Best of Week: Indirect Reciprocity

My favorite lesson of the week was Mr. Allen's story about the woman that bought his coffee for him at Starbucks. The entire pay it forward idea is not only important to english class, but also important to everyday courtesy. I thought it was really kind that the woman would do something so selfless (Even if it's just coffee).

What really baffled me were the reasons why she decided to pay for some stranger's coffee. She could've been having a bad day and wanted to give someone else some hope for the day because she didn't have a great day. I find that possible but not probable due to human nature. Even though this good deed was great and the world needs more of things like this, I find that people don't usually do this type of thing on a whim, especially when they are angry. When I'm angry, I accidentally take my anger out on people for no reason at all. Maybe it's because I want them to feel my difficulty. Therefore, I don't think her doing it to help someone else on her bad day is probable. My next idea was that the entire thing was an accident. But I don't think that's possible because Mr. Allen said that the cashier told him that the woman paid for his coffee and food. My last theory was that she was having a good day and wanted to share the wealth. This would be the most plausible and probable.

The other thing about indirect reciprocity that makes it difficult to actually reciprocate is the fact that it has to be spontaneous. Mr. Allen said that he didn't buy the next person's drink. He knew that he had to come up with his own good thing to do for a total stranger. I've been searching for the perfect time to help someone as well,but because I've been trying so hard, and I don't think the right time will come because it won't be spontaneous. If I let time pass, I hope that I don't forget to use indirect reciprocity, and I hope that my time, to help someone, will come.

Connection: Incerementalism

The idea of slowly undermining someone else’s authority can be found in family and in schools. We learned this concept through Lear, who is growing old, loosing rule over his kingdom, and is being mistreated by his daughters. All of these factors gradually become more effective. He must be taken care of by his servants (Fool) and his greedy daughters who often beguile him.

As people get old, we discussed that their children have to strip away their freedom and power for their safety. I have seen that happening through my family. My great grandmother is still alive. She’s 96 and still vivacious, but she has a horrible memory. So I’ve seen my grandparents as well as great aunts and uncles move her out of her house in Florida. However, now my grandparents and all others listed go to Arizona for half the year so my mom and her brothers are forced to take care of her. I make it sound awful, but grandma-ma is a really funny great person to be with, but she’s a bit of a handful. My family jokes around that once my grandparents get old enough where they need constant looking after, I will have to take care of them instead of my parents. As we learned in class, this sort of incrementalism can affect marriages, but I understand that it can also affect parent child relationships as well, much like Lear and his three daughters.

My other example of incrementalism can be found within our school. Most everyone has had some experiences with student teachers. Some of my peers have even said that they don't learn very much from their student teacher. So, I've known students who try to make class as difficult as possible for the student teacher. They are disruptive and overall, not courteous to the teacher. I think that the reason these kids act up is because they are intimidated and they feel that, because the age difference can be so small, that the student teacher has no right to demand attention or make disciplinary judgments. My cousin is actually a student teacher at an elementary school, and she said that her job is very difficult, but she is making progress with the students. Her hardships helped me understand the pressure being put on student teachers as well as Lear (taking away his authority), and it forced me to rethink my mistreatment of teachers. Age difference doesn't matter, the taking away of someones power can be stressful to the victim and the perpetrator(s).

TED Presentation

Overall, I thought TED project was more successful this year than it was last year. The day of the presentations was more organized, especially because the three groups were in seperate rooms. This helped improve the quality of listening; the audience was more focused on the people presenting than on other things happening around the room.

Another thing that I liked about this year's presentations, was the guidelines. They provided an easy way to divide the work without forcing all the questions to be answered. One issue with this were the questions about how each presenter's idea relates to the Academy and how the Academy prepairs us for the future. Because these topics were listed under guidelines, they are don't necessarily have to be answered. After all, the guidelines were only their to inspire ideas and to get the projects started off. If this topic was in the guidelines, the teachers should've told everyone that it was needed in the presentation. It was unfairly one of the topics on the rubric. I know my group planned to include this, but a few groups failed to address this relationship; therefore, I don't think they should've been docked points. Although unfair, I think that this question was very important to the presentation, so each group should've included it without being told to do so.

One suggestion for next year is that we should be required to give a brief biography of the presenter. This woul heop determine why and how their organizations/causes got started. It's also nice to have the credentials of the presenter to prove that they are reliable people that actually know and have researched what they are talking about.

Throughout this project, I have realized that google sites is a much faster and easier program to use than wikispaces. My group, Open Source Architecture, had a really organized site. We were even able to embed a powerpoint from Google Docs onto our homepage. The only problem we had with our page was lack of visuals. I tried to add some pictures to represent things we talked about, but there was little effort from everyone elso to do the same. I wish we had some more time so that we could use other web 2.0 tools such as graphs on bubbl.us, imeem to add songs, and animoto to make picture slide shows.

Although the google site for my group was really well done, I thought our presentation could've run smoother with the video clips. We were unable to put specific parts of the video onto our powerpoint; so, we waisted time during our presentation trying to find the clips. I wish that our sites would've been due a week before the presentation so that the people that didn't work until the last minute would still have to get their work done, but the entire group wouldn't be pressured to also finish the presentation at the same time. This would give us time to work out some of the technical problems we had.

TED project was much more successful this year than last year, with a few minor technical difficulties.