Today's In Class Activity

The following is my attempt at looking at a picture and simply writing without stopping to correct my thoughts. Sometimes my train of thought goes in weird directions, but hey wasn't that what the assignment was all about? You can see areas where I tried to hard and other places where I just let my mind wander...an interesting synthesis I think.





It is surreal to see this large creature which once dominated the land as a mere carpet underneth a man. His dominance and frightening prescence have been taken from him, as only his skin lies on the ground. He has been displayed as if he is running, which would seem normal for his everyday life (pre-death). I imagine him running through the African Savannah (or is this an Asian elephant? Just one aspect we can no longer determine from his flattened body) with many other wild animals, yet here he lies alone, being grommed by the human race; the race which was most likely the cause of his downfall. Its funny that the man has placed himself between the elephant’s mouth and trunk, as if the elephant is about to pick uop the tiny man and devour him. Elephants are such a beloved creature of human kind. Nearly evey child I know has some sort of elephant toy. But isnt it ironic that elephants are also very deadly? I mean, you don’t see many kids with toy scorpians or stuffed snakes but they are equally lethal. Rogue elephants can trample a man in two seconds if he doesn’t like the looks he is given. These animals are puzzling. I think that man could not handle the fact that there was an animal more dominant and powerfull than him, so we took them down….as we have done with many large beasts…




Oh, how I wish life were still this simple. Playing in the lake with friends. But wait…the little boy is teaching the little girl something. Possibly how to fish? Could this be a symbol of male dominance in our society? Even the sand bar they stand on is an out rightly phallic image. But maybe its simpler than that. They children gaze at their reflections in the water and daydream. The boy pokes the water with a stick and watches the ripples in amazement. How does it all work? Why can I see myself down there? I remember doing this as a child, or even more precisely, attempting to skip rocks on glassy lakle surfaces. My dad always could skip a rock six or seven times, but I only ever got to 3. He tried to teach me, like the boy in this photo is trying to teach the girl, but I never could get the hold of it. Today I still cant skip rocks, but I am correcting his papers and showing him the ways of computers. I guess I am just trying to say that everyone is good at their own thing, and while it may start in childhood withy something as simple as skipping rocks, it advances in life to technology and love…I know that might not make sense, but my dad taught me about skipping rocks because he loves me, and I taught him about computers because I love him.



This image struck me because I am not sure what is going on here. It seems that young upper class white children are viewing a native american family representation behind glass. I wish I could go back in time and ask them what they’re thinking about. The Native Americans sit in ape-like positions behind glass as if they are being kept captive in a zoo. But what is interesting to me is that the white children don’t even notice their own reflection in the window. Its as if we are being shown that we are all on exhibition, we are all part of the world’s museum and are being watched everyday. The man who appears to be their teacher points at the Indians as if they were mere animals doing something interesting, and the class looks on. Is this how they thought was the best method of educating America’s future? By showing them racism from the start? As a kid we used to play cowboys and indians and my parents looked on, ignoring our racial gestures. Will we ever be a society clean of racism? I envy those who are. People usually say. “Im not racist, I have lots of friends who are____.” But what does that mean? Why would one want to hide that? The truth is that a little of our past remains within us, whether we like it (or practice it) or not. Honestly, I would like to go back to the way of life shown here, where man is one with nature. But industry, big business, and society in general have wiped out all traces of this peacefull way of living.