Sydney's Blog: Apathy and Objectivity

In class, I’ve been hearing a lot about apathy: people not caring. Most say apathy exists because our society encourages it. The media discourages inclusion in politics, about half of eligible American citizens don’t vote because they don’t think that their vote matters. Apathy is a result of obstacles put in the way of people caring, such as people being encouraged to do the wrong thing because it is the easier choice. This is seen very often at school: all you have to do is look in one of the recycling bins, and they are filled with trash and different types things that belong in the bins right next to the bin you’re looking into.

In almost all movies and books people are told to be a hero, so they become one, they don’t choose to be a hero they are chosen to be. People see or read this and they believe that they can’t choose to be a hero or a leader; someone has to tell them to. How do we get a bunch of apathetic individuals to become heroes? That's the question.

The main focus of the week had been observing objectively. We are developing this skill in each of our classes in different ways.

In English, we’re working on being able to look at a scene or a place and write down observations that are free of judgments and personal opinions. As writers we must be able to both write our feelings but also what we see without our personal beliefs. We have been reading A River Runs Through It: on the surface it’s just a book about fly-fishing, but as you start to look deeper, there are lots of metaphors for life, such as the river. The author, Norman Maclean, writes the story both with a lot of emotion and no emotion at all (subjectively and objectively).

In Biology, it is a daily requirement to be able to observe and hold back our opinions. Every week we perform a lab, in the lab we record the data that is observed, nothing more nothing less. If we were to add our own personal thoughts to the data collected from a lab, all of the results would be thrown off track, one group’s results would be nothing like their neighboring group’s results.

In Geography, we are beginning to study the different cultures of the world, to do this we must be able to look at the characteristics of each culture objectively to learn about them. If we let our judgments get in the way of what we are seeing and learning, we will never be able to see them and learn about them as they truly are, we will learn only what we see through our judgments.

In Health, we’re learning not to judge people at first sight, but to truly get to know them before we decide who there are to us. To try to stop stereotyping people because it is impossible to tell just how much everyone is affected by individual judgments.

As well as learning, we also have lots of fun goofing off, even though some of things we do are because we are so tired, such as Mael calling Madsen by his first name. Despite how tired we are, we are one of the loudest classes I have ever heard. This results in some interesting quotes form our teachers: as Zargar summed it up, “If I have to tell you to be quiet one more time, I’m shutting this operation down!” Most of the crazy things happen in Zargar’s class… mainly because he’s crazy. Mael, Dylan, and Ethan where losing their minds raising their hands so they could make a comment. It ended in a row-sham-bo match that ended in the two people who didn’t win the match desperately saying “two out of three, it’s always two out of three.” In the end, Ethan was given permission to say that Mountain Dew kills sperm and White Mountain Dew was invented because it didn’t kill sperm. In one of the two classes that we have Zargar, we just do whatever needs to be done and these were a result of that. All in all, we are having a lot of fun and also learning a ton: as Zargar reminds us, “You gotta get data; to get data you gotta count garbage!” and finally, perhaps the most important, “You do what you gotta do so can do what you want to do.”

Ms. L’s note: It sounds, overall, like the connections your are making are powerful and applicable in all walks of life. I am curious how you see our “Trash Talking” Essay (it’s not what it sounds like!) is bringing this all together, and I’d love to hear more about your feelings on creating heroes out of apathetic individuals. For readers who are interested as well as honors strand MSELers, please read the NY Times article link on our site. I look forward to next week's blog from Sami McLoughlin--stay tuned for her picture and more links to great articles and videos.