I found this address interesting. Deresiewicz addresses that the crisis with leadership has to do with students being told what makes someone a leader. Students are told that if they get good grades and make a name for themselves, then they can be a leader. But this is not always the case. Solitude is part of leadership because being a thinker is important. According the address solitude enables people to think deeply about their own thoughts and come up with their own beliefs. Although not all ideas may be original, this does help people think things through. Deresiewicz states “that solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better.” This is an important part of being a leader—knowing yourself. In order to lead others, it’s helpful when you know what group of people you want to lead. Being passionate about a topic can help you be a better leader. In addition, he mentions that solitude includes friendship. Friendship is part of solitude because talking with others about an issue you care about helps you to come to conclusions. It helps you to gather your thoughts and gain trust in others. After reading this article, I realized that it’s important for students to be told that a leader is not just a person that gets good grades and makes a name for himself. But because students are told the college is the way to being successful and becoming a leader, grades are stressed. How do we change the way leadership is viewed and encourage people to engage in solitude and innovation?
The lecture “Solitude and Leadership” is quite possibly one of the best things that I have read in a long time. It is extremely well stated and is something that I could completely relate to. There are a lot of thoughts in this lecture that I have been thinking about for quite some time, especially with being in this class. The reading simply helped put the thoughts into a neat package. One thing that I really like about the reading was how it addressed the people of our generation and how we could relate specifically to our lives. Words like “facebook” and “twitter” will instantly catch our attention because they are the things that we battle with as being huge distractions. I loved how he talked about how he knew from experience many educated people that don’t know how to think at all. He not only stated this, but he talked about how we actually do “think” and what that word that is thrown around all the time actually means. I like how Deresiewicz talks about how thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. It is being patient and allowing things to connect in your mind. I just do not think that the things mentioned in this article are going to change in our society until we stop stressing standardized testing and the importance of “one answer”. The most intelligent people know that there is always another answer and they have the creativity to develop that. This lecture really spoke to me and is something that I want to reread myself because I believe that he emphasizes a lot of problems with our form of education and our thoughts and beliefs on success.
I found the article by Burbules to be very intriguing. I think that it is a little bizarre the way that he thinks about education but none the less it made since with the analogies that he gave. There were some things that I did agree with and some things that I found to be appalling. Whenever I hear the word ‘tragic’ I automatically think of something bad that happened, is happening, or will happen, and I interpreted this article as something bad with the analogies that Burbules made. The one point that he kept making that stood out the most to me was “we help some students necessarily at the expense of neglecting or inadvertently harming others”. This in a way almost hurt my feelings because it is true but I never looked at it this way before. It hurt my feelings because I have been in many positions where you are helping one student and you know that there are other students that desperately need help but there is only so much that you can do as one individual trying to help a group of 30 students whether it be with something in the classroom or with aspects of their personal lives. It just really puts things into perspective every time I read this quote. Yet at the same time I know that this is going to remain in the back of my mind and since I am an overachiever/perfectionist/completest I will feel insignificant and incomplete if I feel that I have a student who has been simply overlooked or misguided under my instruction. I think that this small quote will continue to have a major impact on me when I enter the classroom and it will keep me on my A game making sure that I complete everything with 110% effort. -Emily Mink
I enjoyed Deresiewicz’s speech to the plebe class, mainly because he presented his views clearly and with plain diction – he didn’t fall more ambiguous and vague as he went on, but maintained a course I found easy to follow. This isn’t to undermine his expression, because his parallel of solitude and leadership is profound – and, as he speaks on “first thoughts always being someone else’s”, - this viewpoint seems fairly original. It isn’t that these concepts are innovative or even extremely philosophical, but he manages to compress them in a manner that highlights solitude as the essence of leadership. I found his idea of developing one’s introspection through articulation made a good deal of sense, though I had never considered it in that way before. In the same respect, his reference to the American Revolution was an impressive segue into the negation of conventional wisdom and the permanent power of disrupting “our habits of today”. I am a big fan of reading and found his argument for what makes books so valuable an intriguing one; I like the fact that its simple in context, but the complexity is there, though not crucial to understanding the general concept. Overall, I enjoyed this reading –I found Deresiewicz’s writing understandable as well as insightful; an oftentimes rare combination.
Even though this lecture was written for the plebe class, I felt like William Deresiewicz was speaking to me and all other college students. He mentions how the U.S. army is a bureaucracy, which is true and this can be connected to the articles we read in this class about some schools that have a bureaucratic education system. Every student is created to come out the same. I like how William is speaking to his class about solitude and leadership in order to change the type of person they become, during their time in the military. Taking action, I believe, is the most important thing when it comes to the challenges in education and leadership. I could relate a lot to what he was saying. I never tried to get into a top school but I remember in high school that our counselors kept telling us that extracurriculars were really important, not just grades. This is how students manipulate themselves to get into the top colleges they want to go to. According to William, they are trained to “jump through hoops”. I agree with this and I know people that I went to school with that were focused being a part of lots of extracurriculars and attending test prep courses to become the best they could be. This can go back to the valedictorian speech we read, I’m sure that is exactly what she went through. William is right, this approach is dangerous; schools with that idea are not training true leaders.
When he goes on to talk more about solitude, I kept thinking to how I could relate and apply that to my life so I can become a better thinker. I like how he brings up facebook, which is very relatable, and how it is a distraction that causes people to use other people’s ideas instead of thinking for themselves. When I get on facebook, I find myself getting sucked into other’s people’s ideas and beliefs and start making judgments. I start judging my life according to other people’s lives. I feel like a step of solitude for me could just be getting rid of my facebook account which may seem unreasonable at first but I believe it could change the way I think and get me to think more for myself. I like his definition of concentration, “gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input”. Usually when I’m reading for a class, I’ll get distracted after a couple pages and then check facebook, email and my phone, but while reading this article I refrained and I was able to really think about what William was saying. I like how he relates solitude to leadership. In order to lead, you need to be able to find new directions, and in order to find new directions you need a sense of solitude, which requires concentrating on one thing to develop new thoughts and ideas. How did it even come to be that people ignored the true meaning of leadership?
I remember someone wise telling Frodo in a recent Lord of the Rings movie I was watching that "To be a ring bearer means to be alone". Frodo was a leader. Frodo was alone, he was in solitude. He became a leader by leaving his party (the fellowship) and going off almost by himself to destroy the ring by casting it into the fire in Mordor. He completed his journey by thinking for himself and not getting ideas from other people. The speech Solitude and Leadership made me really think about what a true leader is. To be a true leader is someone who can think for themselves and change society for the better. Frodo took some chances and saved middle earth. Our leaders today tend to fit into a mold of not being radical or not willing to change anything in society. Maybe if we had more leaders like Frodo Baggins, our society would be able to be changed for the better.
In response to the Solitude and Leadership article, I was absolutely amazed with how much sense it made to me. I also like how Deresiewicz didn't limit his argument to just the youth of today. While there are many distractions in today's society with everything the internet and computers offer, but there were distractions 50 years ago in the form of radio, magazines, and newspapers. I even remember before I had internet or a computer, I would distract myself by reading video game magazines. It is a matter of being patient and giving our goals the proper time and care necessary to be truly thoughtful. We need to stop looking for the quick and easy ways/methods of thinking, and really take the time to sit down and think. Without distraction. And in today's society, it is especially difficult to find a place that is free of distraction. Maybe we need to isolate ourselves with a pen and paper, free of a computer screen. Go somewhere our thoughts are able to truly flourish. Are we going a road where this is becoming more and more difficult? Is technology ruining our abilities to truly think for ourselves?
I thought that the Deresiewicz (D) speech had an intriguing idea of the marriage of solitude and leadership. One poignant though that I latched onto was “So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers.” I fear that too often students in academia and throughout the public school system in America are put through unnecessary rigors simply for the sake of weeding out the people who are not willing to do so. While D expresses this when referring to the top notch graduates that go on to be the leaders in the Ivy League schools, its effect is present in schools around the nation no matter the demographic. With the increase of mandatory standardized testing, test prep, and a multitude of extracurricular offered, the present student has no choice but to imbibe information just to regurgitate it once again in order to meet the standardized curricula and requirements to be like everyone else in their academic life and then to somehow standout from everyone else in order to advance yourself. This, I feel, correlates with our present overwhelming sources of information; Wikipedia, Google, etc. The way we receive and search for information now is far different than when the educational model and curricula was made. We have taken account of such things and in schools now it is commonplace to teach “keyboard skills” and “computer technology” in as early as primary school, as it is expected in higher levels of education. The creative intellect then, our ability to think outside of the box, to simply think and formulate our own convictive beliefs is then stifled. D refers to this when speaking of leadership and introspection or solitude as it relates to all of these issues. How then can we as teachers incorporate, supplement this creative independence in our own curriculum and combat the rigid parameters and hoops of this standardized model of education? -Matt Zabiegala
What does it take to make a true leader? In my opinion, it doesn't have to be the smartest person or someone who is well known. A true leader is passionate about life and the experiences that shape our existence. A leader is someone that we can turn to for stability in times of great need. A leader changes the way were look at life. He/she is someone who has high standards and truly stands for something. Someone who taught us to set goals and instilled the confidence and spirit to achieve them is a true leader. A leader gets to know and tries to relate to people. A leader is open-minded and does not judge someone based on their appearance, intelligence, sexuality, religion, etc. A leader is a friend, a relative, a teacher, a co-worker, a boss, etc. A leader is not always someone who holds the most power. A leader can exists in our everyday lives. A leader is simply someone who knows us the best, knows how to lead us through crisis, can talk to us like a friend, will always be there when needed, and shows true compassion for life. Reading the article on Solitude has helped me to understand why so many students do not think that they too can be leaders. They assume that because they are young and don't hold a lot of authority, that they cannot be leaders. We must encourage our students to reach for the stars and never let anything hold them back. We must instill in them the passion that we hold for life and help them to understand that anyone can be a leader if they just set their minds to it.
