First term coming to an end

This has been a very fast period in my life. I can't believe christmas is already here, all the months flew by very quickly.

We no longer have to give a presentation at the end of this term, which is alright with me since the whole piracy research wasn't going soo good for me.

I rented a book at the UNB library called " the slave ship" which was very educational about a bunch of things that has to do with pirates.

Computer knowdlege

This whole post will be dedicated to my hate/love relationship with the recent learnings of all the postings and reports using the computer.

Honestly, I dont enjoy it abit. I am confused most of the time when it gets time to post up my work. I dont understand why we can't just print out our work and bring it to class like the good ol times. This would make my life so much easier.

The instructions on posting up work, if you are an off campus student are extremely complicated. I believe that this is not fair for student like me.

As I am told by the prompts, this will help us further in university and i truly hope it's right. I am glad that i get challenged in this way also and i hope it further my learning.

Pirates, Pirates and more Pirates

I have a feeling that this subject is going to be drained out like the play "Doubt". What I learned the most during the "Doubt" besides all what the play had to offer, was patience. This I believe will play to my advantage in most of my classes and remaing years in school. I think society as a whole always has a tendency to chew everything fast and spit it out as soon it's not in "stlye" anymore. We always want/need new things and we can never satisfied our needs and soon or later most of the things would lose value. With that said, I will try my best to have patience as we explore all we can about pirates.

Last week we worked on in-depth researches using the UNB library. The topics that came out the most were sexuality,racial tolerance,steriotype of pirates,gender,women pirates. All of these subject are interesting in their own right and we can go very far with them. I think everybody should choose what they would like to work on and the class shouldn't be forced to read a book about one certain author or subject. This lets the curiousty of learning flourish more because you are not "forced" to read about a subject that doesn't interest you.The subjects I mentioned above are still relevant with today society. This makes it much easier to learn because of the connection of today's issues.

A very educational conversation was held in our last class. It distrubed some of my class mates. It was very educational for me, it was nothing new that I haven't heard( maybe im wrong). I was very motivated by the answers the teachers gave us. The lesson was simple in words, but in reality it's hard to accomplish. The lesson was to learn regardless of the marks that you were being given. This is very true and I am glad that I picked Aquanas. I want to learn again for the pleasure of learning. Marks and all other things can come in second hand. This is the major difference between high school and universities. The love of knowledge!!

Begining of November

Last week we wrote a four page paper as our midterm. It was very helpful to go through all my entries here and see what we learned about during the past period.

The classes are no longer separated. We just started reading about pirates and learning all their history. We read an article called "Bootylicious", if your mind works similar to mine, you might be wondering WHAT? or Destiny's child has a song called bottylicious. Anyways, it's about pirates and how they use to govern their ships and workers.

The article touches on many different subject and very interesting subjects also. Ex: Were pirates democratic?; homosexuality; sexism; female liberation; racism, ect....

We also learned how to research about authors using the unb library. We looked how to look deeper and question everything that is given to us ( society in whole) as the truth or facts or opinions.

As always these three classes always offer something new and exciting thing to take from.

Highlight of the week : Stories in journalism class

This past week was busy as the others. In english class we worked more on "Doubt". We read reviews that people wrote for the play and we tried to figure out what they were trying to convince us or make us believe. We examined how a simple review of a film can easily influence people decisions or views. So the lesson i learned from that, is to double check every small thing and make a judgement from your own true opinion.

Religious Studies was interesting as always, maybe because we are learning about a religion and culture that I had no knowdlege of, but was always interested in learning about. We been studying about the tibetan buddhism and have focused on "The Tibetan Book of the Dead". I must say that some actions described in the book are unusual, but very intriguing. The book of the dead talks mostly about the last moments when a person is still alive. The book is read to people before they die to help them make the right choice in the cycle.

In journalism class, we had been working on stories about each other. Tuesday was the due date for the articles and everybody had to share out aloud what they wrote. Most of the stories are very personal. I admire everybody who opened up about their most difficult time in their life. This assigment was mainly hard, because it forced people to go back where they probally don't ever want to go and rethink all they had gone throught. I believe this exercise brought the class much closer. The knowledge to know that you aren't the only one with struggles at a young age and that everybody is the same even thought we all had different turning points is amazing. I really enjoyed working with Allenye Gunter, she was very easy to interview and open. That made me at ease to tell her about my turning point.

October is done :( ...the best month of the year!!!

End of season...Start of possible boredom

Tommorow morning I will be heading off to Nova scotia for my last cross country race. Excuse me, if I seem to be talking about the sport too much but it has suprised me on so may levels. When I joined the team I had already made up assumptions on how it was going to turn out. I played many sports in high school and middle school, it was never pleasant. It was hard work, overly competitive people, barely no support system between teammates. To begin with, I must confess that the sports gene in my family was definitely not given to me.

