The thing is, I have had discussions with friends about this...

Here is a listing for a class offered at the U next spring:

3900 Star Trek, the Quest to be Human (3) Cross listed as CLCS 3810. Prerequisite: 2000 level requirements. Fulfills Humanities Exploration.
This course will give students the intellectual experience of grappling with the complex question of what it means to be human in the context of pop culture phenomenon that is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The course will be highly interdisciplinary and involve study of wide range of subjects-including child development and attachment theory, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, creativity and the fine arts, disability studies and prosthetics, and cyborg theory-in order to explore the nature of love and loss, empathy and anxiety, and whether one is born human or becomes human.


I'll bet they'll talk quite a bit about Data in that class. Is he considered human? He seems to have the natural curiosity of a human, always wondering what it would be like to be human...

By the way...

I forgot to mention one thing in my last entry: We swimmers go through a training phase here at the U, fondly called "Peak Week." We subject ourselves to be on call 24/7 for eight days. We have to be within a 15 minute radius of the pool. Not only do we have to workout, but we also have to do additional activities, such as making a skit-on video, and it has to have a lamp in all the scenes, and you must represent every team in the conference. Or you have to make a calendar featuring members from your team. Or you have to play "night games" for three hours, roaming all over campus at midnight. Or you have to do a picture scavenger hunt. Or you have to do an amazing race. Or you have to to "the gauntlet." Or watch Back to the Future 1, 2, and 3, and know it by heart. Not only know the movie and the storylines, but know the background signs, like "Western Auto Stores," or how much the gas cost in 1955. The list goes on and on. But guess what? We, the Junior Class, known as "The Juniors 9," or "JRS9," won the entire competition overall. Yes, us. Our reward? Oversized wide t-shirts that aren't long enough. But that doesn't matter. We got a prize, and it is awesome. Not only does it say "U swim & dive," but on the back of the shirt it has some Michael Jackson lyrics (We did the "Thriller" dance for our skit, and the Juniors 9 sounds an awful lot like "the Jackson 5.") that we used throughout the week for our cheers and whatnot. We just got the shirts this week. Peak week was almost a month ago. Awesome, awesome.

November already?

The "Juniors 9" (Trying to be like the "Jackson 5"). This was our team for "Peak Week," which takes place during fall break. We're on call 24/7 for swim practice, since NCAA rules don't apply. A very hard week.

Dancing "Thriller" during movie trivia practice. (We got the question correct, and had to do a "dance party" while those teams who got the answer wrong had to do a hard set.)

It's November already?! Where did the time go? Wow.

Dad just got his knee surgery yesterday, talked to him on the phone, and it sounded like it went well. I hope to find some time to visit him tonight. He said they took pictures of it on mom's camera. Perhaps I'll take my computer tonight and see if I can upload a couple for the world to see.

Life is going well, and is flying by fast. I've had a couple of good first meets, I'm swimming better than I thought I would.

Nothing new is going on, just being the same old me. Swimming. Schooling. Sleeping. Slurping. Snaffling. Oh, and I learnt the Thriller dance with some of my teammates.

I'm really enjoying my math classes, and a couple of my education classes. The only one I really enjoy out of the three education classes is ELP: education law policy. It's really fascinating to understand just what rights students and teachers give up when they are in the school setting.

It's amazing how out of hand some zero-tolerance policies can get: We talked about a case where a 12-year old girl brought a store-bought cake to class for her birthday. Inside the box was a plastic knife to cut the cake, put there by her mother. The teacher cuts up the cake with the knife, then sends the girl to the principal's office where she was suspended.
Or the time three kindergarteners were playing cops and robbers at recess. They were suspended for three days for pretending to shoot each other.

And I come from a high school where I took a pocket knife on A days for my woods class. (Very handy for getting the slivers out). Sometimes without thinking, I pulled it out during other classes to get one of those stupid slivers out. I was never even warned. I think no one cared. And yet, at a high school close to mine, a student was suspended for having a pocket knife in the glovebox in his car. Very interesting.