Greetings Mosaic I Class!

Hello Honors Mosaic I class! My name is Eric Ralph, and like most of you (well, probably all of you), I am a student at Temple University. I am from Northeast Philadelphia, not too far from Franklin Mills Mall and the Northeast airport. For high school I attended Archbishop Ryan, I’ve been in private schools for a majority of my life, so when I first started attending Temple last year, the large diversity among the student body was a bit new to me. I graduated high school in June of 2011, and am now a sophomore here at Temple.

            My major is Applied Mathematics, so as you can probably imagine, I enjoy math quite a bit. To me, there is nothing better than sitting down and enjoying a nice cup of hot cocoa with a side of calculus. My hope when I graduate is to get a job where I will be involved with statistics, I'm not very clear on specifics yet.

            My goals for this class are fairly straight forward, I want to be able to better analyze and critically think about what I am reading. I feel my abilities in math related classes are very strong; however my reading abilities are in need of some fine tuning. Hopefully this class will be just what I need to help with that.

            The Body Ritual among the Nacirema was quite an interesting article. I actually needed to read the article twice, because is was not until after I read it through for the first time that I realized what Samuel Morris was really referring to. So the first time that I read it, I was of course surprised at the seemingly barbaric rituals and torture that the Nacirema were putting themselves through, but after realizing that Nacirema was just America spelled backwards, everything seemed to come into perspective. The holy-mouth-man was the dentist; the lalipso was the hospital, etc. After realizing this, I found the paper to be very humorous. I must admit that Morris came up with quite an interesting way of teaching us not to judge a society by its culture, no matter how demented or unnecessary some of their customs may seem to outsiders. Overall, I thought the article was very interesting, and it’s unique, albeit twisted, outlook on American Society to be both entertaining and enlightening. You have to wonder though, what he would have said about daycare in his article if he had put it in. He would probably have said something along the lines of 'The parents abandon their children on a daily basis.' Which, like the rest of his article, is completely misunderstood when it is taken out of context.