I printed off the speech that Deresiewicz gave to the plebs class and thought it would bore me to tears, but instead it was one of the most fascinating things I have ever read. While reading the speech, it rang so true to the world around me that I wanted to tell everyone I know to read it or frame it and hang it up in my room. I love writers that say what they mean in normal or clear words that everyone can understand while still hurling new ideas at you and probing you to think in ways you have never though before. Deresiewicz did this. I am writing my final paper on this speech so I do not want to give too much of my paper away, but after reading this article I felt motivated to go and be a teacher who leads others and to do it now. We all know rebellion is fun and this paper is just trying to get people to be that rebellious person who does things differently and tries out new ideas; that person who is not afraid to take a risk. The difference between this kind of rebel and the kind doing 30 to life is that this rebel has a purpose bigger than him/herself. He/she does not do these radical things to get attention from others but does them for the sake of progress or doing the right thing for other people. The teacher who takes time out of the day to do an extra art lesson with his/her class in order to expose them to something new and different instead of yet another math lesson geared toward the OAAs is a rebel. He/she is doing something that may hurt him/her when the test scores come out and his/her kids did not do as well, but the children are benefiting from this culture. This article accurately breaks down the problems in our country and why it is failing, the lack of thinking and the emphasis on doing what you are told. This idea can be summed up into two words in relation to education-standardized testing. Our teachers are being asked to shove facts down children’s throats so that they choose the correct multiple choice answers on the tests. The leaders of this world are not or at least should not be people who only know that A is the answer because that is what their teacher told them.
I thought Burbules had some wise insight regarding utopianism. I thought his critique on Utopian thinking was excellent, citing that "it minimizes or overlooks serious impediments and limitations to our efforts toward change, which can be counterproductive when it makes us unprepared for the inevitable difficulties that arise." I was however, a bit uncertain where Burbules was going with pragmatism. Essentially it seemed as though his point could be summed up in his conclusion, "our search for means of understanding and action should be directed not toward a "quest for certainty", but toward attaining, if possible, workable solutions and decent human relations." And to this point I respectfully dissent. What is the point of education if we do not work toward some certainty? At that point we would simply be offering life-skills classes. (Now I'm not arguing against such classes; in fact, I think that we severely lack this sort of instruction. Nobody ever taught me how to show for food and live on a budget!) Is not that one of the primary functions of education, to instruct pupils as to the reality in which they live and the reality with which they interact? Perhaps I misunderstood Burbules's point, but to assert that we ought not strive for certainty vis-a-vis compulsory education while instead seeking 'workable solutions and decent human relations' is a bit of a stretch. Like the author, I don't necessarily have a solution, but I didn't find his alternative appealing.
I thought that Deresiewicz’s article was very interesting and I agreed with him on many things. Deresiewicz states that in society, leadership has to do with students being told or hinted at, at what makes someone a leader. He goes on stating that he knows many students who are involved in extracurricular activities, those who have high G.P.A’s, and those who are social, but he asks if all of those qualities are good enough to be a leader? On the other hand, he compares solitude to leadership. Solitude is actually part of leadership because you have to think and have your own opinions. Solitude helps a person to better know themselves, and knowing and trusting yourself is an important part of being a leader. I realized after reading this article that leadership really is not about getting good grades or just being social. I always had the idea that as long as a person is successful and confident, then they are actually good enough to be a leader, but that obviously is not always the case. This is the problem in our society, and how it is engrained in people’s minds that this is how a person has to be in order to be a leader. Is it possible for people to change other people’s views on leadership, or is it too late for the reason that people already have an idea because of what society has been taught generation after generation?
I found this article extremely interesting. Especially more recently, education has become more about the grade and the test score than real learning. The more emphasis placed on test scores, the more this problem is going to prevail. And if teacher salaries and jobs become dependent on test scores, this problem will never end. The question of leadership is comparable. What is a leader? It seems that high school and even college would lead one to believe a leader is someone who gets the best grades, does the most activities, and volunteers with the most organizations. But is that a leader? I was really hit by this question. As someone who has always been that overachieving student, I usually like to consider myself a leader. But what have I really done? Have I come up with any creative ideas? Have I inspired anyone to do anything? Unfortunately, the answer is probably no. So the question is, as an educator, how do we teach our students to be leaders if we don’t know how to be leaders ourselves? Deresiewicz seems to believe that we need to reexamine our thinking, because “…leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions.” It seems that we need to start teaching independent thinking as early as possible in order to create real leaders of tomorrow. -Katie Kuvin
The Tragic Sense of Education by Barbules was a little wordy and complex, but it was also very interesting. I really liked the paragraph about how the students will most likely have certain ways of viewing the world and these ways or reasons are who they are and because of this are typically very important to them ( or they are reasons they follow some sort of belief system). Then when we as teachers show reasons or "challenge" why they should or should not have their individual views we are in essence challenging who they are. I think as a future teacher it is a very hard line to walk because you have to be cautious to not be bias to what you believe and the views you have. Just because these are the reasons you feel "security and significance" in life does not mean that the students in your class do or should necessarily feel or even be challenged in that way. My question is in the part of the article where Rorty talks about pragmatism. Is Rorty saying you cannot find truth in those things such as science and god? I guess I just did not understand his sentence about the "largest lie" . -Caroline F.
I found the lecture on solitude and leadership given at West Point to be very intriguing. It made me analyze my leadership and question if my definition of a leader still held true. I believe, like the lecture stated, a true leader is one who stands out and voices their opinion even when it is not what the world believes or wants to hear. I believe it takes a true leader to stand up for what they believe to be right even if it means losing their job or their security.
I think this principle of leadership applies to education. We sit here as students in education classes complaining about the educational system, but are we going to change it? Are we going to be true leaders and voice our opinions in order to bring change or are we going to follow the bureaucratic system? I would like to hope that I am going to bring change and that all my fellow students feel the same, but I believe it is easier said than done. We are alone in this world and it is up to us, individually, to be the change.
I really liked the article The Tragic Sense of Education. It gave me a whole new perspective on education. Barbules states "...education is a perpetually incomplete and potentially unfulfilled process; that teacher and learner embark on an endeavor whose intended outcome is, from the very start, inevitably in doubt. Education that is worth anything involves experiencing undertainty, confusion, and failure." I feel that I can really relate to this quote. I am a week and a half from graduating, and am just now realizing that my education is not even close to being done. Prior to this class, I thought that I would have obtained a full and complete education upon graduation, but this article, as well as class has brought me to the realization that education is not complete once you graduate, it is life-long process. Barbules also discusses that we may encounter tragic experiences in education. I recently experienced this when I chose a career that has absolutely nothing to do with the major that I have worked so hard to complete in college. I feel like my last four years of college were completely wasted since I will not be doing anything that is related to what I have been studying. The article has helped me understand that although my career is unrelated to my major, through my education I was still able to "...adopt a much greater modesty in our claims of social transformation or reform through educational processes." And this will help me succeed.
I found the Tragic Sense of Education article by Burbules to be thought provoking. At first I really didn't like this article and did not agree with the argument being made by Burbules. I think that his meaning of education is pretty harsh. He says that every step in education is not a change for the better and that every gain is a loss. He goes on to say the long view is not available to teachers and learners at each step along the way. In some respects, I agree with him. We educate because we need to learn. Therefore, the information should in some sense be challenging. However, I did not like his comment that the long view is not available to teachers or learners. It almost seems as if he is criticizing education as a whole. I did however agree with his argument that as teachers, we only are able to have a slight impact upon our students life due to the fact that we will only have most of our students for one year. This brought to mind the topic of "looping" students, where students remain with the same teacher for several years in a row. I believe that looping would have its goods and bads. It would be great for the students and teachers to already know and understand one another. This could greatly benefit students if their teacher already knew of situations in their personal lives as well as how they learn best. On the other hand, preparing and arranging how the system would take place would most likely be troublesome. Therefore, my question is, do you believe that the benefits of students remaining with the same teacher outweigh the possible costs?
