I fully intended to write something creative and interesting to post over the weekend, but alas I underestimated the extent to which I had overestimated the amount of work I would have to do. Or something. Anyway, I spent most of the weekend reading and taking notes over several articles on sociological theories of crime and deviance. Typically I would being doing fine until I got to the methods section of each paper, at which point my head would explode from statistical overload. The correlation coefficient is about the extent of what I remember from AP statistics, so needless to say my notes have a conspicuous gap in between “theory” and “conclusion.” Actually the statistical methods don’t matter for the course, they just added spice to the reading. Or something. Next up is The Communist Manifesto, which is entirely devoid of numbers as I recall.
On the other end of the social sciences spectrum we have Anthropology, which thusfar hasn’t been all that stimulating. The readings have been quite interesting (and not nearly as copious as in Soc.), but the in class time is something I might have expected several years ago in high school. I think it is the professor’s first year teaching, so I’m certainly not going to make any major judgements from the first week of class, but the fact that she read the syllabus to us verbatim and then showed a movie on the first day of class does not bode particularly well. We shall see.
I haven’t quite figured Math Structures out yet either. The first chapter covered basic symbolic logic and methods of formal proof, so we focused on procedure much more than on content. We had to prove things that seem obvious just to learn the mechanics of the various methods (induction, contradiction, contrapositive, etc.). At its best it was like figuring out a good puzzle, at worst like repeatedly banging my head against the wall. I did start to get into it a little bit more yesterday though, so I’m hopeful. We started set theory today, so now we’ll actually be learning new stuff, as well as trying to proove it.
Hmm, well that wasn’t particularly creative or interesting, but it’s about the best I can muster at the moment. I hoping that as I become more adept at reading sociological and anthropological literature it will take less time to get through, leaving more time for important things like blogging.