22

Thursday morning I have Epistemology at 8h30.

I like to get up to go to class at 7h10-7h20ish.  This gives me time to lay in bed and check my email, as well as eat my oatmeal.  (or if you prefer, my "flakes of oat" that I smother in yogurt and microwave).

However, on this morning, I woke up at 8h08.  That means I had 22 minutes to get up, get ready, and walk the about 15 minutes to my class in Victoire.

I'm not certain at what point I turned my alarm off in the night, but I don't know what else could have happened.  Anyways, I can officially say that I was on the street walking to the square at 8h13, and I was in my seat in class at 8h29, which made me much earlier than a few of the other students.  I was pretty darn pleased.

Epistemology was okay, I do much better understanding what's going on in that class than in Cognition.  I don't know why that is because both of them just sit there and read the lecture off a big stack of papers to you.

After class the professor approached Luisa and I and wanted to talk about the evaluation.  We can either write a "memoire" about research we are doing for another class, or we can just meet up with him in a coffeeshop at some point in December and talk for about an hour about what we learned from the class.  I'm still making a decision about which one I'm going to choose.

I went home and ate some lunch.

At 13h30 I have Biological Anthropology which is by far my favorite class.  It was a little bit irritating this Thursday because this man sits behind me and he doesn't understand a lot of things and the professor has to explain them to him.  Like, dude, 1) you should know this and 2) it says it on the screen in front of you.

We were discussing the basics of evolution and Darwin's theory of natural selection.  I don't know why this man has never heard of this before.  He was genuinely confused about the difference between Darwin's evolution and Lamarck's "use it or lose it" giraffes.  I have done this so many times.  And I would have been able to explain it to him better than the professor but I feel like that might be considered even more condescending in France than in America.  And considering he was behind me instead of next to me, it would have been disruptive as well.  (I would also like to mention that whenever I'm in a class without another international, no one will sit next to me.  I sit at this huge, long, five-person table alone.  In both Cognition and Biological Anthropology.)

Anyways, it was irritating enough that he didn't understand evolution, he also didn't understand mutations.  I think he got that mutations are spontaneous, but when we got to that point in the powerpoint, he thought that evolution was entirely based on mutations.  Yes, some traits arise from mutation, but there is also always diversity in the population.  If one giraffe has a longer neck than another, it's not necessarily a mutation.  Just diversity.

AND THEN he didn't understand/know about gut microbiota.  "There's bacteria in us?!  What does it do?!  Where does it come from?!  Can we get rid of it?!"  M. Bauduer, please just throw this man out of the class.  I implore you.

I have no problem with people not understanding something.  Or someone asking a question when they don't understand.  But for a reasonable amount of time.  And don't fight the professor when they give you an explanation.  I think they know what the answer is.

We spent so much time on these stupid little things that the professor had to be super speedy through the rest of the lecture and I missed writing some of the last lines from the slides because he didn't have enough time to read through all of the information, and I didn't have enough time to write it all down.  Thanks.

Biological Anthropology goes directly into Visual Anthropology which is also in the same classroom.  I didn't have to get up, but Idil and Julian sat next to me so that proves that people weren't avoiding me for some physical reason.

We talked about camera angles and what they are trying to highlight for the audience.  I don't really understand why this is an anthropology course but whatever.

Then we watched another film.  It was called Afrique 50.  It was about Africa in the 1950s.

I went then down to Talence again to go to French class.  I was hoping that after class people would want to do something again, but they didn't.  Everybody had work to do.  There was some kind of music festival that two people were going to, but they didn't really invite me to with them, and I'm tired of forcing myself to just follow people around so that I'm doing something.

I went home and I watched TV.