Fourth Class

Our fourth class was very interesting as it was the day that we were going to teach the second half of the class. To be completely honest this day was really hard for me for many reasons both extraneous and personal to me but I was able to pull it together for the class and get the presentation done. The first group went before us and their presentation on the myth of Sisyphus was wonderful. I really loved the skit that they did which showed two girls running through the daily monotony of modern life and eventually getting fed up with it - asking why we do the same thing every day with no particular objective other than to continue taking up space. The discussion led us to some interesting places about what meaning or purpose means and I proposed the idea that you can find your purpose in rather shallow things such as watching cartoons or playing videogames and that is only wrong because, through the lens of society, it isn't productive or conducive to a "life well lived" which I believe does hold some weight to it - I don't want everyone being unproductive and just doing whatever they feel like. My professor challenged my proposition by saying something along the lines of how it was interesting that I said shallow meaning as if there were some gradient to the value of what we find purpose through in life. This led the aforementioned discussion about society's lens keeping us in check with how we act concerning our behavior and what meanings we value more than others. Once the first group was done it was our turn and I'm not going to lie I was pretty nervous. I've taken some public speaking courses but putting it in practice is always a little nerve-racking at first. The class is not very small either probably close to 40 or so people. Our presentation was on the fall by Albert Camus which is about a man who thinks he has found his meaning in helping people and always being the best but when he fails to stop a woman from committing suicide he begins to question his true intentions and purpose in life if there is any at all. We talked for a while with the class about whether or not the main character Jean-Paul Clamence was good or bad in the past and whether he was good or bad in the present in the story. This ended up having us discuss what makes people bad and there were lots of different opinions on this but the direction I was hoping it would go was more about the fact that Clamence did not do good out of the goodness of his heart but to maintain a status he had set for himself and that his peers expected of him which, in my opinion, makes him not a good person - something not everyone in my group agreed with which I found very interesting. Overall, I think our discussion went really well and our professor even complimented us afterward so it must have gone pretty well for everyone else!