I enjoyed the speech by Deresiewicz. I think I would have enjoyed that speech in person. Leadership and leaders. What defines someone who is a leader or can be in a role of leadership? We strive to teach students how to be leaders. We encourage them to take leadership roles. But what really makes a leader? Are we teaching them to be the right kind of leaders? I agree with Deresiewicz’s argument that many in leadership roles are simply the ones who are good at jumping through hoops. They aren’t necessarily the best or right person for the position. I seem to see this a lot in schools and other institutions. A good example, from personal experience, would be my mom’s boss. She has gotten herself to the leadership position but really doesn’t do a good job and managing her employees. She doesn’t realize all the things that go into the jobs of her workers. She isn’t the best person for the job but she worked the politics and jumped through the necessary hoops. I think in school we often teach students how to jump through those hoops instead of making sure the truly have good leadership qualities. I agree that thinking is a critical component to being a good leader, so we need to teach students how to better think through problems. This will help students become the right kind of leaders instead of just being able to jump through the hoops. This may get them to a leadership position but are they going to be the kind of leader that we want? I don’t think so.
Deresiewicz brought up some interesting points. His belief that leadership is more than just being at the front of the herd running toward the cliff and the necessity of solitude to be a good leader really struck me. People often satirize the career bureaucrat but at the same time they tend to up in virtually the same position. Most people won't stand up and say something because they don't want to lose their job, cause trouble, or make a scene. Sometimes, that's exactly what's needed though. Being a leader is being the first person to make a scene, to bring an issue into the light. The recent arrest of the World Monetary Fund director provides the perfect example, the maid he allegedly assaulted could have done nothing and not caused a scene. Instead, she spoke out and has forced the world and the French especially to confront their beliefs about women. She had the moral courage to stand up for what is right, how many people would have the same moral courage to be a leader in their own lives?
I found the lecture titled Solitude and Leadership by, William Deresiewicz to be extremely interesting. Before even reading the lecture I was alreading thinking what solitude and leadership have an common, in reading the first paragraph I was astonished that William was going to explain just that, even though I assumed he would. "And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership." But why? The lecture drew me further in pondering how solitude was a form and a part necessary for leadership. I continued to read and became interested in the analogy that students are like sheep being herded to do what is expected. Getting straight A's, doing many outside activities, volunteering, passing tests, is what expected. But going above and beyond is whom is a leader. Its not the people who are the sheep doing what is expected but those going a step further whom become the leaders of today. Its the students who further question and crtically think about topics that make great leaders. The leader is the first person to stand up and make a debate on an issue and the first one to make a scene. Being the sheep is being a memeber of the society and joining the bureucrats and not stepping into a world of free thinking but a world where people think for you. Like William stated we do not have free thinkers but people who are modeled and think based on what politics presents them with. Its in this solitude or alone time that leaders, make this connections with the world and step out of line to not becoming sheep modeled on the grounds of the buercrats, but become their own free thinkers. How does someone who is given the tools to become sheep, become a leader?
The lecture given by William Deresiewicz really hit home with me. He talks about how the students he was working with at Yale had been trained to be “world-class hoop jumpers,” they know what they have to do to get what they want. But, the problem with this is that it does not require independent thinking from these students. This is something that I find extremely troubling. Our society has created a community of conformists. Our students know what they need to say and do in order to get to where they want in life, but that does not allow them to share their individual beliefs and opinions. America is lacking great leaders, who challenge the routines of society. Our schools need to be challenging our students to think deeply and create their own meaningful opinions about things. In my opinion, our schools are failing our students by treating them like sheep, just herding them through the school system. Our students should be challenged to think outside the box, to become leaders who challenge the status quo.
I kept putting off reading "The Tragic Sense of Education" because I keep reading these depressing articles about scooling and education. This quarter has been seriously making me question whether I even want to be a teacher (I'm also in school and society so not just this class, and I think the lawmakers in the state of Ohio deserve some credit). However, I was glad I read the article. The parts that talked about how education was always a loss and a gain and made people uncomfortable really made sense. I think that is exactly how I have been feeling, and it made me feel better to understand why I felt the way I did.
Deresiewicz has introduced a notion that I've been thinking about for a long time. He says that we don't have true leaders, true thinkers. The people in charge, in the highest rank, got there because they know how to kiss ass and stab backs. How utterly true and pitiful is this? Our country has ridden along on it's high horse for such a long time that we haven't even realized we've fallen. Not only have we fallen, but we can't even figure out how to get back up because all of our leaders aren't even leaders at all. They implement the routine. For a while I've been criticizing the current school system because we don't develop independent thinkers, we develop loyal followers. Think about it, we're all in college for what reason? Because we survived (probably excelled) high school by following the rules, jumping through the hoops. The next step laid out for us? College. So now we're here. Are we really here because we want a higher education? Or are we really here because we knew it was the right thing to do, the proper next step after high school. So are we free thinkers? Can we lead a business, an army, the country with brand new ideas that will revolutionize our decade? Probably not. But I have hope that knowledge is a seed and planted in the right soil it can grow. So now we know, we are aware, the question is, will any of us do anything about it?
In the William Deresiewicz article, "Solitude and Leadership", I thought it was really interesting how he tied the two together. At first, I was thinking, "how is he gonna tie these two together in a reasonable way"? However, after reading it, it actually made me think of my role as a leader, and the things I do in my own solitude to help make me a better leader. I really liked the following statement he made "What we don't have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction- a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision." I agree with, especially as as future teacher. We need to find people who can think for themselves, and who will go above and beyond, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of their students. People who won't just settle for what people says works or doesn't work, but are willing to go out of their way to find what truely works best for each student. However, in today's society, I think people are too afraid to take that initiative to go above and beyond. So my question, is how do we find those people and get them into the classrooms that need them most, working with students that need them most, to be successful people of society? Katelyn C.
I found the article "Solitude and Leadership" by William Deresiewicz to very insightful. He brings up the point about who the leaders in America are. They are the people who are the best at jumping through hoops. They are the people who listen to their superiors, do what they're told, and conform the best to society. This type of person is bred from early age. In school they are expected to attend classes, take standardized tests, participate in extracurriculars both in and outside of school. When a person can do this they have demonstrated that they are able to follow orders and conform. This brings up the question why are the leaders in our country the people the are best at following, instead of innovating? -John Searfoss
Solitude and Leadership by, William Deresiewicz is a very good article talking about how society isn't very good at independent thinking. In schools were so brainwashed into just trying to get stuff done to get good grades rather than actually learning the material. I feel like a lot of the readings in this class had to do with the same thing. Teachers need to focus less on standardized testing (although its what they are told to do and focus more on actually getting the student to learn something. In my opinion, if a student is actually learning something rather than learning A is the correct answer than they will be able to think well enough to get the correct answer on that standardize test. Teachers need to be leaders because i would rather have someone out in the world with actual knowledge rather than having someone who just does enough to get by and know the correct answer for the time being until they don't need to know it anymore.
I really liked the lecture by Deresiewicz. It really made me think about my education and if I am really a "thinker". I came to the conclusion that for the most part, my education failed me in this regard. While I have had a few teachers and a few assignments during my schooling that have encouraged me and forced me to think for myself and challenge common ideas, most of my schooling has consisted of regurgitating information and "jumping through hoops" as Deresiewicz called it. I am a good student because I know what the teacher wants and I do it not because I challenge what I think is wrong and come up with my own ways of doing things. This is a sad, but I think many people in our generation have been programmed to think this way. We are trained to be do things a certain way, many times mindlessly, but have not grown much within ourselves. How many kids just do extracurricular activities because they think it will help them get into college rather than because they actually want to? I am pretty sure the original idea with extracurricular was not to get you into college rather it was to help you grow as a person. Growth as a person should be the ultimate goal of education not a means to an end.
I found the Solitude and Leadership article to be very interesting. The article starts off by telling the audience that there is a crisis with leadership as well as concerning what the students are told makes a leader. Students are commonly told that if they receive good marks in school and make a name for themselves in the world then they can be a leader. As the author continues on, he tells us that this often is not the case. Solitude is part of leadership because being able to think and be a problem solver is crucial, helping to pave the way for growth. In order to truly lead, we must be willing to find our own path and think for ourselves. The author brings up many relatable examples, examples that show just how easy it is to get sucked into the viewpoints of others. I know I am at fault as well, often getting pulled in to different issues after seeing my friends’ viewpoints on the matter. Possessing solitude entails being able to think deeply, and to be able to come up with our own ideas. As teachers we must stop stressing standardized testing and be open to more than one way to solve a problem. We must allow our students to have the creativity to explore their fullest potential. Friendship is considered to be an important part of solitude, helping one to gather their thoughts and come to conclusions as well as gaining trust in others. The article continues on to state that to be a good leader, we must also truly know ourselves. This notion together with the belief in knowing your audience and being passionate about what you talk about are some of the ingredients towards becoming a leader. It is vital that we don’t just tell our students that leaders are only those who get good grades and make a name for themselves, possibly alienating much of the student population. The main question is how do we change this to where all aspects of a student are considered into what makes a “leader”?
