Breaking the Trend

During last week’s class presentations, there were a couple of moments that really broke the norm for classroom interactions; this blog post will talk about them a bit. The first was when Andrew was discussing the correlations between Pythagoreans and music. He sought to find that music had impacted the Pythagoreans; however, after thorough research he came up empty. I think that it takes some guts to admit that you failed to confirm your original hypothesis. These types of presentations happen all to infrequently. In fact, I think that one can learn so much about the process of intellectual inquiry from hearing the stories of others’ failed research. Another interesting moment in class is when Tessa was recounting one of the quotes from the Kitty Genovese case. Knowing a quote from memory is nothing unordinary, but this quote happened to include the f-word within the quote. When Tessa said the word without censoring it, I could see the class collectively squirm. It was actually quite funny. From a moral perspective, including the f-word within a quote in an intellectual setting is not a problem at all (in my opinion). From a realistic perspective, all college students have heard the word before (likely with great frequency) and wouldn’t be surprised to hear that word in almost any other context. However, in the classroom it still caught almost everyone off guard. I am kind of happy that Tessa dropped the bomb; it made class a lot more interesting and did actually supplement her presentation.