Display Day

Yesterday, instead of having class, we all went to the FYS Display Day.  Here, there was a variety of things and activities to see, such as posters of haunted places, participate in yoga and other mediation activities, as well as read brochures.  I took part in seeing the haunted places, mostly because that sort of thing interests me.  The poster that interested me the most of about the island of dolls.  But why did this interest me so much?  Well, this interested me mostly because it creeped me out the most.  Like why are there scary looking dolls everywhere throughout the entire island.  This fact made me want to look up more information on the Internet.  However, after seeing all of the posters with haunted places on them, I was led to think that this class about ghosts and legends and their stories was really interesting.  I would like to learn about all these ghost stories even if I would be a little freaked out.  As a matter of fact, I listed this class to be one I wanted to take after the class I am in now.  As I was walking around the displays, I noticed the brochures on baseball and the question it asked: Sport or Religion?  Why was this question so interesting to me?  Well, it is just because I play the sport of baseball and that I believe it is a sport with religion spread throughout it.  Just take Josh Hamilton for example.  He is a Christian person who found God to come out of his bad time when he did drugs.  This is just one example of how religion is used in the sport of baseball.  Overall, I found that the Display Day was very interesting and I learned a lot from going!

Astronomy

Throughout the period of the Mayans, many of the Mayan people accomplished so many things.  A couple of these accomplishments include writing and math.  An accomplishment of writing is that scholars have called the Mayan writing one of the hallmarks of a true civilization.  My question is how were the scholars able to understand the writing of the Mayans?  I mean I could never understand the writing because it looks difficult to understand.  For the math concept, the Mayans were the first civilization to have the concept of zero.  This concept was a huge step in history.  I just don't understand how the Mayans were smart enough to establish all of the accomplishments that they accomplished.  This just amazes me!  Another idea that amazes me is the fact that they understood astronomy and how they created building that alined  with the stars.

Deities

Throughout the civilization of the Mayans, the people believed in deities and the afterlife.  They associated these gods or deities with animals.  But why did they use animals as figures for their gods?  I am puzzled by this fact.  Also, why do the Mayans have specific animals for specific things that these gods symbolize or worship?  What was interesting about the Mayans is that they believed in life after death.  This was especially interesting with the story of Pakal and how the Mayans designed his tomb to allow him to travel to the afterlife.  In my opinion, I am believe the same this that Ricky believes when he taught us about the conspiracy theory about Pakal flying into space on a spaceship.  That is really interesting in how we depict these different theories about the Mayans.