Goody Proctor is a Witch!

Tuesday, 08 March 2011

Today marked my first exam in college in quite a while. The last class I took (right before Isla was born) had absolutely no exams of any kind.

I was not as nervous for this exam as I was for previous exams I have taken at Hamline. I think the main difference is that this exam was short – other exams have consisted of writing non-stop for nearly an hour. This exam lasted ‘only’ 50 minutes, and the first ten minutes were taken up with simply identifying who authored which passages.

I gotta hand it to the professor, he knew how to be tricky. For example, he included a passage from an account by Thomas Morton. In that passage, Morton explains what the Puritans thought of the maypole he erected and danced around with the natives (of course they were offended). But here’s the tricky part: we also read a narrative from Puritan William Bradford, who wrote about how offended he was about that maypole. So, see the tricky part? Was the passage from Morton or Bradford? It was tough to figure out at first, but then, near the end of the passage, Morton uses the self-identifying pronoun “mine-host.” That’s at once a unique and silly phrase. I mean, how many people refer to themselves as “mine-host”?

I should start doing that.

The bulk of the test consisted of selecting four of the ten passages, and then writing about them. The problem, as with other exams, is to succinctly and intelligently make my point. I could have easily written a paper on any of the passages regardless of the number or words or pages the professor specified. But it is a bit difficult to plan out and execute a written argument while the clock is ticking.

Regardless, I’m sure I got an A. Or, should I say: Mine-host is sure mine-host got an A.

Wednesday, 09 March 2011

I attended a Toastmasters meeting this afternoon. I had no speeches to deliver, and no speeches to evaluate. I was not the grammarian or the timer or the toastmaster. This then could mean only one thing: I would be called upon to give a table topics speech.

Table topics (not sure why it’s called that) is a part of the meeting where an assigned person gets up and announced the topic and then calls on people to come up and give a speech with (almost) no preparation time. Today, the table topics master had decided on the topic “Tough Questions From Kids.” He called on me first and, as I was walking up to the front, he said, “Okay, James, your question is this: ‘Dad, is God real?'”

Ha!

I began by saying this: “Well, since simply saying ‘no’ won’t fill my two minutes, I’ll try to elaborate here.” That got me some stares. Indeed, I should remember that for future speeches: if no one seems to be paying attention, just announce that God is fake. Then they’ll look up and pay attention.

Anyway, I quasi-coherently explained that people try to explain the meaning of their lives and the possibility of afterlife and this usually requires the need for a deity. Technically, no one knows if these deities exist, but we can look at the evidence (i.e., The Bible) and see if it is compelling. “Extraordinary claims,” I said, paraphrasing Sagan, “require extraordinary evidence, so before you go jumping to any conclusions about gods, make absolutely sure that the god someone is selling is a reality, especially because of the life-consuming religion that is bound to go with it.”

Also, did you know the rapture is coming on May 21st? Yeah, there is a billboard advertising this in St. Paul (which I would take a picture of if I still had use of my trusty Verizon instead of my shitty AT&T). When will these silly Christians learn? If you want to talk about the end of the world, you don’t speak in specifics – you speak in vague generalities that place the end of the world tantalizingly close yet ambiguously distant so as to allow for reinterpretation. Like the Watchtower does.

Thursday, 10 March 2011

Well, I didn’t find out how I did on my exam yet…so stay tuned.

But on the topic of college: today in class we looked deeper into a text we read about the Salem Witch Trials. Here are a few things I want to mention about it:

1) Did you know Benjamin Franklin wrote a parody of the trials? Yeah, he did. Here it is, and it’s a fun (and short!) read. He basically lampoons the community’s crazy idea that you can test if someone is a witch by if they float or sink: Sink=witch / Float=not a witch. The funny part is that two women keep floating, even though the community insists they are witches. Certain people suggest they are floating because of the clothes they are wearing and, well, I don’t want to wreck it for you.

2) The professor divulged that he likes to visit Wikipedia as a springboard for obtaining information on a subject. A few of my classmates laughed, assuming the professor was joking, but then the professor said he was serious. And I agree…it’s a great place to start.

3) The professor, in an attempt to argue the continuing popularity of the incident at Salem, noted how many hits a Google search reveals. I am unmoved by this, as many of the hits are repeat pages, and (I am guessing) a similar argument could be made for thousands of such historical events.

Also, the results widely differ depending upon the given word choice; my use of “Salem Witch Trials” (above) yielded approximately 50,000 more hits than the professor obtained in class (sorry, can’t recall exactly what he typed in).

4) In a more compelling argument, the professor noted that we had read texts regarding the slaughter of 400 Native Americans at the hands of Europeans, of a European woman’s three month captivity amongst the natives, and of a crew’s nine year odyssey lost in Florida/Texas/Mexico until they finally met up with their Spanish brothers. Why aren’t those stories anywhere near as popular as the Salem Witch Trials? Indeed, I was unaware of those other three events until I began this class, yet I have known about the Salem saga since I was in elementary school. Why the difference? Good question.

The professor added that the trials have so seeped into our cultural consciousness (I thought of the word “meme,” though he never used it) that we can scarcely go a day without observing it being referenced somewhere. I was skeptical about this, but after class, I left to go to work. Just as I was parking at my job, an MPR correspondent reported that Representative Keith Ellison has termed fellow Representative Peter King’s investigation into Muslim extremism a witch hunt.

Well play professor, well played.

5) Visit this site (we did in class)…if you dare.