On Not Being Right

I ate lunch on campus today with a couple of students who had just come from a constitutional law class--both being political science majors. In conversing over eating we got onto the topic of public education in America. As they were talking about various views on the matter I realized how different our viewpoints were because of our experiences. In some respects I felt at times that we were in worlds that almost didn't even overlap. I suspect that is the result of all of us needing to learn or experience a lot more of our fields in order to connect that kind of understanding. In any respect, I realized then that the concerns of someone looking at education through the lens of law and government are completely different than those of someone looking at it through the lens of classroom management and lesson plans. Of course I think my view as a teacher is more accurate, but most big ideas are probably multifaceted enough to be seen from different points of view. That could be considered as an attack on ultimate truth, but I think its more of an attack on any one persons perspective being the whole of ultimate truth. The consequence of that being that we, as humans, need each other to see true things that we wouldn't on our own. I find a very similar experience to all of this in my art theory class, where I find myself as a very small minority of non-artists. At this point I will digress quickly, as the time I've spent studying the philosophy that has probably already charted this idea is small and I won't venture further in the sort of non-adaptive, one-sided communication a post provides. To make an effort at conciseness, I'm beginning to understand more of what it means to not be right about everything, and as that offers a possible gain of communication it might not be as bad as it's made out to be. As this is my first attempt to verbally construct most of these thoughts, I'm not sure how that went, but I hope to mature them over the course of experience.

A question of community

The other night I had a dream that one of my friends at Belhaven turned a paper in for a class a week early. The rest of the class was banking on the prof forgetting that it was due, and there went all our hopes. I don't have vivid dreams very frequently, mostly I don't remember anything I dreamt. This one stuck around long enough that I began to wonder if it might have actually happened. I've now confirmed that it didn't. I feel like that's probably best.

I like living in a neighborhood. I don't interact much with my neighbors for the most part--which is fine--but there're still traces of an element of something we have in common for living on the same block. In a dorm everyone was basically the same age and we were all at the same place in life (by this I mean we were all college students at Belhaven). A neighborhood has a different sort of community because neither of these things are likely to be the same, which makes our common location seem more significant in some ways. In a parish church system, the kind that I don't think exists anymore, we would mostly all go to the same church if we went to church. We'd have the opportunity to be either gratingly annoying or immediately loving to each other, and chances are we would manage to pull of both almost concurrently. We would see both the more human side of each other in passing during day to day life, and we would need to be reminded often that these very ordinary people--ourself included--are just the kind of people that Jesus came to die for, and for some reason I think it would almost be strange, in a real context, to realize that. I'm sure I would like that model. I wonder how the good elements of something like that could be incorporated into the way things actually are more. For now I leave all my thoughts on the matter there, however, at the occasional relapse into wondering.