Best To Worst

O M Double G... the third class session pretty much blew the previous two out of the water. No, don't worry, nothing bad happened, but it sure was an interesting class meeting. So, for those that don't know by now, my Concept Development class is now located in room 308 in the Fine Arts building located in Cal State LA.

So, class started at 8AM, and the professor asked us all to place our comics on the front tables for everyone to see. These comics were a weekend homework assignment that was a sheet of paper with 4 different sized squares. In these squares we had to draw out a series of events that led up to our decision to come to college. So, once we put all of ours on the front desks, we were back to our seats and there was a lecture. After the lecture, the professor had a challenge for us. Without his help, we were going to rank all the comics from the best down to the worst and he gave us 15 minutes. Putting ourselves in alphabetical order was one thing, but to rank our comics from best to worst, I could only imagine it was going to get down right dirty. Whether we enjoyed doing our comic assignment or not, i sure didn't want mine to be in the worst portion. So, the professor left the room and we all got up and moved toward the tables with the comics. Then some of the students started talking about how we were going to decide how to go about ranking them. One girl said we should vote on them and then others went with that and after a couple of minutes, it resulted in a final decision. We were going to go down the line of comics and vote for our 3 favorite comics by placing a mark on the paper. The more marks a comic received, the closer it got to the best side of the ranking. After everyone voted, there were some comics that had votes that didn't match or tie with others and some that had a tie. In the second round of voting, we voted between those that were tied. Then after that, there were still some with ties, so we voted one last time. It took us less than the time the professor gave us to put the comics in order from best to worst.

After that, the professor came back in the classroom and asked us how it went and how we went about the order. After explaining to him how we did it, he asked if anyone disagreed with the order and 5 people raised their hands. Then he asked those 5 to go up and place the comics in the order they felt needed to be changed. Now, for me, I assumed that those that disagreed were unsatisfied with the whole order or most of it at least. It turns out, the only ones that needed to change in the order were a small amount of comics, and they were ranked near the best side. After a few minutes of debate, some of the comics had changed in order by one or two spots which to me, as compared to the whole line of comics, wasn't that big of deal. There was one in particular that didn't move down the line that a student wanted to move and it was in color. I think that one was only ranked higher for that reason, because it was in color, but like the professor said, as a class, we have to rank them in order from best to worst. And because the means to do this was by voting, since that method was decided for this ranking, that obviously means that popular vote was going to be the name of the game. Since this was the case, the comics with the majority of the votes were going to rank higher, simple as that. I totally get the whole disagreeing with one or two in the order that the comics came out to be, but majority of the class voted for those. If the professor told each of us to rank them individually, that would be different. I don't know, I guess I was the only one who ever watched an episode of Survivor...

 Their was a portion of the class where the professor was talking about architects. Now, in my Intro. to Graphics Design class, our final project was to use an architect and a building or structure they created that is somewhat famous around the world. The architect I used was Jorn Utzon who designed the Sydney Opera House. I remember how focused I was for that project. You think I would have remembered the guys name at least. So of course when the professor asked us each to name an LA architect, even though mine was not from LA, at least I could have said an architect's name. You can image how much that bugged me. He then tried getting some equipment to work so we could view some slides or films but there was technical difficulties so we weren't able to see what the professor wanted to show.

Overall, it was a very interesting class session and I enjoyed it. The class is definitely going to be a roller coaster of emotions for me this quarter. Not in a bad way of course. There is one more thing... he brought up a situation of when someone was young and went on a water slide for the first time. While i wasn't extremely young, I was still young enough to remember what he was talking about when he was discussing the feeling you get when doing that for the first time and if you open yourself up to the experience and trust yourself, it can be quite exhilarating. I understood what he meant and what emotions and feelings I was experiencing because I went through that. Think things and topics that we have experiences in are easier to understand when the professor has discussions. It will be interesting to see how wednesday's class goes...