Week 9 : This week focus on how the implementation of your project is proceeding.
I know that it has been a while since I have been able to get it together and get online to blog, but it gets harder and harder to make time. This blog stuff is very time consuming, and as you can see from the date that I am posting some of these blogs, I am crunching as many in as I can. If I can finish these things, I should come out with a good grade in the class. From the topic of the blog, this week is supposed to be about implementig our project to address our problem. I don’t know if I have ever mentioned it before, but I thought it would be a very good idea to meet with other students from other classes who may share similarities within their individual problems. There may even be a way to combine everyone’s individual project into one big project. Thus far, I’ve been able to talk with one other person from another class, and her project is on materialism. If you think about it, materialism is very close to world commercialism. Both involves the edificaiton of some material good in order to achieve maximum profit. In the long run, someone has to spend money for someone else (who could probably care less) to make money. The plan that we devised, is to come up with a survey in which we would circulate around campus. The survey would consist of question involving: the student bodies concern with international issues; financial questions addressing college spending habits; the amount of time students spend watching television, and other concerns somewhere along those lines. My partner suggested that we host forums and other informationals that could benefit our project. Considering that the young lady from the other section is a member of my sister sorority, It would be nice to design a project that could be carried over from the classroom to the community. While I am on the topic, New Orleans is a very materialistic city. Every time I turn on the station, I hear music artist rhyming about how much cheese they got, and how many cars they drive. As a matter of fact, there is even the old song, “Number One Stunta”. For all of you who don’t know ebonic, let me break it down for you. “Stunt”- to present oneself in a flashy, gaudy manner; to boast upon materialistic aspects of life; to ball out of control for no reason; to purposely shine or standout. The materialism that is present within New Orleans also affects more than the individual, but also the education system, along with other aspects of local life. When children see individuals on television with these nice cars, houses, women, and other worldly temptations, and they notice that the guys who possess all these goods are young and barely with a high school education, why would they want to spend the next half of their life in school. I am a firm believer in, everything has an action and reaction, and I believe that is true in any facet of life. These artist do not realize the full capacity in which they are affecting people’s lives; and it’s not always for the betterment of that person. To insure that we have a good turnout, the young lady suggested that we pass out flyers and hang posters to ensure that we reach the maximum amount of people. When we get this feedback, we can use the data to get a general overview about the concerns and mindsets of Xavier students. We need to come up with a catchy slogan for the posters in order to draw a crowd. One step that we plan to take, is to get University 1010/20 classes involved. We can try to have forums in which we can offer credit for the new freshman. Even if we did not do an outside form for the freshmen, we could probably get reservation to talk to them a few minutes before class began. I do not know; but it is an idea none-the-less. We can even turn it into a play type thing. It is Things like this that get peoples attention by making fun of the things they spend their money on, while also attempting to show them that certain materialistic things are not needed. I think that people tend to ignore any sort of problem they may have if it is not directly presented to them; but once the problem has been recognized and accepted as being a problem, then we have to deal with that problem, and the time is now. I have already begun to put my plan into action, and will be looking at the data that I have collected thus far doing within the next week, because I feel as though in order to fix problems that are affecting the community, the problem must first be addressed by the community. If for some reason I do not get enough students with the response that they too think that materialism is a problem then I will have to think of another way to address the problem. This next idea for change might not be that popular to those in the Intro to Biblical Studies course for it would take some sort of participation for them, but you never now. I think that all of the students enrolled in Introduction to Biblical Studies should come together and analyze their individual projects, but then collaborate with each other to come up with some big plan. The reason that I said some students probably would not like the idea is because of the outside of class meeting times. I know meeting up after class does nothing but add more load and stress on top of the other pile of stuff that must be done. That is why if the second part is nowhere near being addressed, it fine. As long as the first part is taken care of. I am just now really realizing how intense this course is, and I think that anyone who takes the time out to write at least half of these blogs, do Theology coursework, and a service project should receive an “A” for the blogs criteria of the grade. I spent a fair amount of tiem working with my service project, but you reall could not tell from my lack of blogging. But it got to the point to where I could only say, “Damn, can we slow down, I am only human”. Sometimes, I think that this course is graduate school level, considering the amount of work that is required of us. Even though I read his argument and reasoning behind blogging, but to me, it just looked like a fancy way of saying, do it, or fail. Which in essence is what the message translates to. I know that this topic is exrememly off topic, but it just popped in my mind. I will not sit up here and blame my rushing to finish typing about five papers, completely upon Dr. Homan. My procrastination was extremely high when it came to blogs along with my initial low interest in the class. But for some reason, anytime I boosted myself up to type a blog, I start thinking, “2000 words is a lot of damn words to be typing about a problem”. I think because I could not get past the blogs, my interest in the class died along with my interest to even try and finish the blogs. On a personal note, I think that I could still get an A in the class if it were not for the sorry grade that I have from my lack of blogging. It feels as though it has taken me at least one and a half hours to complete a paper less than 1000 words, and now I am supposed to pull 2000 out of nowhere each week. Dr. Homan has made it clear that we can stop trying to reach 2000 words, but it was so late in the semester that people had already lost their motivation. If I would have been told to write about 1000 words per week, it would have been done with no problem, but 2000 words to me, on top of other school work, is just not feasible. I would have half a paper that has sensible comments, but the other with nothing but fillers. Anyway, enough bitching and more thinking. I have presented my initial plan to you, so please take heed and be ready to fill in some bubbles. Toine; peace!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 12th, 2004 at 11:28 am and is filed under Project Progress, Week 09: Implementation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.