I have quite possibly the best job on this entire campus. For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I sit at the Campus Honors House at the University of Illinois for five and a quarter hours once a week. Sometimes I clean the whiteboard, others I decorate the interior for whatever season or holiday is upon us. Most of the time, though, I sit. I sit and do homework, study, watch videos, or read. Tonight, I am sad to say, is my last shift as a "student worker," my official title.
It's finals week, and I've spent the majority of time tonight watching "The Sing-Off," which mixes two of my favorite things: a cappella music and expert critique. Listening to and watching groups perform "Viva la Vida" and "Rehab" with only voices is a joy. Hearing constructive criticism mixed with the occasional joke from Ben Folds and others is interesting. Now if only the show wasn't limited to four episodes. *tear*
After one and a half hours of musical entertainment, I decided that it would behoove me to read something. The Honors House, or "HoHo" as we affectionately call it, is chock full of journals and magazines. I set my eyes on TIME's Special Issue: The Year in Pictures. Now, I know for someone wanting to read something, a magazine full of pictures may not be the way to go, but the issue complements the photos with captions and commentary that bring the framed life to action again.
In the "Inbox" section on page 18, I read dissents from some readers at the notion of calling the years from 2000-2009 the "Decade from Hell." TIME's cover story from the December 7th issue was all about how bad the past ten years have been. Whether it was war or financial crisis, contested elections or natural disasters, this decade seemed like it had every kind of catastrophe possible. We might even say it was a clean sweep of the calamity grab bag.
From the Inbox, I moved to "The World," and here I came upon something that connected the Decade from Hell to something about which I have been wondering for a while. The piece is small, in the corner, kind of like a journalistic afterthought. In blue font on page 25, one reads "The decade is nearly over, and the world still hasn't reached a consensus on what to call the 2000s." Yeah, I know! What the heck do we call this decade? I know people say that the new decade doesn't begin until 2011, but if we refer to the "Roaring '20s," or any other decade, don't we mean 1920-1929? It makes sense to me, at least, so now I come to my main point: the past ten years should be aptly dubbed the "Double O's."
Yes, the "Double O's." Think about it. Say it a few times. Let it roll off your tongue. Double O's. Mm-hmm, you hear it? Because I do. The "Decade from Hell," as TIME calls it, should be given a name that refers both to what it literally was (2000, 2001, 2002, etc.) and to what it felt like at many times. Sure, there have been plenty of hard times in other decades and plenty of good times from this one, say some TIME readers, but that doesn't mean we can't feel that the past ten years were trying in many ways for our country. It also doesn't mean that we should pass up the fantastic opportunity to give this decade a catchy name that sticks. And isn't that what really matters here? It's all about making it easier for us to refer to bygone eras. Well, almost bygone.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Among Mirrors
This is my final post... as a CHP 395 student. My hope is to blog every once in a while when I think of something to say. It's just that I already write down thoughts and moments in a notebook to which I can refer if I want to throw myself back to a past time, and there are so many other things to do. Nevertheless, writing on this blog is a bit of a creative outlet for this math major, and Gawande told us to write something, anything.
Here I am—here we all are—among mirrors: reflecting on our reflections. We have this one mirror in front of us, and we're trying to look back on all of our experiences over the past 15 weeks, each a little mirror of its own. Its hard to choose which ones give the best picture. This also reminds me of those reunion shows with which most reality television shows end. You know, where all the people come back looking nicer than they did while the show was taping. All of my blogs are coming together for this final post, but just like in the reality reunions, only a few will get to talk for a majority of the time.
My best blog post from the first three weeks is probably Limits and Living with Others. I was able to connect a couple of different ideas from a few sources into one coherent post. It's funny to look back on what I wrote about the dishes not getting done very much. One of my housemates put a sheet above the dishwasher to keep track of who was starting and unloading the dishwasher. I think it increased our overall helpfulness by simply making it known when we haven't been doing our fair share recently. Imagine that: a real life example of effective change!
