Day 1 of Classes - Toilet Paper Experiment!

8-31-08
Today was my first day of classes! I have all four on one day which will be nice to have every other day free to relax and do homework. My global studies teacher is fabulous! He has a dry sense of humor but that’s what keeps me entertained. He is the head of the religion department at University of Virginia so he knows his stuff. We’ll be learning about the religions of all the places we’re going to and we’ll even have guest speakers (other faculty or people they bring on when we get into ports).

My oceanography class will also be interesting since we can see firsthand what we study! The teacher was the first one to record whale sounds in Alaska and also the first one to create a brochure on how to clean up oil spills. He has done a lot of diving and work in the Antarctica and showed us some pictures of the ice and the water and animals he was researching and studying. His goal is to get us wet...we’ll either be on the water in kayaks, in the water or when we’re on the ship we’ll be watching the water! Every day we go over the longitude and latitude we’re at and what we’ve observed on or in the ocean in the past few days.

My International Management teacher has lived in 89 countries and has been to 123. So amazing and so much experience! We will be talking about current events every day that we need to research before we come to class. Today he asked who was from a different country. We had four different people including one from the U.S. stand up. He had them show how they would count on their fingers if they were counting to five. It was really interesting to see how they each did it differently, some started with their pinky, some with their index or thumb, some faced their hands down, others up. This was a simple example of how people do things differently in different areas of the world. He also had us get into groups and gave us ten minutes to draw a map of the world.

After the exercise he told us he didn’t care what our maps looked like but rather we should notice who took out the paper and pen, who did the drawing, who talked or directed? It was interesting to see that in almost every group it was the male who took charge of drawing, or who was hovering over the person drawing and telling them how to do it.

Finally my sociology class is about Global Social Movements. The teacher wrote a book and talked about it on the Oprah show! We had some really interesting discussions about how movements can be done through cultural or social change. We discussed how people can organize to create change, but also to resist change...I had never put much thought into the latter part of that. Our homework was to walk around the ship with toilet paper hanging out of our pants and see what happened. I did it through hallways, study areas, outside where people were lounging or eating. These were clearly public and people filled areas and no one said anything, yet I did get a few stares.

We also have to cut people in line tonight at dinner...its so uncomfortable but that’s the whole point is to look at our norms, what our society tells us and how people respond when someone acts out of the norm. I’m so excited for all of my classes!!