Evil in Various Forms

A while back my dad came up with this brilliant idea. He needed his students to read... they weren't reading... he would make them get online and record videos of themselves teaching the reading! And he would make it a fourth of their grade! Brilliant!

Brilliant.

I told him at the time it was an evil idea. People shouldn't have to video tape themselves. They shouldn't have to summarize and analyze a complex reading a few minutes. It's just... wrong. Somehow. I told him so and told myself that I had done my duty as a student.

He didn't listen to me and continued with his evil plan (though, in all fairness, not quite as evil as Starbuck and Google's plot to take over the world). And that's alright. I'd washed my hands of it. Except now I'm in Brother McArthur's Cultural Theory class and guess what is a fourth of my grade? Gee, how did you know?

So I find myself trying to summarize Hegel's theories on divine self-alienation, history, thought and reality, and the two parts of his dialect. In two and a half minutes... Head meet desk. I sound like an idiot. And I have to record myself. I stutter and say "um" every few words. I try to stare vaguely over my computer screen so that I don't have to see... um, well, me. I hate pictures of myself. Videos are even more disconcerting. And no matter how many times I do it, they don't come off right.

The Starbucks/Google plot to take over the world is sounding less and less  evil.

Other than that, though, I really love cultural theory. Thinking about thinking is mind-warping, but in a good way. Mostly.

Over.