From the nest three weeks of the semester, I have chosen I Think I Can because it was something that hit close to home. I find motivation a very intriguing subject because there are so many questions about it. I tried to explore that in a way that brought my faith into the discussion, and I tried to do it in a way that presented my beliefs in a more expository than persuasive way. I felt especially good about the finished product afterward, and I think it shows some personal growth.
As for my other two "wild card" posts, I have picked Your Blog Bites! and This One's About Vision. These two posts are very different from one another, but I'm happy with both of them. The former was a lot of fun to write because I got to pretend to be a harsh critic. I intended for the intro to catch people off guard and draw them into the post. For me, the intro is the most important part of a blog. If you don't hook the reader within the first few sentences, you've likely used the wrong bait. On the other hand, my penultimate post was much more analytical than my other posts. It brings in more of what I was able to gather from our conversation last week. I didn't contribute too much that day and chose to listen more to what everyone else had to say. I think that it gives a pretty good summary of how the class went and some reasons why.
I think I've made it known that I liked the blogging aspect of the class. Sure, sometimes I felt like I had nothing good to say. Sometimes it felt forced, but most of the time it was a fun way to use parts of my brain I don't often use. Part of the reason I liked minoring in anthropology is that it was much different from math. I didn't have any anthropology classes this semester, and this course in some ways jumped in the space left by those courses. I think I will continue to use this blog, whether for other classes or for just sharing thoughts. This next semester during student teaching, my supervisor wants us all to keep a journal and send him the entries on a weekly basis. Maybe I'll post them here and send him the link. I hope to continue to grow as a writer and use reflection in conjunction with it as a way to grow as a reflective practitioner wherever I teach.
Here I am—here we all are—among mirrors: reflecting on our reflections. We have this one mirror in front of us, and we're trying to look back on all of our experiences over the past 15 weeks, each a little mirror of its own. Its hard to choose which ones give the best picture. This also reminds me of those reunion shows with which most reality television shows end. You know, where all the people come back looking nicer than they did while the show was taping. All of my blogs are coming together for this final post, but just like in the reality reunions, only a few will get to talk for a majority of the time.
My best blog post from the first three weeks is probably Limits and Living with Others. I was able to connect a couple of different ideas from a few sources into one coherent post. It's funny to look back on what I wrote about the dishes not getting done very much. One of my housemates put a sheet above the dishwasher to keep track of who was starting and unloading the dishwasher. I think it increased our overall helpfulness by simply making it known when we haven't been doing our fair share recently. Imagine that: a real life example of effective change!
From the nest three weeks of the semester, I have chosen I Think I Can because it was something that hit close to home. I find motivation a very intriguing subject because there are so many questions about it. I tried to explore that in a way that brought my faith into the discussion, and I tried to do it in a way that presented my beliefs in a more expository than persuasive way. I felt especially good about the finished product afterward, and I think it shows some personal growth.
As for my other two "wild card" posts, I have picked Your Blog Bites! and This One's About Vision. These two posts are very different from one another, but I'm happy with both of them. The former was a lot of fun to write because I got to pretend to be a harsh critic. I intended for the intro to catch people off guard and draw them into the post. For me, the intro is the most important part of a blog. If you don't hook the reader within the first few sentences, you've likely used the wrong bait. On the other hand, my penultimate post was much more analytical than my other posts. It brings in more of what I was able to gather from our conversation last week. I didn't contribute too much that day and chose to listen more to what everyone else had to say. I think that it gives a pretty good summary of how the class went and some reasons why.
