Essay subjects:

The Iliad
Plato's Republic
The Five Books of Moses
Job
The gospels written by Paul
Augustine's Confessions
Kepler: The Harmonies of the World
Catullus
Tolstoy: War and Peace
The writings of Konrad Lorenz, naturalist
Bach: St. Mathew Passion

A City They've Written AT LEAST One Song About

"All the buildings are brown...but it's so beautiful!"



For all of you who are considering a trip to Santa Fe on May 19th (that is, for my graduation), I thought I would do a little promotional thing to show you just how fun a weekend in Santa Fe can be! A sample weekend (inspired by this weekend):




Friday:
-Eat at the Thai Cafe. Yum
-Go to Ten Thousand Waves for a private bath.


-Watch House late into the night.


Saturday:
-Walk down Canyon Road and have brunch at the Tea House


-Go to the Humane Society and play with the animals. This is an especially important pastime for those of us who have a bird, when what we really want is a dog or cat.
Lucy:


(They also have rabbits):


-Go to a party at St. John's which features an excellent two-man eighties pop cover band.


Sunday:
-Go to the super-cool Orthodox Church.



-Make delicious home-made minestrone and hope it will last until Wednesday.
-Knit.
-Do homework.

And you wouldn't have to do any of the homework OR go to a college party!

Breakthrough

I thought I should say something about my summer working as an 8th grade teacher with the Breakthrough Collaborative, especially since I know no one in my family has any idea what I was really doing this summer. The Breakthrough Collaborative is a national organization (originally Summerbridge in San Francisco) which aims to give motivated sixth graders the support they will need to get to college. So, these kids, smart or not so smart, tragically poor or borderline middle class, English-speaking or Spanish-speaking, Native, Mexican, and White all apply as sixth graders to the Breakthrough Program. The program is a six year commitment and includes the following components:
Before 7th grade: Summer school
During 7th grade: Mentoring and tutoring after school
Before 8th grade: Summer school
During 8th grade: Mentoring and tutoring after school
During 9th-12th grade: Students can apply to be Breakthrough interns and during their junior and senior years to be teachers. The students are given college counseling through the program, including SAT prep and additional tutoring.

The only part I was involved with was the summer school aspect, although now that school has started I am going to meet some of the kids after school once a week to help them with homework and help keep them on track in the program.
My experience this summer was exhausting physically and emotionally. There are 50 kids in Breakthough Santa Fe. I taught four classes of science a day, was an advisory to two eighth grade girls and one seventh grade girl, was the head of a committee that organized the program's Friday afternoon events (career day, art walk, camping trip, etc.), and made lesson plans and did miscellaneous paperwork every night.


Fun with Mentos and Coke during a science Tuesday

The kids' home problems, their romantic hopes, their academic successes and failures, all of this was made my concern as many of them opened up to me about their experiences. There were several kids I feel very close to and truly love. There are others who never opened up to me, never bought into the idea that a lame college student who was trying to teach science (of all things, this definitely made it harder to connect to the girls who liked English and History) could understand what composes their existence. I love them too, but they didn't buy into the relationship, and I think that that's fair, because although I came a lot closer to understanding the importance of one girl's older brother's tricked-out car or another girl's hair extensions, ultimately, I don't really care about that stuff the way they do.

What I care the most about is that the kids succeed at what they love. The program is about going to college and raising these kids from their lower class backgrounds into an educated class. I don't buy into this 100% because I don't appreciate the program's emphasis on class change and making money, but I do want the kids to be life-long learners and to have the confidence they need to help them succeed in an America that is too white, too rich, and too Anglo-centric linguistically and culturally.

Here are some of Breakthrough's students:



Lynette Domiguez, a beautiful, strong, and extremely dedicated young woman. I had her in planetary science, which was definitely not her favorite subject, but which she succeeded in by the end of the summer because she knows how to ask questions and work hard.



Ari Morris and Leon Padilla were two awesome boys. Ari was one of four or five white kids in the program and was a sponge for information. He loved science (as well as all his other subjects, most likely) and was really a joy to teach. He is a very serious skateboarder. Cool. Leon is one of those kids with those disarming smiles who drove me nuts by being distracted in class and then turned around and smiled and...all my anger melted away. He wants to be a doctor.



This is Anthony Aragon, aka "Triple A" which is his DJ name. He always carried speakers around in his backpack (which I wasn't supposed to know about) and had the most personality of any of the kids at Breakthrough. Yeah, Triple A!

Well, this is already too long of a post, and Ben wants to fool around with the computer to set up our new Airport Express (yay!), so I'll quit writing. If any Breakthrough kids read this, you're awesome.