In-class

If there was only one common language for all, what would be:

The advantages?

• Makes things easier to understand
• People can feel more confident
• Equal opportunities are given to all
• Literature is understood by everyone - what the author meant.
• Could resolve conflicts easier.

The disadvantages and implications?

• One language may not have a word that is part of another language.
• We lose culture that ties in to where we are originated.
• Boring (no diversity, nothing to explore)
• We lose our identity.
• With diverse language, comes enrichment of identity.

Linking Questions / Theory of Reality

October 18, 2017

Linking Questions

Ethics
Do good people see the world differently from bad people?
What does it mean to be a good or bad person? A person cannot be fully bad all the time and a person cannot be purely good all the time. It depends on the circumstances they are going through which affects their perspective of the world. For example, having a bad day at school can give me a negative outlook on the things around me.

Religion
What role does interpretation play in religious experience?
Interpretation plays the role of filling in the blanks. Interpretation is quite broad in a sense. Some people would read a verse from the Bible and understand it in a literal sense or some would read the verse as a metaphor and interpret that to apply it to themselves/others. Interpretation opens up a world of confusion, conflict/debate on who’s right and who’s wrong.

Language
How does the way we describe something affect the way we see it?
We describe things in our own perspective with our own prejudices/biases. Furthermore, when we describe things to a person, it can affect the person’s outlook - due to the connotations behind certain words. There is the describer and the receiver. If the describer is attracted to curvier women, rather than describing them as ‘fat/big’ they would describe them as ‘voluptuous/curvaceous’.

Emotion
How does your mood affect your perception of things?
If you feel exhausted/demotivated, everything seems like a lot of hard work and nothing is easy consequently, you tend to have a negative perspective on things - you can easily look at a difficult task and say it’s impossible. On the other hand, if you feel empowered and motivated, you can look at a difficult task as a challenge and work towards achieving your goal.

Theory of Reality

Scientific Realism
‘Atoms in the void’
What appears in our sights are atoms combined to form objects, people, images to fill in a void. ‘The familiar, comfortable, sensuous world of our everyday experience vanishes and is replaced by a colorless, soundless, odorless realm of atoms whizzing around in empty space.


Common-sense 
‘What you see is what is there’
What we see in front of us is how it actually is in reality. Our sight shows the truth as our sight mirrors the way the world is. 


Phenomenalism 
‘All knowledge must ultimately be based on experience.’
George Berkeley (1685-1753) “To be is to be perceived”
What we know comes from our experience of reality, but beyond that, there’s nothing. Phenomenalism insists that we can only judge and speak of things that we have experienced in our own perspective - furthermore, we have no right to speak of things beyond what we know - ultimately about reality.

Boston Public Schools Map

Article

1. Identify three of the main article's claim

Claim | Implication of Claim

Example

Boston schools introduced the Galls-Peter projection map.

- The Mercator map, commonly used, distorted the reality and did not offer accurate representation of the continents.

Gerardus Mercator devised his map in 1569 to aid navigation along colonial trade routes by drawing straight lines across the oceans.
- The Mercator map shaped and distorted the nations to fit within the lines of the oceans where Gerardus Mercator drew to make sailing the oceans easier. Although the scale and position of the terrain on Earth is accurate, due to the inaccuracy of country proportions, Boston Schools introduction of the Galls-Peter map offers something closer to the geographical truth.
- It's a map drawn in 1569 making it an outdated map. Surely, there must have been some change from then to now of 2017. Unification/separation of countries, or even the terrain shift and change of the world due to environmental effects.

The district has 125 schools and 57,000 students, 86% of whom are non-white, with the largest groups being Latino and Black.
- The Mercator map is drawn based on the historical and sociopolitical time of the European imperialist powers. Meaning that there is bias as to how big the size of a country is and their placement. With the Galls-Peter projection map, it will hopefully shift students' perspective of the world away from presenting white history as the dominant position seeing as there is a majority of non-white students within the district. This will change an outlook for these kids, hopefully for the better as it gets rid of the 'fostered European imperialist attitudes'.

What the Boston public schools are doing is extremely important and should be adopted across the whole of the US and beyond.
- Having the Galls-Peter projection map, which is a more accurate map than the Mercator map, could change students' perspective on the world for the better - it presents the countries as it is - being geographically accurate and there is no sign of imperialistic biases. It presents an equal world by displaying their accurate proportions.   

Definitions:

- Paradigm shift

'A fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.' -New Oxford American Dictionary

- Ethical bias

Ethical bias is similar to conformity bias as conformity bias is basing your decisions to what society thinks is right or wrong.

- European Imperialism
Expanding an empire onto foreign lands and implementing their own rules/authority. Being under the rule of an emperor/empress.