I think I've made it known that I liked the blogging aspect of the class. Sure, sometimes I felt like I had nothing good to say. Sometimes it felt forced, but most of the time it was a fun way to use parts of my brain I don't often use. Part of the reason I liked minoring in anthropology is that it was much different from math. I didn't have any anthropology classes this semester, and this course in some ways jumped in the space left by those courses. I think I will continue to use this blog, whether for other classes or for just sharing thoughts. This next semester during student teaching, my supervisor wants us all to keep a journal and send him the entries on a weekly basis. Maybe I'll post them here and send him the link. I hope to continue to grow as a writer and use reflection in conjunction with it as a way to grow as a reflective practitioner wherever I teach.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
This One's About Vision
Reflecting through the use of blogs has been an important practice in our class this semester. Discussions have also played a large part in getting us to synthesize information. Reflection and discussion have really been the primary ways in which we have unpacked what our readings and guests have to tell us about designing effective change. On Wednesday, discussion about reflection took center stage for a while.
Quite a bit of this post is what I gathered from our discussion yesterday. I can only know for sure what I thought and think about the reflections. However, I can know with some certainty what others thought, based upon comments from the discussion. I guess this is a caveat.
Talking about reflections in class on Wednesday tied in really well to the material from Senge on personal and shared discipline. Turns out our personal visions for reflection were diverse, and we were not all aware of the shared vision for reflection. Some of us thought the process was supposed to be more structured and planned while others thought there was more room to maneuver with our posts. It wasn't clear at first how commenting was supposed to work or if we were supposed to look a bit to the week ahead. Some of us chose to write more formally, others chose to be more informal. One of us chose to write from the point of view of a rabbit. It seems like we each had a unique way of viewing the weekly reflections, and this is, well, reflected in our blogs. However, it isn't that our blogs are each so very different that shows a discrepancy among our personal visions and the shared vision. That's perfectly fine. What tells me that there was a gap between the visions is that we all but said it on Wednesday. There are two points from The Fifth Discipline that stand out to me when I think of what could have been better about our reflection-writing.
First, we never really answered the question that, according to Senge, addresses shared vision at its "simplest level." (Senge, 192) I don't remember our answering "What do we want to create?" That's probably the reason that there was so much confusion on Wednesday. Some people thought our blogs were supposed to address the week's prompt unless we had a "more awesome" idea, as one of us put it. The idea, in my mind, for why we wanted to maintain blogs was that it would be a way to extend the discussion outside the classroom. It would be a way to show Prof. Arvan that we were thinking about the material outside of class, and it would allow us to express our opinions and ideas in an alternative form. I guess I saw blogging as a fun alternative to writing research papers or something of that nature. What I wanted to create may have not been what others wanted to create, which may have not been what our professor wanted us to create. If we had answered more clearly, or at least revisited as a group, the question of what we wanted to create with our large network of blogs, I believe we would have been more successful in establishing a shared vision.
Going along with that, I think the blogging experience would have been more favorable if we had each firmly established our own personal vision for blogging. I think, from the comments on Wednesday, that a lot of us were concerned with knowing Prof. Arvan's vision for the blogs. We wanted to know how they would be graded, and not knowing that very clearly, in my opinion, caused us to not take as many risks. Some of us would have more often deviated from the prompt if we were sure it was encouraged. I think sometimes we just did not have a good sense of our vision for blogging. None of us are seasoned bloggers. I would say that our "personal mastery" is higher than it was fifteen weeks ago, but it still isn't extraordinary. Senge says that for people with high personal mastery, "a vision is a calling rather than simply a good idea." (Senge, 132) Maybe if we each had more of a vision rather than an idea for our blog, we would have all enjoyed the experience more.
I think we could have done more, but we did quite a bit as it is. A lot of this has to do with this course having a lot of "firsts" involved: first time for blogging (most of us), first time for the course, etc. Given all of those firsts, I think we have ended up with some fairly nice products of our experience. Maybe we didn't design as much effective change as we wanted to, but there's still time for us to reach more of our vision for the class. We still have one or two more posts to write, some of us have a multimedia project to finish, and my group is working on a survey and proposal to get a mentoring program for ANTH 143 going. It took us a while to get personal visions to line up with the shared vision, but I think it has happened here near the end of the semester. I would have liked it to have happened earlier. I would have liked for this ANTH 143 project to have come into focus before Thanksgiving break, but it didn't. So now, we work the best we can with the time we have this semester and maybe next semester, too. So long as we don't let reality bring us down too much, maybe we can achieve our vision for this class after all.