“The Tragic Sense of Education,” article draws an interesting parallel between the realm of teaching and that of literary tragedies. Certainly there are harsh realizations that teachers encounter in the classroom that can be interpreted as “tragic.” For example, it is not realistic to think that as a teacher you are going to impact the lives of all of your students. In fact you may only impact a couple, which is a difficult pill to swallow for a new teacher. Furthermore, you may have high hopes and aspirations intending to enrich the lives of your students, only to find that you do not have the resources to do so. It is a common disappointment and reality that teachers face. The tragedy tropes of great literary works can definitely be found in the classroom. In fact I think that one of the reasons attrition rates are so high with new teachers is because they do not have a tragic sensibility and therefore are unequipped to handle the realities of their situation.
However, I do not think that education can be seen exclusively through a “tragic” literary lens, but rather should be seen through a prism of all three of the dominant Shakespearian genres, the tragedy, the comedy, and the history. In comedies, typically the protagonist experiences a series of unfortunate events, only to find happiness in the end. This can be related to teaching. In histories, there are themes of politics and ethical dilemmas, which undoubtedly parallel teaching. For me, the tragic sense is too limiting and pragmatic. As a future teacher I want to maintain a sensibility that encompasses all three genres, with an emphasis on the comedy.
I enjoyed reading Deresiewicz’s speech on leadership. He seemed passionate about the crisis he sees in leaders in our culture. He says that leaders have become people who can jump through hoops, pass tests, and climb the pole. There’s no organizing, initiative, or distinguishing characteristics being shown in our leaders, just a knack for maneuvering up the ladder. I like how he said that a true leader can formulate a new direction and has vision. I like this idea because I imagine a leader being a little skeptic of the system in place and always searching for new directions to move in and big dreams for their country, institution, etc. I like the image that “having vision” creates for me, because it makes me think of people who really think about things and create their own ideas while building off of others’ ideas. He also talked about courage, which is rarely seen today. That could be because there is less of a need for courage in a world where people can say whatever they want, but having courage is something to be looked for in a leader. It is the ability to stand up for what you believe. This is a quality I hope to have as a teacher. I hope I will be able to have a vision for my students and give them vision for what they can become. I hope I can move them in a good direction and show them what a true leader can look like.
My question would be: What are some leaders today who show signs of true leadership? What drives them?
I enjoyed the solitude and leadership article by Deresiewicz. I found it to be extremely interesting, applicable, and relatable to my life. It really inspired me to think about things in a different way and to try to do things with a different strategy or way than I usually do. I never really thought about solitude as being a part of leadership, because in my mind leadership is all about others and how you act towards them. I thought it was interesting to think about leadership in a different way. I also enjoyed how he related leadership and issues that go with it to many different situations and generations. I know that there are lots of distractions in our time, but also in others. We focus on how the Internet and TV use up so much of our time, but in other times it was just as bad just in different forms, like radio and newspapers. I think that Deresiewicz made an important point that people, especially leaders, need to stop looking for the quick and easy way to do things and to think about things, if we take our time the benefits will be much better. If we put in an effort to differentiate our ideas and modes of leadership we will do much better in the long run.
The Tragic Sense of Education was probably one of the more pessimistic articles relating to teaching that I have read, but I found it pretty interesting. I like to say I live in the shades of gray of this world, which is kind of what Burbules is saying to do. We have to see both the possible positives and negatives of situations in order to see the whole picture clearly. Education is perpetually incomplete. I liked the statement that, "Our most inspirational metaphors of education (climbing, grasping, journeying, etc.) connote aspiration, optimism, and progress; but such metaphors are, whatever their motivational advantages, fundamentally misleading because they promise more than can be guaranteed." In school, students are always given these sort of sugar coated mantras that are delivered in, usually, a less that sincere manner and are often disregarded or laughed off out of cheesiness. This is not to say that some utopian type thinking is not beneficial. It gives students a direction to look in and something to strive for whether it is obtainable or not. Burbules's assertion that, "the nature of things in education. As a process it is at best two steps forward, one step back—and often just the converse," is an uncomfortable truth, because isn't the point of school to make us better--all positives? -Katie Petrolo
The quote that stuck out to me the most while reading Burbule's article was “we help some students necessarily at the expense of neglecting or inadvertently harming others”. I agree with his statement and reflected on my own teaching when such instances occurred. During my student teaching I have noticed times when I have given some students extra help without doing the same for all students. It happens. You can't be with every student individually during one class period. You can, however, come up with a system that helps you spend one-on-one time with each student during a week. Target certain students one day, then target others on another day. I found that it can be easy to brush off students because they are either too far behind, or more advanced. In either case, not giving both types of students the attention they need can be detrimental and it is the teacher's job to figure out ways to reach each student individually.
My goal as a future educator is to encourage my students to think for themselves. During the middle childood ages, peers are such an influence that students who usually make good decisions start to make poor ones based on what their friends say. More than likely I will not teach a future Yale student, but I do know that being "privileged" or "prestiges" has nothing to do with leadership. I think that a true leader will stay true to their beliefs and will fight for the underdog. In some cases like the students of schools like Yale and West Point aren't trying to be leaders that will help social mobility. I just had an assignment discussing schools like Yale, Harvard and Princeton and the lack of respresentation of lower middle classes or lower socioeconomic status. I hope to teach my students how to be leaders in their community in hope to change the future for them or at least their kids in the future. Norma
I loved reading this article dealing with Leadership and the lack of it. I completely agree with this article. Personally, I feel that the lack of leadership today stems from the stupid self esteem movement has taken over schools everywhere. Teachers and parents both put way too much emphasis on children having high self esteem. They have taken it all way to far. Now a days children are rewarded for everything and told that everyone is a winner. That's not how life works and children need to be taught that. What incentive does a student have to work hard and focus on a project/assignment if they know that everyone will get rewarded or a high grade. Why try when everyone gets the same reward. A book I recently read titled "Generation Me" even goes as far to say that the rise in depression rates in children/young adults can be linked to this high self esteem movement. The author believed that children grow up hearing how great and wonderful they are, when in reality they merely average. Then life hits these individuals and it hits them hard. For the first time they are told they are not great and they can't handle it.
I found the lecture from West Point to be particularly interesting. I consider my self to be anything but a conformist. Obviously we all conform to the rules and expectations of society in some manner or another. That's why I was somewhat surprised by my reaction to this lecture. When I think of the military, I often picture individuals who are rigid and ritualistic in their habits. When Deresiewicz suggest that today's leaders must be willing to think for themselves and to some degree question the norm I was a bit inspired. I found this article to be relative to young teachers because I believe today's educators must be willing to ruffle a few feather for the benefit of their students. My fear is that to many of us will just adapt to the system and conform to what is expected in the name of higher test grades. I hope to be able to project an atmosphere where critical thinking is rewarded not only with high grades but a sense of accomplishment and pride. The most enjoyable aspect of this reading was understanding who Deresiewicz was addressing when he gave this lecture. The fact that he is encouraging military personal to rethink "how it does business" is just brilliant. I hope he managed to inspire young cadets to be more mindful about the choices they will have to make once on the battlefield.
After reading this article, I found it to be very interesting. Waying the positives and negatives during a situation should be considered anytime we make a situation. This article really seemed to be pesimistic at times, but I found that I agreed with a lot of things he had to say. I feel as though he is talking to individuals who are entering college in which they have so many paths to choose from. One of these paths is the military. Military people have to be able to think for their own and adjust to others as he states. He does this in such a brillant way that I hope young children thinking about going into the military read some day. This may be a piece that actually inspires them to do so. Finally, I want to leave on a thought I had throughout the reading. If we always live in the "gray area" that he suggest, then aren't we going to be questioning ourselves to much? I think at times it has to be black and white and that is just the way it has to be. I know that is not for every scenario, but I do think it is for some. Just a thought I had when reading.
I found that Deresiewicz was so right when he was talking about how much college prep has changed since the 80s. I personally do not know what the 80s were like, but I do know that the process of getting into college was intense. My experience with getting into college was based on whether or not I took advanced courses, my gpa, ACT scores, and an admissions essay with two prompts to choose from. I was solely a number who's statistics were the only thing that mattered. Even the prompt (of which I chose one about what makes art, art) can only be depicted in so many ways. I believe that if the protocol for universities would be to have a personal interview with university admissions that I would have been able to get into many more schools. It was intimidating and I wish there were better ways to judge my collegiate ability.
