week 4 dq post Nancy Lyle 

Metaphorically speaking of the Titanic, e.g. iceberg and socially hiding information, in school I wrote a couple essays on the sinking of the Titanic.

The thing which annoyed me the absolute most was as a grown adult, thanks to James Cameron and a 1/1 scale very, very. very small section of the hull, I took one look at it and knew that almost everything we know about the physics of the sinking has no basis in reality. The “gash” might have been a gush, but in all hard-physical reality. by the time the lifeboats were being lowered 90plus percent of the damage was underwater. A bit more research and I found out the entire hull from bottom to top consisted of riveted plates of steel. Glacier ice is much, much denser than steel, as the hull at speed and with all those tons and tons(x) of weight behind the velocity. I will lay money odds that 2 hours sailing time behind where the Titanic currently sits you will find 1000s of rivets and hundreds of sheets of steel as the rivets were simply popped off as the ship slammed into the much more dense and profoundly larger glacier. From the point of impact back for about 200 feet if not back to mid bow, from where the glacier stuck to the keel all of those sheets are gone. The rivets were popped off, leaving the steel with absolutely nothing to hold it in place on the hull. Almost a century of wonder was entirely ignored by the facts that anyone looking at the actual hull would see how the ship sank, but no one in authority paid even the smallest amount of attention to the scientifically obvious. Those rivets popped off like a teenager’s skin issues leaving the ships interior entirely open to water flooding in. The point of impact the water would have flooded close to instantly, that whole section of ship instantly.

How to engage a student body, well first for most cultures they cannot function outside of “established norms”. To live in a culture requires some level of “group think” concepts. For the group to agree to think in ways which at times are real and sometimes have no basis in reality. For 1500 years the Roman Empire and then the Papacy convinced their citizens to “group think” the earth was flat. Which has absolutely no basis in reality. The curvature is about 7’.

To have a group participate it first requires engagement, then requires entertainment, but as you pointed out that entertainment has to be something each person in the group is comfortable with. That comfort level is where things become difficult because every person in a group has different measuring sticks regarding their individual needs inside of the group think model for what makes them comfortable. For me I enjoy exploring ideas, but I do not suffer fools well. So, I react very badly when the scientific facts I point out become challenged by people who simply want to either argue or bully the conversation to be a jerk.

Right now, I am working on this week’s homework, because of the way I think and process information I am building an entire class of information in order to isolate the individual lesson I need to present. I have an 11-week class outlined and for the most part minus a couple of the rather on the extreme side of obvious like CRs and OCs detailed explanations as to what each week is about. My class is about the foundation/history of psychology. Which I guarantee to most people, my class has information almost no one knows about. But is entirely fact and evidence based. Up and including where Wilhelm Wundt was when he was writing his notes, which became the first modern textbook on psychology, which after publishing was purchased by William James/Mary Calkins, Lightener, etc. who turned and created the psychology dept at Harvard, the APA, and the psychology dept at Penn State respectively. My interests are not entirely focused on Wundt, he does take up a week and a half of the 11 weeks. My focus is where does the information he translated for the Prussians at Fort Ball come from. From his translations he made notes. He made notes as an older adolescent up to his late 20’s sitting alongside 20 other linguistics and two very, in some circles, extremely famous men. One of which was living as a slave under false papers provided by his slave masters, the Prussian Empire.

How to engage with students, but balance between the group think concepts, and what each person needs to feel comfortable is and can be difficult.