Feeling Legit.

So this afternoon I found myself standing with slightly trembling knees in a conference room on the third floor of the administration building in front of BYU's Academic Innovation Task Force, all eyes turned expectantly toward me.

So how exactly did I get into this particular situation, you may ask?

Well, I was talking to Dr. Burton after the Digital Civilization class that I'm T.A. for, and he told me that he had been asked to give a presentation on his ideas for innovative education at the meeting of this task force in a few hours. They had said he could bring a student with him to give the student perspective, and would I like to be that student? 

Why yes. Yes I would. 

So Dr. Burton gave me the place and time, and that's how I wound up with shaky knees standing in front of this group of people dedicated to promoting and implementing innovation in BYU courses. Gulp.

The Scope of A Mormon Woman

Some quick thoughts from my conversation yesterday afternoon with my Women's Literature professor, Dr. Suzanne Lundquist:

We've been talking about the book My Antonia, by Willa Cather, in class the last few sessions. It's brilliantly written, and I highly recommend it. Told from a male narrator point of view, it looks at the immigrant/frontier experience living on the Nebraska prairie and in small rural towns. In it there are young immigrant women who have a vitality about them that the town girls, bound by social constraints, are lacking in, and we discussed what it means to be an acceptable female human being.

I was talking with my professor afterward about how I have been interested in this question lately--what it means to be a woman in our society, and particularly a Mormon woman. I think we have certain ideals we grow up believing--a certain story we expect our lives to follow. The idea is that if we remain true to our standards and live virtuous lives, when we reach a certain age we will meet a virtuous young man, marry in the temple, and live happily ever after. While this is an admirable goal (I'm not knocking eternal marriage--my testimony of eternal marriage is a firm one) I believe that that storyline does not cover the full scope of a Mormon woman's experience.

I've been doing quite a bit of reading lately in the Church's new book, Daughters in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society, and I have been astounded at how much sisters have been involved in the world around them since the society's beginning. Many women were called to go and get an education in medicine or other things and then use those skills to help and teach others. The Women's Exponent, a Relief Society magazine, was published for years running until the Church made it into the Ensign. I read an article in an 1888 issue encouraging the sisters not to throw their copies of the Exponent away, but to read them and learn from them and share them--to send them off to sisters in other parts of the world. The Exponent included poetry, Relief Society lessons, things that were happening in the world and in the Church, studies of literature and art, and so on.

I think sometimes we as women in the Church feel bound by that traditional storyline--grow up, get married, live happily ever after--and we fail to broaden our view of the world. It's true that family should be our first priority. But I think that Mormon women are capable of making their influence felt outside the home as well.  I would even venture so far as to say that they should make it felt, as they have throughout Church history. And what happens if life doesn't go according to plan?  What if Mr. Right doesn't show up right on schedule? Some women feel cheated if they are single past the age where they think they should get married. Well, an increasing number of women in the Church are single, and there is a place for everyone in the Lord's kingdom, single and married alike. The single woman is just as valuable and just as loved in the Lord's kingdom as the married woman is.

So, what does it really mean to be a Mormon woman in the 21st century? This question has been a deep one for me, and I admit that I don't entirely know the answer. My studies this semester have been focused on embracing truth wherever it is found, but I have been staying grounded in the gospel of Jesus Christ through scripture study and prayer. I want to know what my role is in the Lord's kingdom, and sometimes I wonder if there will be more for me to do in addition to being a wife and a mother--more that is outside the home. I don't know.

What do you think?

Philosophy of Conversation: A Call for Change

I just heard a conversation on the way home that perturbed me a little bit.

Girl: I have some homework to do. I have to read Plato's Republic before five.
Guy: Why five?
Girl: I want to finish before my ballet class.

Now, this is a pretty harmless conversation, right? But it made me think. You know, the guy probably didn't know much about Plato's Republic. (I'm making an assumption here, but by the sound of it, he didn't.) Heck, I don't even know much about Plato's Republic. But did the guy want to find out? Did the girl think about the reading as more than just a box to check off her to-do list? Though I could be wrong, the answer to both questions, judging by their attitudes, seemed to be no. That's all well and good, of course. This was just small talk between a boy and a girl as they walked home from school. So why did it bother me? Well, I'll tell you.

The reason it bothered me is that I can't help thinking that we students have somewhat lost our sense of intellectual curiosity and ability to generate deep, meaningful conversations about the ideas that make up our identity as individuals, a civilization, and the human race. 

Announcement!

I just received word that my abstract for a research paper I wrote last semester was accepted for presentation at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) that will take place at Weber State University on March 29-31. It was one selected out of 3,500 other submissions. Pretty cool, right??

My paper is called "Blogging in Undergraduate Courses: A Potentially Powerful Tool for Self-Directed Learning." I posted a proposal a couple months ago on my other blog here.

This, of course, means that I'll have to go back and work on this paper quite a bit more. I think blogging can be used for multiple purposes in academic courses, but I think its most powerful form is an interactive learning log, one that can help students trace their learning process and give them a venue for interacting with their peers and the online community at large. I have come to the conclusion, however, that in many respects blogging cannot stand alone; it must be accompanied by an enlightened instructor with an evolving pedagogy, a technophilic classroom environment, and committed students.

Hmmm. Hmmmmm.... It appears I have much thinking and writing and revising to do. Updates to come!

P.S. If this conference is anything like the National Collegiate Honors Council Conference I went to back in October, then this paper is going to ROCK THEIR WORLD. Just sayin'.

Official

I just posted my first post as a T.A. on the Digital Civilization blog! Up until now, only the professors, Dr. Burton and Dr. Zappala, have posted on it. My post is an introduction to the class and a little bit about future shock. And I rather like it.

I feel quite official now. :)

Learning Plan 1.0

I was reading the Digital Civilization class blog (which I now get to contribute to--watch for links to my posts!) and Dr. Burton, my professor, was talking about reinventing the syllabus. He mentioned a girl named Janelle who

1. found out what she needed to learn;
2. created a schedule and a plan for learning it; and
3. adapted her plan as she moved forward.

So I decided to make a plan of my own.

Say Whaaat?? First Day of CS 100

So I'm behind a bit. New Year's thoughts to follow. But first...



I took a class Fall 2010 called Digital Civilization--you've probably heard me talk about it before. (And guess who's a TA for the class THIS semester?? That's right--I AM! Woot woot!) From this class I developed an interest in the principled use of media and digital culture and generally becoming more computer-savvy. So I was like, hey, why don't I take Computer Science 100 this semester? It's for non-majors (and I'm about as non-major as you can get), so how hard could it be, right?

Wrong.

I am out of my league, to say the least. Today in class we covered how to convert decimal numbers (numbers like 382 in our regular, base 10 system) to binary (base 2 system--the 1's and 0's we've heard about in computers before) and... I got lost.

I haven't taken math since my senior year of high school (calculus), and we were doing long division in class today--don't they have calculators for that?? Yeah, I was having troubles--kind of pathetic.

But it will be okay. This foray into the field of computer science will be a challenge for me, and I've never taken a class that I haven't been able to conquer. This will be a great learning experience. I'm going to have to adjust to computational thinking and programming languages, but I learned Latin, didn't I? Yes, I did, and I can learn this language too. Per aspera ad astra! (Through adversity to the stars)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go over my notes on binary conversions.


Photo credit: Brenderous on Flickr