Floating Foundations - Livingston

While reading it wasn't hard to draw parallels between the examples of course material in the article and those of our class. We write responses to recently published articles and comment on others posts in a blog, which is similar to the professor's wiki assignment for Tulane students. We're assigned topics for writing that fall under a main category and are expected to develop critical conclusions in those essays, also much like the students at Tulane. Though the structure of our course was not as a restructuring in response to a natural disaster, I feel it's possible that our class, too, has been designed as a 'floating foundation' of sorts. Many teachers now see as the sole possibility for keeping students actively engaged in the coursework, and rightfully so.

Upon reading about the students who were not exposed to the surroundings of New Orleans during the devastation, I found myself agreeing with their nonchalance. Post-Katrina, I also felt that there was too much coverage of the event, and discussion of it got old. I was not directly exposed to it and felt no connection to the event. It would have been torture to write about it for a whole semester. The way that the professor went about redirecting the course in order to better incorporate those who felt this way was a much more suitable option. While Katrina was obviously a large shaping factor of everything in our nation that year and following, Livingston's comment really sums up how quickly our generation moves on. "Looking back, I recognize that I underestimated the pace at which students adapt to a changing present: how much, as adolescents, they are already at home on foundations that float."