I liked Burbules' piece and really related to it. I think he ultimately wants educators to focus on what they can do, realistically, to completely devote themselves to their profession, without any misguided attempts to romanticize teaching or to fall prey to the temptation to view education cynically. When I graduated from college 6 years ago, I dissuaded myself from becoming a teacher. Internships in NYC schools made me feel that I would hate working within public schools and conforming to all of the state requirements and testing (in some cases requirements as absurd as dictating how students were seated or how folders of student work should be displayed). But after time and consideration, I feel it would be a waste to ignore the desire I have, and have always had, to teach. I was in grade school when my teachers began sending me to other classes to tutor or pairing me with included special education students to complete assignments. While I suppose I could be successful doing a number of things, teaching is the only thing I have ever felt excited about doing. And I don't mean that in a giddy lighthearted sense, but rather that I feel an ignition or activation deep inside myself when I am in the position of teaching something to someone. Yet I don't approach teaching optimistically. I recognize that it will be difficult despite my personal motivation to teach, that I will not be able to reach all of my students, and that there will be bad days as well as good. I will be satisfied if I can make any difference, however small, for some of my students. That is not to say, of course, that I won't devote myself to helping each and every student I have as much as I can; I simply acknowledge that an educational utopia is impossible, and that that is ok: being overly optimistic or pessimistic will lead to burn-out, which won't help any students.
I really enjoyed reading Deresiewicz‘s article. Even though the title of the article was contradictory as the author mentioned but it made more sense to me as I was reading through. Simply when I want to make a decision or take the lead on a situation that is going to have a huge impact on my life, I should organize my thoughts first, look at the decision? What is its impact on my life? What are the consequences? And may be consult a close friend or a trusted someone to help me focus on my decision and how I want to proceed about taking an action upon it. From this simple example we can see that solitude and leadership go hand in hand and not against each other. I totally agree with Deresiewicz that great leaders should be more like thinkers other than just followers. Even the words explain themselves, when they do the routine thing or the exact same thing that others before them were doing, they are following the same path, and they are not taking the lead on changing that path for the better. They are not thinking for themselves or their country, they are only thinking about keeping that title or position of a leader. As future educators, we have to be good leaders, with vision, with open minds to be able to understand and accommodate all of our students’ needs. We have to be able to think for ourselves, and as a result, our students will follow this path for thinking about themselves and be future leaders. With carful thinking and measuring all aspects of making a decision about an issue that would impact our career as future educators, how are going to go about carrying out that decision? Are we allowed to go against the flow? Against the rules and regulations? Or against our supervisors? Being good leaders requires deep and focused thinking, which in other words, requires solitude.
Solitude and Leadership When I hear that an exam or assignment is going to be critical thinking and analyzing rather than question and answer I immediately start to worry. I am a good test taker, I have been trained by our school system to be just that. I can memorize information in one night and spit it back out on a test to get a good grade, then immediately after I purge in order to make room for the next cram session. This is something that I am not proud of, but it has gotten me through my education with very good grades. This is, I feel, how a lot of American students view their schooling. Why should we actually think about something when all that is asked of us is to relay the facts that we have learned, word-for-word, onto a piece of paper? The classes that I loved and that I still remember what I learned in are the ones that forced me to think and use my own views and opinions. We have a lot of issues with our school system that need to be reconciled, and I believe that the root of all of the problems is our extreme focus on testing. We are currently producing a generation of citizens that do not know how to think for themselves. They do what they are told, when they are told, and they never question a thing. How is this ever going to change if what we teach them their entire childhood and beyond is to repeat exactly what we tell them?
There were a few points in these readings that really stood out to me. For one, in Burbules "The Tragic Sense Of Education," I was interested by idea that educators inadvertently harm some students by the mere fact of helping others. I saw a version of this first hand in my FEEP experience. While I believe the teacher I was placed with does a great job for the most part, I saw that she was hardly giving aid to a couple students in particular, both of whom had untreated ADHD. She spent a lot of time helping other students and I was bothered by this. When I asked her, she said that in a class of 28 it's very difficult to help every student, and that it takes significant time to help these "problem" students. She saw it as if she spent too much time helping them, she would be neglecting all the others, and so she was choosing the lesser of two evils. Another point that I found interesting was in the lecture on leadership, where though we are all expected to complete our education in order to become "leaders," leadership is different than accomplishment, aptitude, excellence, etc. Many people succeed in their education, which as an institution works to create leaders, but very few actually are. I like that Deresiewicz emphasizes that good grades do not equate a good leader. I thought this tied back in with several other readings and discussions our class has had, such as the graduation speech from a few weeks ago.
As a first thought I found the definition that is given on solitude rather interesting. Solitude was described as being alone completely, like a man in the woods, however I feel that solitude can be internal and someone can feel alone and solitude even a room of crowded people. Those who lead our society and show authority I feel are the ones who feel the greatest sense on solitude because I do think that many people search for the simple things in life again.
As another thought I found the points that Allie (a couple blogs up) had made. As students there is so much pressure to pass a test, to either pass a class or even graduate. By placing such emphasis on our tests I do not think as students are actually retaining the information and using it for later purposes. I know personally that I retain more information when there is not pressure of a test lerking around the corner. When the pressure of a test is placed on a student I simply retain the information to pass the test but how much of it I actually take with me farther than the test is very slim. I believe that if more emphasis was based on students retaining much more information by not putting such large emphasis on tests and make them more practice based and to take them a bit more casual I feel much more information would be retained and taken from the classroom.
The Barbules article was very interesting and addressed many points that I felt were valid in the educational systems of today. The part in the article about being sensitive to the fact that students' world views can be drastically different due to how they are brought up. This point also brought up how religion can affect how a student can perceive the information taught. This also alters how they can retain concepts and understand them as well. I personally feel that this is true and teachers aren't always aware of this fact and may sometimes teach in ways that exacerbate the problem. Along with this the author says that we as educators need to find a balance between pessimism and optimism. Teachers often get really burnt out in their career due to this unbalance and I am sure if they were made aware of these facts, this would be a much less likely scenario.
The Tragic Sense of Education was a very different read for me, because it left me a little conflicted. Perhaps the paper killed a bit of my joy; it's a possibility. I am not often confronted with how the interconnections of society extend so that the smallest acts of kindness for one person will leave another neglected. I typically stop looking after the kindness happens. I liked the assessment of Utopianism, because it is easy to dream without giving the ideas life or direction. Education, especially at higher levels, discusses what is wrong in the world, but there is little implementation of what's concluded. Modesty should be used in education as well. Whenever I was the pupil of a teacher who admitted flaws in their knowledge, I respected them more. They seem more reliable, honest, and human.
I think Deresiewicz is right in his personification of what it means to be a true leader. To effectively lead, one must be able to do their own thinking, and be able to act upon their ideas. When one is in solitude, they are able to relect on things in their life and better understand themselves. Introspection gives us a chance to look back on situations and examine the ways that they have affected us and the impacts they've had on our lives. I also agree with the author when he talks about how today's young people have mainly learned how to conform to what's expected of them and jump through the hoops that are put in their way. Rather than thinking outside the box and trying to be a leader, the majority of our youth are learning how to follow the rules and work the system to get to past the stuff they don't like and get to a point where they feel comfortable. Are there benefits to excelling at being able to "jump through the hoops" and conform to what's expected of you?
While reading Solitude and Leadership I thought about many different things. The first thing I thought was how funny it was that someone was talking about West Point about the dangers of being a conformist. Isn't that the place where everyone is supposed to conform so that they are able to work in the military. I think that he is right, that we need to stop teaching conformity. I feel that we are nothing without our creativity, and that we would be no where today without having people that thought outside the box. After thinking about this some more I came to the conclusion that this was, in fact the best speech for West Point. The people there aren't being trained to conform, they are being trained to work with others, while still being able to have their own opinions. I think that in the end, this was a really enlightening speech, and I hope that the people that were there to hear it in person really took it to heart.
I think Deresiewicz is right in his personification of what it means to be a true leader. To effectively lead, one must be able to do their own thinking, and be able to act upon their ideas. When one is in solitude, they are able to relect on things in their life and better understand themselves. Introspection gives us a chance to look back on situations and examine the ways that they have affected us and the impacts they've had on our lives. I also agree with the author when he talks about how today's young people have mainly learned how to conform to what's expected of them and jump through the hoops that are put in their way. Rather than thinking outside the box and trying to be a leader, the majority of our youth are learning how to follow the rules and work the system to get to past the stuff they don't like and get to a point where they feel comfortable. Are there benefits to excelling at being able to "jump through the hoops" and conform to what's expected of you?
I thought that the leadership and solitude article was very interesting, I loved how it connected two totally different things to make them seem like they really do need each other. The importance of solitude in any aspect of life is really undeniable. We need to be able look at our own lives, our own struggles, our own beliefs independently before we can hope to teach them to others or even understand them ourselves. Taking the daily distractions out of the equation is very important, solitude requires it. This is the only way that we can be alone with our thoughts and understand what it means to lead, to get the distractions away and learn what our beliefs truly are. I like the example he gives about what happened in the Army and he explains the fact that we need to know the following, "who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe." In order to lead properly in any situation we need to know these things.
