Sandra's Blog

  Ashley and I chose to present on the Salem Witch Trials because it is a topic that interests both of us. However, after mastering the subject for class, I realized that I actually didn’t know much about the trials at all. Although they took place over 300 years ago, I was especially surprised at the connections that could be drawn between the trials and current events today. We started our hunt for information with the first accusations, but we soon realized that the causes went further back. The first accusations were made by two young girls, who accused three women, including Tituba, an enslaved woman in their household. After being pressured, Tituba confessed to practicing witchcraft and claimed the devil had helped her. This led to a string of confessions and accusations throughout the town. Something that struck me was the social status of the accusers versus the accused. The accusers were usually young girls, with two of the earliest being only 9 and 11 years old. The acc...

     I’ll never forget receiving the email that I was needed as a “cybercriminal” for class that day. I was filled with a mix of excitement and dread at the thought of having to con one of my classmates. However, after learning about scams over the past couple of weeks, I was thrilled to be able to put my skills to the test. When I walked into class to receive my task, I immediately got to work, devising a plan to find out one of my group members’ mother’s maiden name. I thought this would be a breeze; unfortunately, I was mistaken. Although I had already spent an hour before class coming up with fun ways I could collect information from my peers, I found myself at a roadblock when it was time to actually carry out the task at hand.  My first tactic was to try to use the assignment to elicit the information. We were creating our own scams, and my group decided to make fake parking tickets. Hypothetically, we would print fake parking tickets that looked identical to...

Watching Paper Moon in class was the first time I realized that this course was not what I expected it to be. I had expected to look at scams, but I didn’t realize that it would be a puzzle to find the scam in the films we watched and the topics we learned about. Originally, I had pictured all scams as inherently wrong. However, watching young (and now motherless) Addie run around with Moze selling Bibles gave me a new perspective.  I was first surprised by how clever the scam truly was; it took effort to track down women in these specific circumstances. It also took a certain cunning on Addie’s part to determine just how much could be collected from each family. For example, she knew that the wealthy woman would be willing to pay over $20 even though they normally asked for $8. It was hard for me to decipher whether this scam could ever be justified because some of the money earned was going to Addie, who was left with nothing after her mother died. At the same time, the scam invo...