Lunch with Big K

I’m just going to start skipping any mention of my mornings, unless something extraordinary happens. But today nothing happened so I’m moving on to the lecture. First of all, I’m glad that Prof. K split up Plato into two days. Today he gave us important background information on Greek politics and city-states, such as Athens (where Plato lived). Even though I already understood Plato pretty well, this helped me put his views into perspective. He hated the idea of a democracy, which is what Athens used, and that is one opinion that helped him conjure an image of his ideal community. We also got to hear about the relationship of Plato and Socrates and the dialogue of The Dialogue. This lecture was the best yet. Ms. Kaplan even came to watch.

Our TA session was great. Today we debated Plato’s policies! I was finally on my home turf… and I had to share it with ten other people. In addition to that, the other team was very well spoken. And to top it all off, I was neg. (opposition). The debate was exciting though. I think both teams had strong points, but Simon ultimately sided with our enemies. He was supporting the other team throughout the entire debate. He never once commented on any of our points, nor did he give us constructive criticism. We weren’t able to finish the debate today, so we are concluding tomorrow.

I left the TA session early to go have lunch with Prof. K. I was curious about what he would want to talk about. It was fine though because he only wanted us to talk about our school lives, our parents and how we discovered the program. By the time we all finished introducing ourselves, we only had a couple of minutes before he had to go have a meeting with the TA’s. We didn’t even get a chance to learn about him. I felt so out of place at lunch. Everyone’s parents were either lawyers or doctors and their graduating classes usually had around 200 people (about half of my graduating class). My school only has one advantage over theirs: we don’t wear uniforms. Lunch was interesting.

Since our guest speaker could not make it to class today, Prof. K discussed everything about St. Thomas Aquinas we didn’t get to yesterday. Afterwards, I stayed behind with about ten other classmates and listened to Prof. K discuss a lawsuit concerning students at a local high school and their principal infringing on Constitutional rights. It was interesting to listen to because we began with this topic but once questions and comments were allowed, the conversation went off onto several tangents. I don’t remember how we arrived there, but we eventually wound up talking about religion in the US government and schools. A girl from France commented about Muslims and the regulations placed on them by the French government. This put an interesting spin on the conversation. I wasn’t going to stay at first, but now I’m glad that I did.

We had to meet Ms. Kaplan and the Hotellies at the Statler to discuss our upcoming weekends. We are actually going to be pretty busy. We are going to the Erie Canal on July 4th, Colgate University (I don’t remember the date) and we will be going to several historic landmarks, such as the Harriet Tubman House. After our meeting, Jacky, Chris, Beilul, the Andrews and I walked into Collegetown to have dinner. They have real restaurants! We have been suffering through Appel’s food when there have been restaurants within a close proximity. I thought Collegetown was farther away, but it is only about five minutes from the hotel, so it is fairly close. I know we’ll be making more visits to Collegetown in the weeks to come.

We returned to the dorms after eating. I walked upstairs, called Jordan and the Andrews and Invited them to come to my room so I could have company while I wrote this blog. And now that I’m done, I can focus on revising my freedom essay that is due tomorrow. I bid you all farewell and good evening because I am signing off.