My older brother can learn any sport and become fairly good if not perfect. Myself on the other side, I practice, practice and practice to only end up on the bench hahaha. Cross country was another completely different story. As usually I joined with a very limited experience and out of shape ( physically and mentally). I had no idea what I was getting myself into, all I knew and believe was the former experiences in other sports. With that said, I went in with a very negative felling about the sport and the all the teammates in general. This is a belief that i held even before I decided to join the team. My first practice was horrible, I remenber saying to myself the first two weeks " Okay this is the last time I am going to practice, i have to tell Scoot, I AM DONE!". Something that I dont know kept pushing me to suprise myself, to challenge myself and to prove my body that I can do my best. My teammates were the complete opposite of what I had in mind. Everybody was very welcoming(despite me not being in good shape) and very patient ( especially the coach). I never thought in my life that i could actually say that i like my coach and that i like a competitive sport. Now the season is almost over and i have improved beyond my imagination. I still frown at the hills during practices and the saturdays long "hilly" workouts. I can honestly say that this team is simply amazing. Everyone in them. :D

I believe my experience can be related to what we been doing in class so far. We have been reading all kind of stuff (especially "Doubt") and finding what influenced us to come to a certain conclusion. This is what happened to me, going to a sport with an already made up mind. The lesson that I came out with is to never judge anything or anybody from previous experiences. This is ofcourse hard and it's not easy to ingore something when you "think" you know the outcome. I am going to make sure this is my goal, to stop judging anybody or anything from my past experiences. I wont let my past good or bad stop me from enjoying life. I now made friendships that could last forever. This was not a season thing, these are my friends now.

Emmanuel Rutayisire

Sorry for any wrong spelling. :D

My remedy....

Another week past...another to go. One thing i have been learning since I been to university is to take one day at a time. I am such a future seeker all the time, because i get easily bored of the present.

I had a race( UNB opening) this past saturday. I didn't run due to my over worked calves. My left on is the worst and the pain that it produces when I run on it is too much. All I have to count on is self massages and massages from my coach. My coach is amazing when he's giving you a massage. You might ask yourself at times if "this is suppose to help", because at the moment pleasure is the last thing your body is feeling. On thursday I attended an occasion about hunger in America. It was very educational and the speaker was..........unique & kind of lost. Classes been going as the usual, nothing dramatic has happen yet.

The weekend went fast, due to homeworks and other occasions that i won't mention. I am finding myself working late every sunday and trying to get everything ready in time. I wouldnt say that my week/ weekend were bad, but it i had to be "responsible". At times all I trully want to do is eat Banana bread and dance all night. That brings me to another frustrating subject. Why do dance clubs feel that it's alright to close at 2am. Im soory but, at 2am that's when all my energy kicks up. Only if I had my own nightclub. Everybody would be served FREE banana bread( 50 cents , if you want chocolate chips in them) and you would dance until you fell tired.

To end my weekend, I went to do some thrift shopping. Thrift anything has a very special place in my heart. I was lucky enough to find a very nice pair of black dress shoes. I also found my haloween custom/ everyday wear. This is my remedy. Thrift shopping and spending hours in Chapters keeps me sane. ohhhh wellll...."this is it" ( hahaha) for me. see ya next week.

Fourth Week Journal Posting

This past week went very fast and was full of work. The deadlines creep on your very fast without realising it. My main focus for now is to keep up with all the deadlines. Anyways last week we read and talked about " the kingdom of silence" in journalism. The article was very long, but had a lot of interesting information to share with us. We have been since talking about censorship in journalism all over the world. In religious study we read a few pages that pagan wrote and had to answer if would have changed our mind about the play. We discussed about "Doubt" and all its religious connection. English Class we basically also talked about Doubt and how our beliefs influenced the way we read or saw it. We then had to post it up on the website.

Like i mentioned above, last week was full of work. Now that he holidays are over, we get to fully concentrate solely on studies.

1....2...THIRD POST

Last week went very very fast. The class was assigned to read a part of the script of a play called "doubt". The reading was very easy to do, mainly because it touched on very interesting subjects (ex: racism, religion, discrimination). On friday i went to see the play and i enjoyed it very much. The actors were really good, the setting, the lighting ect.... everything was 100% good!!!! I finnaly got my journalism book, which i was lucky enough to get one before they all sold out. I am very excited to start with religious studies. I think the course will cause a lot of discussion in class and change people's mind ( or not). During the play this quote stood out the most to me. " innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil " .

Second Week

This past week we focused about a trial that is happening in canada regarding the Rwanda genocide. We searched about Munyaneza, a hutu who comminted genocide in Rwanda. We searched about all we can find about the Genocide and Munyaneza. It very suprising how much information the class came up with. Certain people beliefs were changed about how we saw war crime.We also learned how to use the online UNB library. The library provides so much articles about any subject that you think of. At first it seemed confusing, but once you get the hang of it , it got really easy. The most important thing i learned this week is how big search engines ( ex: google , wikipedia) had to be double checked to really prove if the source is right. We ended by having an open discussion on our thoughts about the Genocide and other realated issues. The class engaged in a very intense conversation. It was very interesting to hear how everybody had so much to offer compare to last week about the issue. Everybody was informed and tried to understand as much as they could about the Genocide and the trial. This thurday we will begin separating into three different classes. I am excited to see how that will be working out.

peace and love! Emmanuel

electronically inkshed : first week

This class has been very interesting so far. I am still very eager to see more and learn more about this class. The people in this class are very diverse and that makes the class very fun. We have been questioning our beliefs and how it affects our everyday life. We been questioning "the truth" about society.