Beloit College Reflection

The Beloit College mindset is a surprisingly accurate list of the way my peers and I thing about the world.  Many of the seventy-five mindsets on the list are very true, but there are a couple that I disagree with.  The mindsets that talked about a person that I have never heard of, and say that they have always been dead to are obviously very true.  There are some mindsets that I feel almost make my generation sound uneducated, like saying that we don't know who Michelangelo is.  I think that for the most part the college did a very good job compiling the different mindsets of my time.

I agree with a vast majority of the mindsets that the college came up with.  I agree obviously with all the mindsets that say that something has always existed since we were born.  These are thing like DNA fingerprinting and the human genome.  There are a lot of names that are brought up saying that we have never heard of, and for the most part it was true I have never heard of Ice-T, or Dirty Harry, or John McEnroe.  There were a number of mindsets that talked about the cold war, and since I was not alive in that time all the ones about the US getting alone with Russia seem right to me.  For the most part I feel they got the mindsets correct for my generation.

I disagree with a small amount of the mindsets that they brought up.  I think that some of them make my peers and I look uneducated.  They said that Al Gore has always been animated to us, this isn't true at all in fact I can't think of that many Al Gore cartoons, I would say that the majority of my peers know that Al Gore was the vice president under Clinton.  Once again they say that we don't know that Czechoslovakia was a country, I would bet there are quite a few people my age that know that is was.  Lastly they say that we don't know who Beethoven is I would be very surprised if someone doesn't know how Beethoven and I would venture to say that many could hum one of his master pieces.  There were few mindsets that I disagree with, I disagree with some because I feel like they are making fun of my generation.

I think that Beloit did a very good job in summarizing a whole population into just seventy-five mindsets.  Many of the seventy-five mindsets on the list are very true, but there are a couple that I disagree with.  I agree with all the ones that date us, meaning if something was invented before we were born obviously we won't remember what it was like before that.  There were a couple mindsets that I disagreed with, because I felt that the college made us out to be somewhat uneducated.  I really enjoyed that article and think that it was very accurate.

Hixson Diversity Exerience

Today I attent a diversity event called "Teenager at Alcatraz: The Clarence Carnes Story".  This was an old man who told a small crowd a story about collecting stories from people we were indians in the south.  He dicided to start doing this because when he read a book about history in Southern America he noticed that there was nothing said about the trail of tears and other impotant things that happened to indians in their history.  He then went on to tell stories about an indian boarding school.  This school was very tough, many kids were killed by other kids.  The teachers would let the kids go down on the football field with sticks and belt and beat up the smaller kids.  The small kids had to make it across the length of the field or get killed.  The story was very intresting and I am very glad that I attended.