Thursday, March 05, 2009

School speak

When I blogged about finishing my assignment the other day, Michele from A Reader's Respite asked about the topic of my essay. I thought I'd briefly mention it today in lieu of an actual post.

My university course is called An Introduction to the Social Sciences (a course that is no longer available after this year, but this course is its successor). The course started off with an introduction to the introduction. We read a very brief textbook about crime in the contemporary UK which gave us the basics of what we will be dealing with in future blocks of study. Our first essay (for which I'm still eagerly awaiting my results) was to discuss how our society is both fearful of as well as fascinated by crime.

One of the first points that was discussed about studying social sciences was not to bring your own personal history to the course. While interesting, a personal bias will limit the scope of understanding the course. Fair enough, but even so, as I'm reading the materials, I always relate to my own history of related topics anyway. I have quite a lot I'd like to discuss on our next block of study, which covers identity. What is identity? and how is it formed?

But crime was also fascinating. I don't know if a lot of my readers know this, but my brother has spent a great deal of time in jail. He's been in and out of trouble for many years. I've always been a little worried about him. He's now almost 28 and for the past 10 years he's been paying for the bad choices that he made when he was younger. So the sections dealing with causes of crime were of particular interest to me.

The essay itself was pretty basic. Outline the idea that we're fascinated and afraid of crime. The latter was a bunch of statistics and surveys done about rising levels of crime and also the perception that people are more at risk of becoming victim to crime and the former was a short paragraph about how surrounded we are by crime on television as crime documentaries, crime dramas, crime fiction, true crime books etc etc.

I'd like to write more, but I can hear the boys arguing downstairs and I'm not sure if my dad is up to refereeing little boy squabbles just yet.

Edited to add: I PASSED MY ASSIGNMENT WITH A REALLY HIGH SCORE! SO, SO HAPPY!

5 comments:

  1. well done on the pass! (again!)

    It sounds likea really intersting course, I hope you are enjoying it.

    I was intersted in doing humanities and social science but we will seee what happens.

    I never knew your bro had been inside, tiz sad he is still paying the price for his previous mistakes, I hope he can pull himself out of the loop x

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  2. Hooray! Congratulations, Michelle. And the course really does sound interesting.

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  3. Hooray for passing and with a really high score, too!

    Funny how so many are worried about/afraid of crime and yet it's the subject of so much of our entertainment.

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  4. Well done on passing. Well done on being able to study with two young children! I am amazed.

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  5. Congratulations! I too managed to study with two young children and it was well worth the effort.

    xx

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