Quite a bit of this post is what I gathered from our discussion yesterday. I can only know for sure what I thought and think about the reflections. However, I can know with some certainty what others thought, based upon comments from the discussion. I guess this is a caveat.
Talking about reflections in class on Wednesday tied in really well to the material from Senge on personal and shared discipline. Turns out our personal visions for reflection were diverse, and we were not all aware of the shared vision for reflection. Some of us thought the process was supposed to be more structured and planned while others thought there was more room to maneuver with our posts. It wasn't clear at first how commenting was supposed to work or if we were supposed to look a bit to the week ahead. Some of us chose to write more formally, others chose to be more informal. One of us chose to write from the point of view of a rabbit. It seems like we each had a unique way of viewing the weekly reflections, and this is, well, reflected in our blogs. However, it isn't that our blogs are each so very different that shows a discrepancy among our personal visions and the shared vision. That's perfectly fine. What tells me that there was a gap between the visions is that we all but said it on Wednesday. There are two points from The Fifth Discipline that stand out to me when I think of what could have been better about our reflection-writing.
First, we never really answered the question that, according to Senge, addresses shared vision at its "simplest level." (Senge, 192) I don't remember our answering "What do we want to create?" That's probably the reason that there was so much confusion on Wednesday. Some people thought our blogs were supposed to address the week's prompt unless we had a "more awesome" idea, as one of us put it. The idea, in my mind, for why we wanted to maintain blogs was that it would be a way to extend the discussion outside the classroom. It would be a way to show Prof. Arvan that we were thinking about the material outside of class, and it would allow us to express our opinions and ideas in an alternative form. I guess I saw blogging as a fun alternative to writing research papers or something of that nature. What I wanted to create may have not been what others wanted to create, which may have not been what our professor wanted us to create. If we had answered more clearly, or at least revisited as a group, the question of what we wanted to create with our large network of blogs, I believe we would have been more successful in establishing a shared vision.
Going along with that, I think the blogging experience would have been more favorable if we had each firmly established our own personal vision for blogging. I think, from the comments on Wednesday, that a lot of us were concerned with knowing Prof. Arvan's vision for the blogs. We wanted to know how they would be graded, and not knowing that very clearly, in my opinion, caused us to not take as many risks. Some of us would have more often deviated from the prompt if we were sure it was encouraged. I think sometimes we just did not have a good sense of our vision for blogging. None of us are seasoned bloggers. I would say that our "personal mastery" is higher than it was fifteen weeks ago, but it still isn't extraordinary. Senge says that for people with high personal mastery, "a vision is a calling rather than simply a good idea." (Senge, 132) Maybe if we each had more of a vision rather than an idea for our blog, we would have all enjoyed the experience more.
I think we could have done more, but we did quite a bit as it is. A lot of this has to do with this course having a lot of "firsts" involved: first time for blogging (most of us), first time for the course, etc. Given all of those firsts, I think we have ended up with some fairly nice products of our experience. Maybe we didn't design as much effective change as we wanted to, but there's still time for us to reach more of our vision for the class. We still have one or two more posts to write, some of us have a multimedia project to finish, and my group is working on a survey and proposal to get a mentoring program for ANTH 143 going. It took us a while to get personal visions to line up with the shared vision, but I think it has happened here near the end of the semester. I would have liked it to have happened earlier. I would have liked for this ANTH 143 project to have come into focus before Thanksgiving break, but it didn't. So now, we work the best we can with the time we have this semester and maybe next semester, too. So long as we don't let reality bring us down too much, maybe we can achieve our vision for this class after all.
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