Week of Class

This week in class we talked about many things. We got into our groups for our event we are putting on in April. I think our group had a pretty good discussion about what we wanted to do for our country, which is Canada. We talked about things such as what type of food we are going to have, what type of music we will have playing, type of different decorations we will have up at our booth, and types of prizes we will be giving away. We all had good ideas and we all agreed on everything. We have Ian in our group so I think that will help a lot since he is from Canada and has knowledge about the country and they way people in Canada do things. During the class periods I learned about othering and I learned that othering pretty much happens everyday, big and small. I also learned what monochronic and polychronic means. Monochronic means doing one thing at a time and polychronic means the exact opposite, doing more than one thing at a time, also known as multitasking. We also talked about what prejudice means to different people and a lot of people had their own meaning of the definition. On Friday we started to watch a movie about people making fun of others because of their sexual orientation. One part in the movie that really threw me off was when one guy said him and his buddies would look for gay guys and go up to them and beat the guy up and then take their money and just leave the person there. Another thing I though was crazy was when Matthew got beat up so bad by those people that their family could barely tell that it was their son. I think the rest of the movie should be pretty interesting. 

Lefsa

Today I had to bring in my snack from my culture. I chose to bring in lefse because this food has kind of been a major thing in my family. My grandpa and grandma on my moms side used to make lefse in their basement and sell it to local grocery stores. My mom and my aunts and uncles would help make lefse when they were younger. I also had the chance to make lefse with my grandparents in their basement where they used to distribute it from. The lefse was called “Elaine’s Lefse”, Elaine was my grandmas’ name. I was not able to make the lefse because I did not have the correct equipment and time but if I would have had these things I think I would have been able to make some homemade lefse for the class to taste. I have grown up around lefse and it has been part of our holidays ever since I was born. I thought it was kind of funny when some of the class did not know what this was. But then I remembered it is a Norwegian food and not many people in the class were from North Dakota or even Norwegian. My family has always put butter and sugar and also brown sugar sometimes on the lefse. I have always lefse and I think it will be something I will pass down to my children as well and also maybe even teach them how to make it. Making lefse is not an easy task as it takes some patients and concentration as well. You use potatoes and then take a rolling pin and roll it out until it is pretty thin and about fifteen inches circular. Then you cook it on a lefse cooker I guess you could call it and it is a circular grill that is flat and you use a flat wooden stick to flip it and you only flip it once and it only takes a few minutes to cook. 

Family Tree

Great Grandmother    Neltha Peterson     5-16-1900    5-16-1934                Eva Schmidt            Great Grandfather    Gilbert Peterson    9-20-1900    1-10-1990                Matt Schmidt
Great grandmother    Ella Eicholtz/Marie Eicholtz                                     Ida Fried
Great Grandfather    Ike Eicholtz            7-11-1904    12-21-1989  Joe Fried 6-5-1912    7-1-2000
Grandmother             Elaine Eicholtz        4-13-1930    8-26-2010     Marcy Schmidt      3-17-1940
Grandfather              Earl Eicholtz           7-8-1928    3-17-2009        James Schmidt       3-8-1937
Mother                    Debby Schmidt          6-7-1960                Father Kevin Schmidt        4-24-1960
  Kolby Schmidt    12-11-1991
This is my family tree for both my mothers and my fathers side of the family. 

As you can tell my great grand parents date back to the 1900’s. My mother’s family is of Norwegian descent and my father’s family side is of German descent. I am not quite sure where my great grandparents came from but I do know they are Norwegian. My dad is German and I also don’t know where his ancestors came from German descent. I never have really known much about my ancestors because I have never really had to do research on them. I got research from my mother and my grandmother but they didn’t really give me much information besides my family tree.

Class

            During last week of class I learned some new things about certain topics. I learned about what culture means and we discussed the topic of culture for a little while. I learned that culture is the way people live, your lifestyle, your religion, your family’s history, your age, your sex, and also a person’s moral. Also culture is learned and not how you were brought up. Another thing I learned was the melting pot. I learned that the melting pot was a bunch of cultures are mixed together. I also learned about “tossed salad” and that is when you can tell the differences between the cultures but they live in the same location. I also learned about people who are foreign to the United States and how forty seven percent of scientists and engineers are foreign born. Also people often come to the United States for an education because the United States is a lot more technically advanced for schooling. We also were taught about what symbolic, dynamic, and ethnocentric mean. We also had to write down five things that we thought was our culture and the five things I wrote down were male, twenty-years old, from West Fargo, ND, family, and also Lutheran. I think this describes my culture pretty well in five topics.

            We also learned about organizations. Organizations can involve certain things and can all be different and can be process-orientated, job-orientated, professional, an open system, have tight control or loose control, and can be either pragmatic or normative; meaning either flexible or rigid. You also reminded me that I have to bring a snack to class tomorrow. I have been thinking about what I am going to bring for a while now and I think I have a good idea what I am going to bring in. 

Week of Class

The couple days of class we had this week I found to be pretty interesting. There were some things I learned about and there were also some things I already knew a little about when we talked about them. The first day of class was pretty much like every other class I had. We went over the syllabus and covered all the guidelines of the class for the semester. The syllabus was pretty much self-explanatory and it was straightforward. We were told how to do our blogs and what you expected out of our blogging. The first blog we did was about some of our goals for the class and I knew I was going to have to give you some goals at the beginning of the semester because of the other class I had with you, so I was expecting that. I also like the fact that you are calling our tests knowledge celebrations. I think this gives the class a “comfort zone” I guess you could say because I think the class wont stress out as much hearing the words knowledge celebration, as apposed to test.

            I thought the second class session we had was a quite interesting one. The movie we watched made me think about some things and it also made be laugh because it was a little bit on the cheesy side. However, the movie did get its point across. From my point of view, the movie was one that made a point that I think almost everyone could relate to and it did this quite often. When you brought up that we had to plan an event for the college, I wasn’t too thrilled right away but after the class started talking about it a little bit I kind of changed my mind. I think the project we will be doing will be pretty fun. The group I am in is doing Canada and I think that will be cool because I don’t really know much about Canada and I wouldn’t mind learning about it a little bit. This was pretty much all we did in the two class sessions we had and I think the classes we had were good ones.

Goals for this class

My name is Kolby Schmidt and I am from West Fargo, ND. I came to Williston State College because I got offered the chance to play baseball. This will be my sophomore year here at WSC and I am hoping to graduate in May, 2012. I hope to achieve a few goals for this class which include learning about a bunch of different types of cultures, learning how to communicate with these different types of cultures, and I believe I will learn new cultures that I didn't know existed. I come from a good size city which is Fargo, so I am fairly familiar with many different cultures. I think coming from a bigger city will help me in this class because I will hopefully have a good idea about these different cultures before we start talking about them. Different cultures throughout the world have many different views and ways of thinking and learning. I hope I will be able to better understand these ways of thinking and leaning by taking this Intercultural Communication class. I also am striving to attend mostly every class because it has been stressed by our coach to make sure that we attend every class because once we get into our season we will be missing many classes due to games. You said not to talk about grades but I am hoping I will be able to achieve a B or maybe even an A in this class.