Atitlán: Day 2 (Oct 9)

It was cold last night and all seven in the room woke up early. We started taking showers and realized that our shower taking system didn't really work  and then we had a morning meeting. In our meeting we all got a question from Bert, this question had to answered for the handbook. The question I got was (I think) one of the most important ones: “What is the Michael Polanyi College?”. We had breakfast afterwards, which was delicious.

After breakfast we started working on our question. First, we had to brainstorm then we had to make an out line as a guide to start our prose writing. Of course, my first outline was wrong. Apparently we had to do a big list, and I did a big paragraph. I fixed it up in the end, and I think I did a good job. Here is a picture of one of my outlines, since I had to do it a million times.

The day has been beautiful, except for some misunderstandings with the food.

We had a discussion that lasted for about an hour and a half about the food issues. We barely moved passed a point and still repeated some of the ideas more than once. I was really annoyed by this and got into a bad mood. Things could be so simple, so why do they have to complicate things so  much? I guess this is just part of working with a group, things wont always go your way.

Atitlán: Day 1 (oct 8)

After a long ride, we arrived at lake Atitlán. Of course we left late, so we arrived late.

Our trip was fine, but the boat people wanted to charge us more and we actually had to pay them more. We had lunch, then we had one of our meetings. Our first assignment was to start reading Benjamin Franklin´s autobiography. I really enjoyed it. I think his story was very interesting and I love the way he tells it. I enjoyed the anecdotes he used, specially the one when his drink friend wont row the boat so they push him over board. I also like how he made his own way, not depending on anyone else.

Afterwards we had a dialogue about Franklins autobiography in which we discussed the values we thought were important to Franklin. Later we had dinner, the food was quite good. After dinner we played cards, pool and had lots of fun, although they told us we were making too much noise.

The rooms were fine, except for the fact that there was a cockroach in our room and the girls were screaming like crazy.

It was a good day, although it rained all most all of it. 

Dialogue Rubrics

These are our Rubrics until now:

One person speaks at a time.
Active listening.
No Facebook, phones or any other social media allowed.
Make eye contact when someone is speaking.
Call for a stretch or a pause.
Seek to understand the author.
Make a nice circle.
Explain exactly what you are disagreeing with.
Remain open.
Keen observation.

Do NOT trust every source!

Since I work at a Mayan museum, I get really annoyed when people get things wrong about the Mayans, specially if something that has been published is wrong.

Reading Taming the Infinite, they mention that Mayans live in South America. Mayans do not live in South America, they live in Central America. South America has their own indigenous tribes, like the Inca.

Another mistake I notices was in a video about the Mayans from the History Channel. They had almost everything right, except for two things. The video called the Mayan Long Count, the Aztec Long Count. The Aztecs where from Mexico, not from Central America, and had nothing to do with the Mayans. The video also showed the Aztec calendar instead of the Mayan.

I know I should not get irritated with things like this since everyone, including me, makes mistakes.

If we have computers, why study Arithmetic?

This question was brought up during class with Kyle and I also found it in Taming the Infinite chapter 3. Both Kyle and the book reached the same conclusion. We study Arithmetic beacuse someone has to know Arithmetic in order to build the computers, not knowing only how to do the problems but also understanding the procedure.

Chapter 3 Taming the Infinite

As I mentioned before most of the ancient civilizations had their own way of writing numerals. In this chapter we go through the Romans, Greeks, Indian, Arabic Italian and the Mayas.

What I found interesting about this chapter is that most of these numerals are related either because of political matters or because of trading between each other. They each adopt their numerals to other countries, and as a result we have numerals that are much like the ones we have today.

This chapter also introduces us to the negative numbers which at the beginning didn’t actually mean that a value was less than zero but that it was a subtraction (according to the Chinese it represented debt).

The one thing that really got me mad about this chapter is a mistake often made (even by the History Channel): Mayans did not live in South America, only in CENTRAL America. South America did have indigenous tribes, but they were not Maya, one example is the Incas. 

Celebrate Whats Rights With the World

We watched a video today called Celebrate whats Right With the World by Dewitt Jones. Dewitt worked for National Geographic for many years as a photographer and in this documentary he shares his point of view of the world. He thinks perception controls our reality: If we don’t believe it, we don’t see it. He also says that if we are open to see possibilities we will find them. We live in a continuously changing possibility curve, in an ever changing world. He also says that we have to find a balance with what we do and who we are.

After we watched the video, we arrived to some conclusions with the group.

1  1)    This video is about realizing what is infront of us. (what is from getting real). We are all attached to what should be, not what actually is. Reality is what you make it, we all have to cultivate the skill of seeing whats good in the present.

    2)     Having a vision is to be able to see things that other people don’t see.

3  3)   Celebrating whats right with the world gives you the energy to fix what is wrong.

The last conclusion I mentioned is the most important one, well at least for me. I related it a lot with today. We were all discussing that we have so many problems with the MPC, that we lack organization, that it is no expensive, etc. We were all talking about what was wrong with the MPC, we never once talked about what was right with it. I think this last conclusion is the solution for that. We are always going to have problems, but we should always focus on the good things. I immediately tried this and all of those problems faded away. For the first time I felt like I really belong. I feel that I made the right choice to join the MPC. I know I am in the right place. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTkMWGyby2o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp8ZSD6EgJA

These are the links to the video. I could only find it in two separate parts, but its complete!