So as most of you AISers know, we had to write a biography on the ‘late’ Mr. Bolos last week, using a box of his personal belongings to help us draw our conclusions. According to Mr. O’Connor, examining someone’s things can tell us a whole lot about them! The moment Doc OC ;)set that cardboard box on the table before us, my mind drifted way back to the summer before seventh grade when my friend and I decided to bury our own little time capsule that we were to dig up the summer after our senior year of high school. I thought of that day briefly as I dug into the box, but I soon forgot about it. Days later, I was staring at the notes I had taken on Mr. Bolos’s artifacts, trying to piece them into the little I knew about his life. This was basically a guessing game. A rubber mouth? He must’ve been a dentist! From that bar of ‘wash your sins away’ soap, he was clearly insanely religious… A picture of the girl’s basketball team? He must’ve loved basketball! And girls? These artifacts taught me nothing, or even took me down a completely inaccurate path. Again, I was reminded of my time capsule. Slowly at first, I began to remember what I had put inside. Several pictures of Cole Sprouse, a plastic tooth filled with a couple of my old baby teeth, a picture of my fat black cat, a list of my ten favorite things (1. hot dogs, 2. funnel cake, 3. full throttle…). If anyone were to write ‘The Life of Kasia’ based on this box of things, they would’ve deduced that I was an overweight, cat-and-pre-pubecent-boy loving weirdo that did sick things like save decaying teeth… I don’t even like that cat.
So this all brought me to the conclusion that you really can’t learn a lot about a person based on some things they have laying around. No disrespect, Mr. O’Connor, but asking us to learn about Mr. Bolos by looking at some of his things was misleading if anything. If people are what they have, then I’m just weird.
I agree, looking through possessions can be very misleading, and to make things worse, everyone has a different opinion. Though someone might see the rubber mouth in the box and assume Mr. Bolos is a dentist, another person can look at the same rubber mouth and assume he a crazy old guy that collects random body parts (maybe). I think looking through someone's possessions is almost worthless for it's impossible the true meaning of all the stuff unless you ask the owner. From the start, the Death of Mr. Bolos paper has been a "wild goose chase". Though it was a valuable learning experience of putting together artifacts, if we had been graded on the accuracy of our papers, I believe the entire class would get an F (though a main factor of that is because Mr. O'Connor was feeding us false information). The assignment basically showed us a bunch of stuff, and told us to fully describe a man's life, which would mean 30% would be finding information from the artifacts, and 70% would be assuming. For all we know, Mr. Bolos could have found a bunch of junk from his trash and piled them into a box. And for all we know, from looking at Kasia's time capsule, she could have been a junk food-deprived girl, thinking she's married to cole sprouse with a cat as their kid, and unaware that the tooth fairy gives you money for your teeth.
ReplyDeleteI see where you're coming from, objects can be analyzed in a myriad of ways which makes the deduction of true information quite difficult. However, i just had the idea that if perhaps one doesn't look at the artifacts separately but together as a whole, greater insight can be gained into how to analyze them. For instance, you saved some of your teeth, which id struggle to believe were things you were attached to. Therefore i wouldn't assume everything you'd placed in the box were items you were attached to, and wouldn't necessarily assume the picture of the cat was there because you necessarily liked it. It could have some other significance.
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