9 days until graduation

I just completed the oral portion of my French 202 final. I will take the written proficiency exam Friday evening, thereby completing the foreign language requirement for my degree.

This afternoon I have one last lecture in Language and Culture. The take-home final and study guide will be given out at the end of the hour. I suspect that it will be ridiculously easy.

That leaves Human Impacts on Ancient Environments and Prehispanic Civilizations in Mesoamerica. Those finals will be Tuesday and Wednesday next week, repectively.

Speaking of education, the results of the National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study were released today and they are terrifying. No wonder most Americans perceive current events without any sense of context! If we don't know the spatial relationships between nations, how can we know much about their historical relationships?

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a classmate, another honors student, in October 2004. She was undecided about for whom she would vote in November. I was appalled to find out that she didn't know the parties of the candidates, nor did she know that Bush was the current president! She was also completely unaware of the Marriage Protection Amendment that was in the news at the time. In fact, she thought that gay marriage was legal in every state! She hadn't heard anything about Massachusetts. I explained all of those things to her and she decided at that moment to vote for Kerry. Once she realized that people's lives were actually affected by the election, she began to take it seriously enough to start learning a few things.

I have a hilarious book titled Non Campus Mentis. It is written like a short history of the world, but is assembled entirely out of excerpts of history papers written by college students. I howl whenever I pick it up, but it depresses me that these statements came from the same demographic group that miserably failed the NG test. The same people that can't find Iraq on a map (and likely support the war anyway) are also the ones that think the British sent Aztec troops to fight at Gallipolli and that the Catholic popes were relocated to Arizona by the King of France. It makes me wonder, would the war have happened if Bush could identify Iraq on a map? Was he confusing Iraq and Iran all along?

Here is what I have been listening to today:

1. Peter Gabriel: So
2. Gruff Rhys: Yr Atal Genhedlaeth
3. Safety Scissors: Tainted Lunch
4. The Magic Numbers: The Magic Numbers
5. Joy Division: Closer
6. Goldfrapp: Black Cherry
7. Cities: Cities
8. Antony & The Johnsons: I Fell in Love With a Dead Boy EP
9. The Kallikak Family: May 23rd 2007