Mar. 10th, 2004

livingdeb: (Default)
I'm quitting my class. If I were actually taking the class, and it would be on my student record and counting toward my degree, I would hang in there and it would be fine. But as I am overextended, I'm going to blow it off.

I felt we didn't have enough information to do the first assignment, but it looked like that wouldn't be a problem in the future. For the first assignment, I just basically wrote that I did not know enough to be able to do a good job, but I could do a lame job and I could discuss additional interesting related issues.

But now I'm having trouble with all three of the next assigments. One is to join an online discussion, which would be fun, but only members of the class have access, so I would have to go through a lot of trouble to get on the list. Even though the prof collected our e-mail addresses and things the first day and knows I want to be on the list. The second assignment is two write a dialog between someone from France and someone from England around 1800 about the two countries' "Indian" policies up to that date. Again, this could be quite fun, throwing in British-sounding phrases for the one and a French accent for the other, and where the reader slowly, as the dialog goes along, figures out how these two know each other. But the information we have is very broad, general; there's no meat. I'd have to do extra research to get the good stories. The real problem, though, is with the third assigment: choosing a paper topic. I have no clue. What we have learned so far has not inspired me to want to go into greater depth on any topic that could be adequately covered in only ten pages. Bleh.

The problem is that I want the readings to be a book like Guns, Germs, and Steel, only about what strategies worked for Native Americans. I had thought none of them worked, but the instructor says that economic assimilation was the key. What he means is that the only profitable thing the French figured out was fur trading, and the French had never even heard of beavers before arriving in America, so they felt stuck trading with the locals. There was a large swath of folks on the continent all speaking the same language, so once the French learned that language and adapted the native canoes which were better for river travel than anything they had at the time, they could go up and down the river, trading. The French even discouraged missionaries because missionaries felt they couldn't do their work without forcing the converts into agriculture, which would have been at odds with fur trading. So that's pretty amazing. Whereas in other areas, colonists found gold or other resources which they already knew how to get at more efficiently than the natives, or things like tobacco, which they learned to produce more efficiently. Taking over tribute systems already in place was promising, but the more settled folks were even more susceptible to disease than the others, living in higher densities as they were.

Oh, and did I mention the whole class is depressing and gives me nightmares?

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