PHIL 325-50

I took PHIL 325-50 Love, Sex, and Friendship in my Spring semester, Junior year, to complete a perspectives honors requirement for Cormier Honors College. I have taken classes with Dr. Blincoe before and liked his way of teaching, and the topic interested me, so I was excited to take this class. I probably would not have even thought of taking this class without seeing it on the honors list offerings, but am ultimately glad I did see it, after finishing the class. There were some aspects of the class that I did not like, but they had less to do with course material and more to do with assignments given, and in the end this did cause me some trouble with completing all the assignments. Because of the time conflicts I had this semester, as well as problems going on outside of school, I did not do as well as I wanted to on all my assignments, and this caused me to get a lower grade than I was aiming for in this class. I ended this class with the grade of a 92.75%, an A- based on his grading scale.

As I had already taken one of his classes before, I knew what to expect for the final project. Like the last class I took with him, this was my favorite assignment for this class. For this project, we had to work in groups to apply some of the concepts we learned in class to a dialogue created by the group. I worked with one other person, and we decided to write on the topic of technology. My position for the dialogue was that technology is good, my partner’s position was that technology was bad. We had some really good sources to use from class, so we pulled a lot from our notes and looking back over those sources, then we also did some research from both scientific and non-scientific sources from outside. we then worked together to see how we could work in all of our points and bounce off each other, as we knew that no one side was going to win the argument in our dialogue. I think what really helped in this project was the fact that we both knew where we stood on what we were looking for from this project and how we wanted to go about getting those results. We agreed for just about everything and work flowed really fast and smooth. The only time there was a little hiccup was at the end when we were trying to decide the title. We ultimately stuck with “Technology: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”, but I still believe in my heart for it to be “Say YES to TechNOlogy”.

Final Project Dialogue; Ariel Birkholz, Virginia Bryington; 29 April 2022. Group project of a dialgoue between two people on opposite ends of the technology debate – one believes technology is good and vital to everyday life, the other believes it is bad and harmful to the connections between people