Casey+DeBoer

CAS ACTIVITY WEEK OF 11/09/09- This is my first real week of basketball practice this season. I have played for many years and still I am learning things I didn’t realize were important. Basketball has always been a way for me to be involved in a team sport and to exercise often, play hard, and enjoy myself. There is something about being on the court that truly fascinates me. The ways in which a team works and is bonded through something as ordinary as a sport is spectacular. We are practicing three times a week for an hour and a half each time. Though our team is defiantly not going to win championships this year, we continuously push ourselves to improve each year. Basketball always challenges me to work harder and to be a good player, but this week I am learning the definition and helpfulness of having a real team. It’s a group of people who work together on and off the court, and who are bonded better than the rest of the grades. At a school as small as ours, everyone has their own friends and everyone sticks to their own groups, and on the court lots of groups come together for the game. My skills in basketball are not to where I would like, however, I enjoy it a lot and I get better with every season.

TOK- Assignment 3 To what extent do our senses give us knowledge of the world as it really is? Humans rely on their five senses to tell them about an object, place or person in their lives. When there is a cup of water in front of you for example, you can see it and feel it to know that it is actually there. A person can drink the water to know how it tastes and feels and they can weigh it to figure out its mass. There are a great deal of ways that a person can perceive an object in front of them, the trick is knowing what it is about that object that you can trust is true. People see things in their own ways because for whatever reason they perceive them differently.&lt;br&gt; Your eyes can tell you that something is real to you, but a person’s eyes can play tricks on them. That is why you have to be cautious about to what extent you believe what you see. People believe things for a number of reasons like their pasts or memories. When looking at a picture people can perceive it differently based on something it reminds them of. Our senses let us see the world for what we want to see in it. Some people think croissants taste wonderful, but that doesn’t mean that everyone will think they taste wonderful. It is all based on personality and personal responses on things. Everyone has the same five senses but people do not necessarily feel, touch, see, taste, and hear things in the same way. There is also the theory that when I look at the color red it may or not be the same color red as another person sees, we could just have a mutual name for a different color. This could cause issues in certain things but generally I don’t think it actually matters as long as people have that mutual name. You mean we might all see the color differently but as long as we apply the name to the same set of things we are able to communicate meaningfully and not get confused. People should not rely solely on what they see or hear but also question things. Our senses give us a great deal of knowledge but the knowledge we receive from them may or may not be accurate. T his is good, Casey. Our senses are the starting point of much of what we think we know, but we usually do not confine our ideas to what we have actually sensed, but add on all kinds of inferences, assumptions and associations. We are often unaware of what we have done and give all the extra ideas the same status of certainty as what we have actually sensed. Moreover, as you point out we are often misled by our senses. And then there is the issue of all the metaphysical ideas and experiences we have like love, justice, a soul. Is the starting point for these ideas our physical senses? How do we "know" these things? CAS Activity with Tom Summer 2009-  This summer I worked with a refugee from Thailand, named Tom, on his use and interpretation of the English language. Tom was going into the eighth grade and throughout the summer, we read three books. I learned a lot through this experience and I think he did too. I learned that I can teach and help other people understand the vocabulary in a novel. This took a while for me to get used to explaining words that I use on a regular basis but that were not common to him. Tom always came to our meetings and he was a really great person to get to know and I probably wouldn’t have met him otherwise. The first two books we read were chosen for us but at the end of the summer I chose a third book based on what I had learned that Tom liked. It was really good for me to get the opportunity to learn about Tom and his family and culture. We also talked about our summers which I felt was just as important as the actual tutoring part. I touched on almost all of the IB learning outcomes throughout this event every week. It was a constant activity because we met once a week for two and a half months which relates to the 5th learning outcome and Tom and I got along very well and listened to each other which is the 4th goal. Overall, this activity taught me a lot about being a good role model and challenging myself to explain what I mean when I say something. Tom is an ethnic Koran from Burma - his family escaped to Thailand and lived in a refugee camp there for many years before being able to resettle in the States. When tutoring I too find it surprisingly difficult and challenging to come up with precise and helpful definitions for many of the words that I use all the time, especially abstract ones like "irony" or "nuanced". It's fascinating what that reveals about the way we use language - we have an non-articulate, i.e wordless, but accurate grasp of what words mean - how do we do that? I mean I can understand how we do that with words that describe a physical entity like cat - we can match the word to an image in our minds - but how do we do it for words that have no image like "fairness"?