The Tragic Sense of Education was a really interesting read. It upset me but I agreed with his thoughts at the same time. It is terrible that we have to deal with this awful reality of the education system. This quarter I tutored a student and because this was a tutoring situation it was one on one, this was an amazing situation because I got to see my student twice a week for an hour. After doing this I had to write a reflection paper from the quarter on what I have learned and how i would like to incorporate this into my future classroom. Reading this article made me think of this reflection paper because I wrote about how I would like to include as much one on one time with my students as possible in my classroom because I saw first hand this quarter how much students can benefit from this one on one time. I know that it is not a plausible thing that I will get to have one on one time every day with my students but I think it is something to work towards and try to include it as much as possible.
I agree with this article. I believe that this directly applies to teachers and those going into teaching. We are told about the classroom and the theories about it. But when it comes to actually teaching we hear about the classroom like it's some sort of mythical creature. Our professors talk about all of the different things in the classroom but we never get a lot of time in a classroom. We need more time spent in classrooms if we want to be successful teachers and leaders. The ability to lead doesn't come from theories and books, it comes from experience and the ability to work with people. Steve Jobs didn't go to college and so did tons of other successful people. It really isn't a measure of success if you go to college. I know plenty of people who actually fail at the majority of life, but they've gone to college. Grades are no measure of success either. It's really easy to memorize and puke what you've memorized back onto a test. That gets you good grades but since we never have to apply what we learn in the classroom, what do we care? How will we better ourselves if we never get experience? Thanks OSU, it's been real.
In response to the Solitude and Leadership article I found it very relatable to me even though he was addressing the plebe class. As much as the military is a completely different lifestyle than being a college student, they are very closely related at the same time. In the military it is all about behaving a certain way while you are at work. The military does not really care what you do off the clock as long as you show up to work on time, get your job done, and stay out of legal trouble. That is kind of the same thing as school. Teachers really do not care too terribly much about what you do outside of their classrooms and off school ground. But the better behaved you are in class and the more extracurricular activities you are in the better you look on applications to colleges. Everyone has the people in their classes that have a comment about everything and go above and beyond to get noticed by their teachers and administrators. This quarter I had a teacher tell my class that her best advice to us would be to make noise. That since OSU is such a large university that so many students get lost in the shuffle and only get by and not thrive with their education. She encouraged us with class discussion and to basically be in constant communication with her. She even admitted that she favored students her talked to her in and out of the classroom whether it be via email, Carmen, office hours, she even “Skyped” with someone the other day instead of emailing back and forth. I think it is important to make sure that students are doing what they need to do to get the grades they want, but is it really fair that just because some students do more outside of the classroom that they get better grades or accepted into better schools? What happens of students have to work? Or are is single parent? They have very limited time outside of the time they are already devoting to the class and the workload that goes along with it. Sucking up does not make you a good leader or prepare you for anything.
I found this address interesting. Deresiewicz addresses that the crisis with leadership has to do with students being told what makes someone a leader. Students are told that if they get good grades and make a name for themselves, then they can be a leader. But this is not always the case. Solitude is part of leadership because being a thinker is important. According the address solitude enables people to think deeply about their own thoughts and come up with their own beliefs. Although not all ideas may be original, this does help people think things through. Deresiewicz states “that solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better.” This is an important part of being a leader—knowing yourself. In order to lead others, it’s helpful when you know what group of people you want to lead. Being passionate about a topic can help you be a better leader. In addition, he mentions that solitude includes friendship. Friendship is part of solitude because talking with others about an issue you care about helps you to come to conclusions. It helps you to gather your thoughts and gain trust in others.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this article, I realized that it’s important for students to be told that a leader is not just a person that gets good grades and makes a name for himself. But because students are told the college is the way to being successful and becoming a leader, grades are stressed. How do we change the way leadership is viewed and encourage people to engage in solitude and innovation?
The lecture “Solitude and Leadership” is quite possibly one of the best things that I have read in a long time. It is extremely well stated and is something that I could completely relate to. There are a lot of thoughts in this lecture that I have been thinking about for quite some time, especially with being in this class. The reading simply helped put the thoughts into a neat package. One thing that I really like about the reading was how it addressed the people of our generation and how we could relate specifically to our lives. Words like “facebook” and “twitter” will instantly catch our attention because they are the things that we battle with as being huge distractions. I loved how he talked about how he knew from experience many educated people that don’t know how to think at all. He not only stated this, but he talked about how we actually do “think” and what that word that is thrown around all the time actually means. I like how Deresiewicz talks about how thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. It is being patient and allowing things to connect in your mind.
ReplyDeleteI just do not think that the things mentioned in this article are going to change in our society until we stop stressing standardized testing and the importance of “one answer”. The most intelligent people know that there is always another answer and they have the creativity to develop that.
This lecture really spoke to me and is something that I want to reread myself because I believe that he emphasizes a lot of problems with our form of education and our thoughts and beliefs on success.
I found the article by Burbules to be very intriguing. I think that it is a little bizarre the way that he thinks about education but none the less it made since with the analogies that he gave. There were some things that I did agree with and some things that I found to be appalling. Whenever I hear the word ‘tragic’ I automatically think of something bad that happened, is happening, or will happen, and I interpreted this article as something bad with the analogies that Burbules made. The one point that he kept making that stood out the most to me was “we help some students necessarily at the expense of neglecting or inadvertently harming others”. This in a way almost hurt my feelings because it is true but I never looked at it this way before. It hurt my feelings because I have been in many positions where you are helping one student and you know that there are other students that desperately need help but there is only so much that you can do as one individual trying to help a group of 30 students whether it be with something in the classroom or with aspects of their personal lives. It just really puts things into perspective every time I read this quote. Yet at the same time I know that this is going to remain in the back of my mind and since I am an overachiever/perfectionist/completest I will feel insignificant and incomplete if I feel that I have a student who has been simply overlooked or misguided under my instruction. I think that this small quote will continue to have a major impact on me when I enter the classroom and it will keep me on my A game making sure that I complete everything with 110% effort.
ReplyDelete-Emily Mink
In response to Solitude and Leadership;
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Deresiewicz’s speech to the plebe class, mainly because he presented his views clearly and with plain diction – he didn’t fall more ambiguous and vague as he went on, but maintained a course I found easy to follow.
This isn’t to undermine his expression, because his parallel of solitude and leadership is profound – and, as he speaks on “first thoughts always being someone else’s”, - this viewpoint seems fairly original. It isn’t that these concepts are innovative or even extremely philosophical, but he manages to compress them in a manner that highlights solitude as the essence of leadership.
I found his idea of developing one’s introspection through articulation made a good deal of sense, though I had never considered it in that way before. In the same respect, his reference to the American Revolution was an impressive segue into the negation of conventional wisdom and the permanent power of disrupting “our habits of today”.
I am a big fan of reading and found his argument for what makes books so valuable an intriguing one; I like the fact that its simple in context, but the complexity is there, though not crucial to understanding the general concept.
Overall, I enjoyed this reading –I found Deresiewicz’s writing understandable as well as insightful; an oftentimes rare combination.
Solitude and Leadership
ReplyDeleteEven though this lecture was written for the plebe class, I felt like William Deresiewicz was speaking to me and all other college students. He mentions how the U.S. army is a bureaucracy, which is true and this can be connected to the articles we read in this class about some schools that have a bureaucratic education system. Every student is created to come out the same. I like how William is speaking to his class about solitude and leadership in order to change the type of person they become, during their time in the military. Taking action, I believe, is the most important thing when it comes to the challenges in education and leadership. I could relate a lot to what he was saying. I never tried to get into a top school but I remember in high school that our counselors kept telling us that extracurriculars were really important, not just grades. This is how students manipulate themselves to get into the top colleges they want to go to. According to William, they are trained to “jump through hoops”. I agree with this and I know people that I went to school with that were focused being a part of lots of extracurriculars and attending test prep courses to become the best they could be. This can go back to the valedictorian speech we read, I’m sure that is exactly what she went through. William is right, this approach is dangerous; schools with that idea are not training true leaders.
When he goes on to talk more about solitude, I kept thinking to how I could relate and apply that to my life so I can become a better thinker. I like how he brings up facebook, which is very relatable, and how it is a distraction that causes people to use other people’s ideas instead of thinking for themselves. When I get on facebook, I find myself getting sucked into other’s people’s ideas and beliefs and start making judgments. I start judging my life according to other people’s lives. I feel like a step of solitude for me could just be getting rid of my facebook account which may seem unreasonable at first but I believe it could change the way I think and get me to think more for myself. I like his definition of concentration, “gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input”. Usually when I’m reading for a class, I’ll get distracted after a couple pages and then check facebook, email and my phone, but while reading this article I refrained and I was able to really think about what William was saying. I like how he relates solitude to leadership. In order to lead, you need to be able to find new directions, and in order to find new directions you need a sense of solitude, which requires concentrating on one thing to develop new thoughts and ideas. How did it even come to be that people ignored the true meaning of leadership?
