Get Involved II--Extra Credit Opportunities

In order to get the most possible for a university education, it is *very* helpful to take advantage of the many opportunities for learning there are outside the classroom.  I like to see my IDL students participate in as many campus events as possible.  I especially like seeing student attend NSU plays and concerts.

Tonight (Thursday, October 16), tomorrow, and Saturday, the NSU theater department presents "On the Verge."  The show starts at 7:30 p.m. in the Williams Library "Round Room."

Also tonight is the annual aria and concerto competition.  The aria portion of the competition begins at 5:00 p.m. in Krikac auditorium.

For extra credit, just add a comment to the post here your impressions of either the play or the aria/concerto competition. What did you find particularly memorable/enjoyable?

Gendercide--20th and 21st century genocide (extra credit)

"Never again" said the Jews (and many others) about the Holocaust. However, there have been many such tragedies in the 20th and 21st centuries, some of them going on right now. Please take a look at the "case studies" on the Gendercide site (look at the case study drop down menu on the right hand side of the page). Choose one of the studies (or one of the articles on the main page), and comment here on that article/case study. In what way does the information on this site help justify the 20th century's nickname "The Age of Violence" or the 21st century's nickname "The Age of Stupidity"?

Yad Vashem (extra credit)

"One death is a tragedy: a million deaths is a statistic," said Joseph Stalin. Unfortunately, this tends to be the truth. Numbers are a useful tool for measuring things that are too big for us to understand in any other way, e.g., how far it is from earth to the sun. But using numbers often blunts the reality of human tragedies.

The Yad Vashem site tries to make the victims of the Holocaust something more than just statistics. Its database is an attempt to preserve a memory of as many individual victims as possible.

Browse through the database, and look through some of the individual pages of testimony. What do you find interesting/memorable in these pages?