Cody Payne's e-Portfolio
Problem-Solving and Communication
In Aaron's Ethics class we had to look at issues and arguments from an objective and logical point of view. We would have to look at both sides of an argument and question the legitimacy of either stand point. Most times we would extensively research our chosen topic to view all angles and come to an ultimate understanding of the issue at hand and debate the nuances that make the argument and to hopefully find a credible solution. I personally learned a lot in this class especially because of the need to see objectively and not just from your own opinion or point of view. Looking at a controversial topic from an outside perspective forces you to lose any bias and see directly through falsehood.
In Mike's Civics class we took a close look at the protests and revolutions in Northern Africa and parts of the Middle East and debated the direction of this chaos and the position the United States takes on the matter. Once again we had to take an objective point of view to see all aspects of it. We had to think about what the intentions of the people and the leaders of those countries must have been and contemplate what we would do if put in that position. There were many different sources of information for these issues and lots of them were fairly one-sided so it forced us to search endlessly for different perspectives on the information given. I learned more about politics and society in this class than my previous civics class because of looking at the people and events that are taking place as we speak from an objective stand point and seeing all angles and aspects of the situation.
I chose Human Evolution for the topic of my Senior Thesis because it is a greatly overlooked subject when it comes to looking at our past to see where we're headed so I decided to take a close look at our evolutionary past and try to put the puzzle together and see where we might be going. In the process of finding information supportive to my thesis I came across lots of different sources relevant to the general topic of human evolution but rather irrelevant to the specific aspects I was looking for. It took a lot of looking to find the information I needed. When I began piecing it all together I attempted to present it in a way that portrays humans in an objective light and to get the reader to look at themselves as just another creature of the planet and but one small step in the evolutionary scale.