I remember someone wise telling Frodo in a recent Lord of the Rings movie I was watching that "To be a ring bearer means to be alone". Frodo was a leader. Frodo was alone, he was in solitude. He became a leader by leaving his party (the fellowship) and going off almost by himself to destroy the ring by casting it into the fire in Mordor. He completed his journey by thinking for himself and not getting ideas from other people. The speech Solitude and Leadership made me really think about what a true leader is. To be a true leader is someone who can think for themselves and change society for the better. Frodo took some chances and saved middle earth. Our leaders today tend to fit into a mold of not being radical or not willing to change anything in society. Maybe if we had more leaders like Frodo Baggins, our society would be able to be changed for the better.
ReplyDeleteIn response to the Solitude and Leadership article, I was absolutely amazed with how much sense it made to me. I also like how Deresiewicz didn't limit his argument to just the youth of today. While there are many distractions in today's society with everything the internet and computers offer, but there were distractions 50 years ago in the form of radio, magazines, and newspapers. I even remember before I had internet or a computer, I would distract myself by reading video game magazines. It is a matter of being patient and giving our goals the proper time and care necessary to be truly thoughtful. We need to stop looking for the quick and easy ways/methods of thinking, and really take the time to sit down and think. Without distraction. And in today's society, it is especially difficult to find a place that is free of distraction. Maybe we need to isolate ourselves with a pen and paper, free of a computer screen. Go somewhere our thoughts are able to truly flourish. Are we going a road where this is becoming more and more difficult? Is technology ruining our abilities to truly think for ourselves?
ReplyDeleteI thought that the Deresiewicz (D) speech had an intriguing idea of the marriage of solitude and leadership. One poignant though that I latched onto was “So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers.” I fear that too often students in academia and throughout the public school system in America are put through unnecessary rigors simply for the sake of weeding out the people who are not willing to do so. While D expresses this when referring to the top notch graduates that go on to be the leaders in the Ivy League schools, its effect is present in schools around the nation no matter the demographic. With the increase of mandatory standardized testing, test prep, and a multitude of extracurricular offered, the present student has no choice but to imbibe information just to regurgitate it once again in order to meet the standardized curricula and requirements to be like everyone else in their academic life and then to somehow standout from everyone else in order to advance yourself. This, I feel, correlates with our present overwhelming sources of information; Wikipedia, Google, etc. The way we receive and search for information now is far different than when the educational model and curricula was made. We have taken account of such things and in schools now it is commonplace to teach “keyboard skills” and “computer technology” in as early as primary school, as it is expected in higher levels of education. The creative intellect then, our ability to think outside of the box, to simply think and formulate our own convictive beliefs is then stifled. D refers to this when speaking of leadership and introspection or solitude as it relates to all of these issues. How then can we as teachers incorporate, supplement this creative independence in our own curriculum and combat the rigid parameters and hoops of this standardized model of education?
ReplyDelete-Matt Zabiegala
What does it take to make a true leader? In my opinion, it doesn't have to be the smartest person or someone who is well known. A true leader is passionate about life and the experiences that shape our existence. A leader is someone that we can turn to for stability in times of great need. A leader changes the way were look at life. He/she is someone who has high standards and truly stands for something. Someone who taught us to set goals and instilled the confidence and spirit to achieve them is a true leader. A leader gets to know and tries to relate to people. A leader is open-minded and does not judge someone based on their appearance, intelligence, sexuality, religion, etc. A leader is a friend, a relative, a teacher, a co-worker, a boss, etc. A leader is not always someone who holds the most power. A leader can exists in our everyday lives. A leader is simply someone who knows us the best, knows how to lead us through crisis, can talk to us like a friend, will always be there when needed, and shows true compassion for life. Reading the article on Solitude has helped me to understand why so many students do not think that they too can be leaders. They assume that because they are young and don't hold a lot of authority, that they cannot be leaders. We must encourage our students to reach for the stars and never let anything hold them back. We must instill in them the passion that we hold for life and help them to understand that anyone can be a leader if they just set their minds to it.
ReplyDeleteI printed off the speech that Deresiewicz gave to the plebs class and thought it would bore me to tears, but instead it was one of the most fascinating things I have ever read. While reading the speech, it rang so true to the world around me that I wanted to tell everyone I know to read it or frame it and hang it up in my room. I love writers that say what they mean in normal or clear words that everyone can understand while still hurling new ideas at you and probing you to think in ways you have never though before. Deresiewicz did this. I am writing my final paper on this speech so I do not want to give too much of my paper away, but after reading this article I felt motivated to go and be a teacher who leads others and to do it now. We all know rebellion is fun and this paper is just trying to get people to be that rebellious person who does things differently and tries out new ideas; that person who is not afraid to take a risk. The difference between this kind of rebel and the kind doing 30 to life is that this rebel has a purpose bigger than him/herself. He/she does not do these radical things to get attention from others but does them for the sake of progress or doing the right thing for other people. The teacher who takes time out of the day to do an extra art lesson with his/her class in order to expose them to something new and different instead of yet another math lesson geared toward the OAAs is a rebel. He/she is doing something that may hurt him/her when the test scores come out and his/her kids did not do as well, but the children are benefiting from this culture. This article accurately breaks down the problems in our country and why it is failing, the lack of thinking and the emphasis on doing what you are told. This idea can be summed up into two words in relation to education-standardized testing. Our teachers are being asked to shove facts down children’s throats so that they choose the correct multiple choice answers on the tests. The leaders of this world are not or at least should not be people who only know that A is the answer because that is what their teacher told them.
ReplyDeleteI thought Burbules had some wise insight regarding utopianism. I thought his critique on Utopian thinking was excellent, citing that "it minimizes or overlooks serious impediments and limitations to our efforts toward change, which can be counterproductive when it makes us unprepared for the inevitable difficulties that arise." I was however, a bit uncertain where Burbules was going with pragmatism. Essentially it seemed as though his point could be summed up in his conclusion, "our search for means of understanding and action should be directed not toward a "quest for certainty", but toward attaining, if possible, workable solutions and decent human relations." And to this point I respectfully dissent. What is the point of education if we do not work toward some certainty? At that point we would simply be offering life-skills classes. (Now I'm not arguing against such classes; in fact, I think that we severely lack this sort of instruction. Nobody ever taught me how to show for food and live on a budget!) Is not that one of the primary functions of education, to instruct pupils as to the reality in which they live and the reality with which they interact? Perhaps I misunderstood Burbules's point, but to assert that we ought not strive for certainty vis-a-vis compulsory education while instead seeking 'workable solutions and decent human relations' is a bit of a stretch. Like the author, I don't necessarily have a solution, but I didn't find his alternative appealing.
ReplyDeleteI thought that Deresiewicz’s article was very interesting and I agreed with him on many things. Deresiewicz states that in society, leadership has to do with students being told or hinted at, at what makes someone a leader. He goes on stating that he knows many students who are involved in extracurricular activities, those who have high G.P.A’s, and those who are social, but he asks if all of those qualities are good enough to be a leader? On the other hand, he compares solitude to leadership. Solitude is actually part of leadership because you have to think and have your own opinions. Solitude helps a person to better know themselves, and knowing and trusting yourself is an important part of being a leader. I realized after reading this article that leadership really is not about getting good grades or just being social. I always had the idea that as long as a person is successful and confident, then they are actually good enough to be a leader, but that obviously is not always the case. This is the problem in our society, and how it is engrained in people’s minds that this is how a person has to be in order to be a leader. Is it possible for people to change other people’s views on leadership, or is it too late for the reason that people already have an idea because of what society has been taught generation after generation?
ReplyDeleteI found this article extremely interesting. Especially more recently, education has become more about the grade and the test score than real learning. The more emphasis placed on test scores, the more this problem is going to prevail. And if teacher salaries and jobs become dependent on test scores, this problem will never end. The question of leadership is comparable. What is a leader? It seems that high school and even college would lead one to believe a leader is someone who gets the best grades, does the most activities, and volunteers with the most organizations. But is that a leader? I was really hit by this question. As someone who has always been that overachieving student, I usually like to consider myself a leader. But what have I really done? Have I come up with any creative ideas? Have I inspired anyone to do anything? Unfortunately, the answer is probably no. So the question is, as an educator, how do we teach our students to be leaders if we don’t know how to be leaders ourselves? Deresiewicz seems to believe that we need to reexamine our thinking, because “…leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions.” It seems that we need to start teaching independent thinking as early as possible in order to create real leaders of tomorrow.
