It's a podcast. It's a long podcast. It was actually fun to put together. If you're really not interested in Somalia - stick around past 2:35. The stuff about Somalia is good information, but sort of tangential.
Listen to Somalia, College and Snobs [m4a format; iTunes recommended].
Depending on what y'all think of this one, I may or may not do podcasts in the future. Leave comments! (And if you're reading this on LJ, as always, I only see comments on the actual site.)
Politics: August 2006 Archives
Summer semester has been interesting. I've had a little time off, which has been helpful, but I haven't been idle; I taught a credit and a half of physics labs (about 50 in-class hours, plus 30 or so for grading, spread over four four-day weeks), did summer camp counseling (90 hours, spread over two weeks), and took two online courses through Metro. That's just the stuff that actually gets assigned hours; I've also started work on a couple of software projects, worked on a variety of graphic design projects (one of which you'll be seeing, shortly), wrote quite a bit, and spent time cultivating my relationships with friends, both meatspace and internet-based.
Nothing I've done this summer has driven me battier than the online courses, though. I wanted to get these two courses - Black History and Human Geography - out of the way as cheaply and quickly as possible (one for lack of interest, and the other by way of protest); summer session online seemed the way to go.
Human Geography has been a lot of inane things I already knew. Where people are, why people migrate, what people grow, geographic factors leading to success or failure, etc. The professor, while I'm sure he's very nice, has asked some of the most terribly slanted questions for homework I've ever seen.
It's not nearly as bad as Black History, though. The questions in there, while nowhere near the repugnance level of some of the material in the Native American Religion class I tried to take to fill the diversity requirement (did you know that white women are perpetuating genocide by taking interest in Native American spirituality?), have frequently been of the "When did you stop beating your wife?" variety. I skipped one week of homework, half because I was ill, and half because I couldn't summon the self-loathing required to write the page-long essay on one of the two topics given. Even when they're not bad enough to skip, they're still awful:
- Analyze Jesse Jackson's presidential qualities. Would he make a good president? Why or why not?
- Do Black entertainers and sports figures have a responsibility to the Black community? If so, what?
- How does the Maya Angelou phrase "on the pulse of morning" describe African Americans in the 1990's?
- Analyze the most critical issues facing African American communities today. Why did you choose those issues? What can be done to address them?
- Write an essay comparing hip-hop music to the beginning days of Rock and Roll. Use plenty of web links to illustrate song comparisons.
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