ARW 4/29 Response

ARW 4/29 Response

Today, we covered so many topics related to the second chapter of Lies in ARW class. In the first lecture, we learned how standards or common sense change from time to time. George Washington is known as a first great president of the United States, but when people know the fact he had slaves, most of them may change the impression toward him. In fact, I did, too. However, that is only because we use the standard today to judge this fact. Back in Washington's time, this habit might have been normal for rich whites. This is an interesting point to think about because Loewen is revealing untold truths about Wilson in Chapter 1 and Columbus in Chapter 2 but it doesn't necessarily mean he wants us to change the impression but he wants us to have critical eyes to identify what happened in the past. It links to another point Rab brought up, having bias is not necessarily bad thing. Loewen just keeps showing heroes' negative sides in order to let readers know that there are many historical facts censored by textbook authors.Then the next question is, when should we consider that the author is overly biased and his or her opinion is skewed to the extreme?

We also learned how to sign up for Rab's tutorial session. This will be extremely helpful when the deadline for a writing assignment is approaching. This is done through Google Sites. How useful you are, Google.

Then we divided into groups for discussion. The first topic was how we change our previous views on Columbus after reading Chapter 2.We basically had the same idea; first we thought he was a great explorer who is known for discovering the Americas (although we knew that he found it by mistake and that was why the indigenous were called Indians) and his tale about making an egg stand. We were all surprised with his exploiting of the Americas. The second question, which was unexpected, was why textbooks even bother mentioning that the fact "world is round" was discovered by explorers, no matter who they were. People around this time period already knew this fact as a common knowledge, apparently. I thought this is because authors probably wanted to insert the turning point of knowledge, as people changed their ideas from geocentricism to heliocentricism. It would be their efforts to make textbooks little more appealing.

At last, we watched a video called "How to speal fluent Japanese without saying a word." This is to learn how a culture is viewed from the perspectives of other cultures. The video showed how Japaneses are ambiguous with their answers, and I thought it was fairly accurate. Stream 1 is an interesting group of people because we all have more than one culture. Therefore, how to interpret this video also differs among individuals.