Protocol 2/15

We started out class today talking about out external writing assignment #1. Ben then told us that we didn’t need to bring a hard copy on Thursday, nor do we need to bring the peer edit sheet we worked on in class last week. We do however need to send the e-mail to our m/other and bbc him in the e-mail by 12a.m on Thursday.
Ben then handed out our reading which is titled “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. A couple thing you should know about the handout...It’s a best seller, and also, we don’t need to read it as closely as we did with Hegel but we should gaze over all of it.

Next, Ben discussed the difference between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’. To be uninterested means you think it’s boring. To be disinterested, you don’t have a bias on the matter.

We then talked about the Socratic Method. Ahmed explained to the class that is where the professor comes at student with different questions. Ben added that it was the oldest form of difficutations. Its dialect based questions where the teacher knows the question. Ben used this method on Heidi and Hallie. They both did a good job of answering questions on the spot and Ben eventually got the correct answer he was looking for out of both of them.

Next, we talked about bureaucratic authority and charismatic authority. We referenced Vaber and discussed the quote on page 181. “The natural leaders in moments of distress- whether psychic, physical, ethical, religious, or political- were neither appointed officeholders nor professionals in the present-day sense, but rather the bearers of specific gifts of body and mind that were considered “supernatural”. We talked about how charismatic authority focuses on emotions. For example the “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore” speech is using emotions to get people attention. We talked about how for charismatic authority, it seems like the world spirit is with you. In bureaucratic authority a person would point to the facts and go straight to the archives.
Sophie said that, “people in the Tea Party are following charismatic authority. They don’t know what bureaucratic is.” Then Mandy added that, “[she] thinks people in the tea party are very diverse. There are always stereotypes but there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Then Jordan stepped in and said it was time for the difficultation. We started out by watching parts of two different YouTube videos. The first was in support of the tea part and the second was against it. We then proceeded to get into groups and make a bubble chart adding idea we thought would go well with what the Tea Party actually is. As a class we created a list of these ideas- patriotic, misunderstood, conservative liberals, charismatic authority, middle class vs. upper class, educated vs. uneducated and old vs. young.

Lastly, we got into four different groups and started posters of something that could be in favor of the tea party of against it (depending on what group you were in).

We will finish the difficulation on Thursday.