My Geography Extra Credit

This extra-credit assignment started with a video in weather class. It was a video with a guy who looks like he was enjoying a nice Sunday afternoon at home. Maybe he just finished mowing the lawn and now he watching his favored football team. Now subtract the Sunday afternoon, his house and couch. Now add an auditorium in Monterey, CA filled with some of the world’s top scientist, philosophers and other geniuses’ of our time. Now you have the visual.

The guy I’m talking about is Psychologist Barry Schwartz(click on his name to watch the video), and he gave a very impressive lecture about how society has too many choices, and that the key to life is having low expectations. After the video, my professor asked the class our opinions and then gave us an extra-credit assignment which had nothing to do with weather at all. Watch a second video from this website and write a page response. And so it begins.

The video I chose to watch was Eva Vertas (click on her name to watch her video)lecture about cancer. Eva Vertas is a 19 year old prodigue in the field of microbiology. I found her lecture to be quite interesting. The way she began with her families’ life story and her path from the Ebola virus to fruit flies to Alzheimer’s to cancer was really cool. There were a few parts of her lecture that really stood out to me. The first one was how she spoke of preventing cancer as oppose to getting rid of cancer. The second was how stem cells “contribute” to tumor cells.

Ms. Vertas first point struck me as innovative right away. I mean every time you hear about cancer, it is about trying to find new treatments. But right away, when she gets on the topic of cancer, she specifically says she wants to prevent the impairment before it becomes a problem. Who thinks this way? Most people when talking about anything that is harmful go strait to how to fix it, not how to prevent. She reminds me of a good parent who baby proofs a house before they have children.

And from that point it lead strait into stem cells being one of the factors of cancer. She said that in most of the cancer research she did said how cancer is related to injury. If you break your leg and your leg has cancer cells in it, the cancer cells turn the steam cells into bone cancer. How is it that stem cells, this remarkable cell that is suppose fixed every part of the human body, is one of the main factors leading to cancer growth and movement? This video gave me some real head aches the first time I watched. So I had to watch it two more times to get a real grip on what she was really saying.

After I finished the video I started to think about how, even though this was entertaining and informative, this applied to me and my life. Why in the world would a geography teacher give me an extra-credit assignment about something that has nothing to do with weather, or even geography? It couldn’t be because he feels bad for me not doing well on quizzes. So why in the world am I writing this paper?

Then it hit me. These videos cover everything from philosophy to advance microbiology. But these videos all have one significant thing in common. These videos feature men and women who are all doing what they love, and beyond that, they are raising new questions about what they love, and even farther, they are innovating what they love. They are taking a passion steps beyond what it is know, and taking it to the future.

So the thought came into my head. What if this professor who assigned this extra- credit just wants me to succeed in whatever I choose to do with my life? What if he wants me to take from these videos a new direction in life? A direction where I am driven to succeed in my passion, and take my passion into the future? A direction where I am happy with what I am doing, and not caught up with all the petty things life can throw at me? Wow. This is a lot different from any other science class I took.