Monday, June 28, 2010

Camp K Kicks Off

Today I awoke at 6:30 to begin my first day of Political Philosophy in Theory and Practice. It didn’t take too much for me to wake up today. I must have been subconsciously anxious to begin the course because I woke up immediately when my alarm went off. I took a shower and packed my backpack with all of my materials (i.e. books, packet and notebook) and headed down to breakfast with the rest of the ILC.

After breakfast, the Hotellies and the Kramnick Kids went our separate ways. While they went to the Statler, we marched to Malott Hall. When we got to the hall, we filed into a medium-sized lecture hall and we sat in the front. Almost everyone showed up within the next ten minutes…before Kramnick. Finally Prof. K showed up and I set up my camera to record his lecture. This was a really bad idea because it not only drained my battery, I could only record twenty-nine minutes at a time. My camera spent the rest of the day in my backpack and I plugged it in immediately when we got to the dorm. Regardless I didn’t take any pictures today.

Anyway, Prof. K’s lecture was pretty straight forward. He went over the reasons we study certain philosophers and the outline of the class. We practiced taking notes for Prof. K’s class by writing the outline and anything important he said about philosophers. I’m going to have to work on fast and easy note taking because I have never been one for taking good notes. I have confidence though.

After Prof. K’s lecture we met with our TA and the other twenty students in our respective groups. Andrew Gonzales and I got the same TA: Simon C. We have to call him Simon C. because there are two Simons that are TA’s. Andrew and Dyana have the other Simon as their TA. Our TA seems really helpful, insightful and lax. He is British so the accent keeps you interested. He also has an Oxford education! That really impressed me. We started by dividing ourselves and heading to our respective rooms for discussion. We began by doing an ice-breaker and introducing each other (and yes I mean “each other” instead of “ourselves). We had to get to know the two other people in our three person group and tell everyone about them. The next part of our day was lunch at Trillium.

Trillium’s food was delicious. The food in Appels was alright, but this food was food court quality. It was such a nice change from Appels. I enjoyed a sandwich and mac ‘n’ cheese. Even though it was a simple lunch, it was exquisite I would gladly walk down to Trillium over going to Appels. I ate with Dyana, the Andrews and Jordan and we all felt the same way about the food. Thankfully, we have to eat at Trillium on class days. Hooray A+ food!

After lunch we returned to our TA rooms and we began to discuss freedom. Our group discussed the concept of freedom and the different iterations of freedom. Once we completed discussion, we were told to write an essay about what freedom was to us. It was actually much simpler than I thought. Once I decided what my definition was, the rest flowed really easily. I finished my essay two minutes before class ended and had just enough time to review it. Finally, the long day of scholarly work was over.

The Andrews, Dyana, Jordan and I met at the Cornell Store after class adjourned. I bought a Cornell sweatshirt, a binder and a keychain. We headed back to the dorms after this. It finally rained while we were outside! It was so nice! The cool drops of rain covered us from head to toe by the time we returned. After everyone dried off, we gathered in Andrew and Jordan’s room (again). We began blogging once we all got settled in, except Jordan who enjoyed a nice PC game. I’m going to cut off my blog here because we are about to head out for dinner. We plan on studying after dinner, as a group, and practicing our Socratic discussion. I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow because I think we will be studying a lot tonight. We need to come in swinging and make a great first impression.

Until then, I’m signing off.

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