Step 1: Open iTunes application on your Mac computer.
Step 2: Insert a Great Courses CD into computer.
Step 3: A splash screen will appear after the computer senses the CD has been inserted. This might take a few seconds. On the splash screen shown below, select “Yes”. You DO want to copy the disk into your computer.
iTunes splash screen asking if you want to import from CD
Once your computer begins to read the CD, iTunes will give you a progress report at the top of its display.
iTunes progress readout showing ripping progress.
As each track has been read properly, the iTunes screen will give a green check mark.
Image shows the CD list of tracks and which have been copied.
When the disk has competed its reading process, a little ding might be heard from your computer speakers.
We are now going to make play lists for each lecture in iTunes.
At the bottom left corner of the iTunes window you should see four buttons.
Lower left corner control buttons for iTunes.
Mouse click the + button. When you do this a new playlist is created and it will allow you to type in a name. The default name is “untitled playlist”. Make sure you enter a good name. I recommend you enter the lecture series and lecture number.
Next we are going to populate the correct lecture into this playlist. Go to the playlist called “Recently Added” and select it so the tracks you just ripped from the CD show up.
Highlight all the tracks that go with the single play list you are building now. Use your shift key to select a range of tracks.
Use your mouse and click on the highlighted GROUP of tracks and DRAG them over to the correct play list.
Renewal for my safe deposit box is up again this month with Union Bank. The bank decided to add a fee of $15 to our annual $85 safe deposit box fee because we do not have a checking account with that bank. I have all my bank accounts with a wonderful credit union, called Schools First. Credit unions are simply the best while banks, in my opinion, subscribe to the greed principal, and the $15 added fee, allegedly, was right up there in that category. My credit union does not offer safe deposit boxes so I started to look around for alternatives. We have our mortgage with Chase so I found a local Chase bank that offered safe deposit boxes. I went in to inquire, if having our home loan with Chase, qualified us for a good safe deposit rental rate. The bank layout inside is somewhat unusual. There are no counter tellers in a straight row behind bullet proof plastic. The room is large and circular. In the center are large podium desks where the tellers stand. You wait in line for your turn to talk with a person working at one of the podium desks. It is a bit disorienting at first. I am not sure why these desk islands concept is being used. The account services people sit at traditional desks around this large circular room, against the outside walls and were all busy. One of the tellers, I met with, could not tell me the answer to my question and told me to wait for account services person in a nice waiting area with padded chairs that looked like they came from iKea. An oriental women came in about ten minutes after me and asked me if the area I was sitting was for new accounts. I said yes. I was getting so bored I turned to my BlackBerry e-mail. One of the account services persons, a young women, came over and proceeded to ignore me and took the oriental lady to her desk. She never asked who was first. I was astonished at two mistakes being made, one by the bank employee and the oriental lady. I waited another five minutes for any person to become free but my daughter called asking me to pick her up at school. I said I would pick her up. On my way out, I mentioned to the teller, that had told me to wait, what had happened. She looked most embarrassed.
This is just one more reason I do not like to deal with banks. At my wonderful credit union, you register at a desk residing at the center of the bank. The people there even can take care of questions and make copies of documents for you. They make sure you are called in order if you have to wait for an account services person.
Sort of odd, don’t you think, that small credit unions have a more professional operation than some very large banks.
The following is an edited version of actual correspondence.
SC: I ran into Dr. T. I described to him, as I could best describe how you told me the way you perform in your classroom, not having viewed your “performance” but just what I could remember from your telling me, and passed out but a few phrases to Dr. T. He picked up on a small reoccurring theme from my most inadequate description of you and told me that sociology instructors must convey the science of sociology and not push for any agenda. When he told me this I must admit I was taken back, shocked at being told this. I have reflected much about what he told me and I guess it is much safer to present the current teachings of sociology without pushing any viewpoints to avoid ire from administration and community.
In my opinion, if one values education and strives to determine the truth in all things, then does it not follow that attitudes and viewpoints arise out of this? Could it be that they just want safe, no radical, no fringe viewpoints? That possibility, if I am correct in this line of reasoning, might work for high schools but in a college setting one expects distillation out of truth by faculty to share with students and have those students agree or disagree with well reasoned arguments. If this is possible, that Sociology Department might be vanilla flavor and adamant against any deviance from that.
I am not sure I have this correct; just had to share with you what I learned from Dr. T and see if any of this fits.
Dr. B: Those who espouse that sociology should be neutral miss the point of what sociology is, according to the founding fathers of the discipline. Most of these people are conservative apologists. Sociology by definition is political. The founders, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, DuBois, etc. were very much into social justice and reform.
One can teach from a passionate point of view without converting others. This is my approach–to provide an alternative to those who have been given the “normative” view of society. If students are disengaged from the social world, how are they to “know” what it means to exist in that world? Sociologists are a unique and quirky bunch–they analyze and interpret society and attempt to be objective, but are embedded in the world they study. If they could remove themselves from that world, they become abstracted from it and are better able to understand. However, how do you understand if you do not experience the sensuous world of the concrete? Max Weber suggested that one should engage in verstehen, a subjective understanding of social reality at the same time he advocated for an objective analysis of that world. In other words, if we acknowledge our biases, we are more able to objectively approach our subject. People like T assume that they can be objective by not being involved, i.e., being a “scientist.” However, they are most certainly pushing their own agenda by accepting the normative, uncritically. The reproduce the social structure rather than produce new information and social change.
If one is to exist in and study the social world, one must be involved otherwise one becomes a “book” academic—the worst kind of teacher.
That’s my two cents!
SC: In your opinion, how do you rank the Sociology Department, in total? Is it a book academic department or does it offer more of what you listed as your ideals?
Dr. B: That department is a product of the environment where it is situated–conservative O. County. They tend to want to hire people like themselves although the department likes to project an image of inclusiveness. If one talks with the minority student population in Sociology, one gets a sense that they are not being appreciated by a large number of faculty members, even the younger ones. To put it bluntly, most of the minorities came to me rather than other professors. I could understand their plight of being disenfranchised and marginalized in the department.
I enjoyed being in the department because I could be one who could create waves as well as one who mitigated against the problems that students faced. It was okay to have the “white liberal” to voice what they perceived to be radical, but the same was not okay from a minority faculty member.
In “Science as a Vocation,” Weber (1918/1919) writes:
The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts–I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party [political] opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts. I would be so immodest as even to apply the expression ‘moral achievement,’ though perhaps this may sound too grandiose for something that should go without saying (p. 147).
