A Random Walk with Serendip

What? I worked individually with Child F because the teacher said that he did not know how to draw his letters, which is something that the rest of the class was working on at the carpet. It took SO MUCH COAXING on my part until Child F even let go of his white board marker to begin. In the beginning, I drew a letter and then asked him to draw the same one (we were actually only working on the lower case “a”) but he would just start scribbling. Eventually, every time he...

The issue of personality and morals is an interesting one, and one that causes a great deal of confusion. In general, people’s character traits remain fairly consistent. However how are we then to reconcile this with the fact that when in a group or under the orders of an authority figure, people behave very different than they do otherwise? “Group mentality” is an issue that has plagued people for ages, as it questions how much control people really have over their actions. Studies...

Erzsébet Báthory: Change Does Not Mean Improvement

            Our Emily Balch seminar in its discussions on evolution seems to have come to a puzzling conclusion: that change is somehow purposeful. Change moves towards a certain goal, and all change has positive consequences. This is baffling to me. Change is random, with consequences both good and bad. Change does not make perfection...

I definitely prefer posting essays online to handing them in to only the professor for a number of reasons.  For one, in most classes, I've never been able to see what my classmates are writing - unless the purpose was to "peer edit," which, in my opinion, just turns into students trying to find flaws with papers just so they'll look like they did their homework.  There is more room for finding grammatical errors to look like a know-it-all than there is to discuss new ideas....