Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Three Beautiful Things 11/06/12:Happiness Extrapolation, Church Struggles, Electoral Equanimity

1.  I'm trying to help my WR 115 students extrapolate ideas from one source and apply them to the interpretation of another.  It's something none of them has done before.  Yesterday they turned in their happiness papers and it required them interpret the short film "Family Tree", by extrapolating ideas from an article they read on happiness.  At the start of both of my classes, my students were candid, respectfully so, about the difficulties they had writing this assignment.  Their comments helped me a lot.

2.  It had nothing to do with the election.  Nothing to do with Romney.  Coincidentally it happened today.  I had two conversations with two separate people about their struggles as members of the LDS church.  Both were respectful, not bitter.  Both were candid.  These were very good conversations and I had little but my listening ear to contribute to them.

3.  The Deke and I don't have a television, so our election night party consisted of doing stuff online and checking in from time to time with websites that were reporting the progress of the presidential election.  To help relax us for the evening, we each drank a couple of gin and tonics, ate a flat iron steak with broccoli and mushrooms and onions; I drank a 22 oz bottle of Apricot Wheat Ale and the Deke had a Velvet Merlin stout.  I looked at photographs on Tumblr.  The Deke watched CSI Miami on Netflix.  This relaxed us and we were free to take in the election news with quiet and equanimity.  We neither uttered a harsh word nor did we gloat.  I reported results and we both calmly nodded.

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