ReplyDelete-Katie Kuvin
The Tragic Sense of Education by Barbules was a little wordy and complex, but it was also very interesting. I really liked the paragraph about how the students will most likely have certain ways of viewing the world and these ways or reasons are who they are and because of this are typically very important to them ( or they are reasons they follow some sort of belief system). Then when we as teachers show reasons or "challenge" why they should or should not have their individual views we are in essence challenging who they are. I think as a future teacher it is a very hard line to walk because you have to be cautious to not be bias to what you believe and the views you have. Just because these are the reasons you feel "security and significance" in life does not mean that the students in your class do or should necessarily feel or even be challenged in that way.
ReplyDeleteMy question is in the part of the article where Rorty talks about pragmatism. Is Rorty saying you cannot find truth in those things such as science and god? I guess I just did not understand his sentence about the "largest lie" .
-Caroline F.
I found the lecture on solitude and leadership given at West Point to be very intriguing. It made me analyze my leadership and question if my definition of a leader still held true. I believe, like the lecture stated, a true leader is one who stands out and voices their opinion even when it is not what the world believes or wants to hear. I believe it takes a true leader to stand up for what they believe to be right even if it means losing their job or their security.
ReplyDeleteI think this principle of leadership applies to education. We sit here as students in education classes complaining about the educational system, but are we going to change it? Are we going to be true leaders and voice our opinions in order to bring change or are we going to follow the bureaucratic system? I would like to hope that I am going to bring change and that all my fellow students feel the same, but I believe it is easier said than done. We are alone in this world and it is up to us, individually, to be the change.
I really liked the article The Tragic Sense of Education. It gave me a whole new perspective on education. Barbules states "...education is a perpetually incomplete and potentially unfulfilled process; that teacher and learner embark on an endeavor whose intended outcome is, from the very start, inevitably in doubt. Education that is worth anything involves experiencing undertainty, confusion, and failure." I feel that I can really relate to this quote. I am a week and a half from graduating, and am just now realizing that my education is not even close to being done. Prior to this class, I thought that I would have obtained a full and complete education upon graduation, but this article, as well as class has brought me to the realization that education is not complete once you graduate, it is life-long process.
ReplyDeleteBarbules also discusses that we may encounter tragic experiences in education. I recently experienced this when I chose a career that has absolutely nothing to do with the major that I have worked so hard to complete in college. I feel like my last four years of college were completely wasted since I will not be doing anything that is related to what I have been studying. The article has helped me understand that although my career is unrelated to my major, through my education I was still able to "...adopt a much greater modesty in our claims of social transformation or reform through educational processes." And this will help me succeed.
I found the Tragic Sense of Education article by Burbules to be thought provoking. At first I really didn't like this article and did not agree with the argument being made by Burbules. I think that his meaning of education is pretty harsh. He says that every step in education is not a change for the better and that every gain is a loss. He goes on to say the long view is not available to teachers and learners at each step along the way. In some respects, I agree with him. We educate because we need to learn. Therefore, the information should in some sense be challenging. However, I did not like his comment that the long view is not available to teachers or learners. It almost seems as if he is criticizing education as a whole. I did however agree with his argument that as teachers, we only are able to have a slight impact upon our students life due to the fact that we will only have most of our students for one year. This brought to mind the topic of "looping" students, where students remain with the same teacher for several years in a row. I believe that looping would have its goods and bads. It would be great for the students and teachers to already know and understand one another. This could greatly benefit students if their teacher already knew of situations in their personal lives as well as how they learn best. On the other hand, preparing and arranging how the system would take place would most likely be troublesome. Therefore, my question is, do you believe that the benefits of students remaining with the same teacher outweigh the possible costs?
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the speech by Deresiewicz. I think I would have enjoyed that speech in person. Leadership and leaders. What defines someone who is a leader or can be in a role of leadership? We strive to teach students how to be leaders. We encourage them to take leadership roles. But what really makes a leader? Are we teaching them to be the right kind of leaders? I agree with Deresiewicz’s argument that many in leadership roles are simply the ones who are good at jumping through hoops. They aren’t necessarily the best or right person for the position. I seem to see this a lot in schools and other institutions. A good example, from personal experience, would be my mom’s boss. She has gotten herself to the leadership position but really doesn’t do a good job and managing her employees. She doesn’t realize all the things that go into the jobs of her workers. She isn’t the best person for the job but she worked the politics and jumped through the necessary hoops. I think in school we often teach students how to jump through those hoops instead of making sure the truly have good leadership qualities. I agree that thinking is a critical component to being a good leader, so we need to teach students how to better think through problems. This will help students become the right kind of leaders instead of just being able to jump through the hoops. This may get them to a leadership position but are they going to be the kind of leader that we want? I don’t think so.
ReplyDeleteDeresiewicz brought up some interesting points. His belief that leadership is more than just being at the front of the herd running toward the cliff and the necessity of solitude to be a good leader really struck me. People often satirize the career bureaucrat but at the same time they tend to up in virtually the same position. Most people won't stand up and say something because they don't want to lose their job, cause trouble, or make a scene. Sometimes, that's exactly what's needed though. Being a leader is being the first person to make a scene, to bring an issue into the light. The recent arrest of the World Monetary Fund director provides the perfect example, the maid he allegedly assaulted could have done nothing and not caused a scene. Instead, she spoke out and has forced the world and the French especially to confront their beliefs about women. She had the moral courage to stand up for what is right, how many people would have the same moral courage to be a leader in their own lives?
ReplyDeleteI found the lecture titled Solitude and Leadership by, William Deresiewicz to be extremely interesting. Before even reading the lecture I was alreading thinking what solitude and leadership have an common, in reading the first paragraph I was astonished that William was going to explain just that, even though I assumed he would. "And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership." But why? The lecture drew me further in pondering how solitude was a form and a part necessary for leadership.
ReplyDeleteI continued to read and became interested in the analogy that students are like sheep being herded to do what is expected. Getting straight A's, doing many outside activities, volunteering, passing tests, is what expected. But going above and beyond is whom is a leader. Its not the people who are the sheep doing what is expected but those going a step further whom become the leaders of today. Its the students who further question and crtically think about topics that make great leaders. The leader is the first person to stand up and make a debate on an issue and the first one to make a scene. Being the sheep is being a memeber of the society and joining the bureucrats and not stepping into a world of free thinking but a world where people think for you. Like William stated we do not have free thinkers but people who are modeled and think based on what politics presents them with. Its in this solitude or alone time that leaders, make this connections with the world and step out of line to not becoming sheep modeled on the grounds of the buercrats, but become their own free thinkers.
How does someone who is given the tools to become sheep, become a leader?
The lecture given by William Deresiewicz really hit home with me. He talks about how the students he was working with at Yale had been trained to be “world-class hoop jumpers,” they know what they have to do to get what they want. But, the problem with this is that it does not require independent thinking from these students. This is something that I find extremely troubling. Our society has created a community of conformists. Our students know what they need to say and do in order to get to where they want in life, but that does not allow them to share their individual beliefs and opinions. America is lacking great leaders, who challenge the routines of society. Our schools need to be challenging our students to think deeply and create their own meaningful opinions about things. In my opinion, our schools are failing our students by treating them like sheep, just herding them through the school system. Our students should be challenged to think outside the box, to become leaders who challenge the status quo.
ReplyDelete- Kristen Calaway
I kept putting off reading "The Tragic Sense of Education" because I keep reading these depressing articles about scooling and education. This quarter has been seriously making me question whether I even want to be a teacher (I'm also in school and society so not just this class, and I think the lawmakers in the state of Ohio deserve some credit). However, I was glad I read the article. The parts that talked about how education was always a loss and a gain and made people uncomfortable really made sense. I think that is exactly how I have been feeling, and it made me feel better to understand why I felt the way I did.
ReplyDelete-Megan M
Deresiewicz has introduced a notion that I've been thinking about for a long time. He says that we don't have true leaders, true thinkers. The people in charge, in the highest rank, got there because they know how to kiss ass and stab backs. How utterly true and pitiful is this? Our country has ridden along on it's high horse for such a long time that we haven't even realized we've fallen. Not only have we fallen, but we can't even figure out how to get back up because all of our leaders aren't even leaders at all. They implement the routine.
ReplyDeleteFor a while I've been criticizing the current school system because we don't develop independent thinkers, we develop loyal followers. Think about it, we're all in college for what reason? Because we survived (probably excelled) high school by following the rules, jumping through the hoops. The next step laid out for us? College. So now we're here. Are we really here because we want a higher education? Or are we really here because we knew it was the right thing to do, the proper next step after high school. So are we free thinkers? Can we lead a business, an army, the country with brand new ideas that will revolutionize our decade? Probably not. But I have hope that knowledge is a seed and planted in the right soil it can grow. So now we know, we are aware, the question is, will any of us do anything about it?
In the William Deresiewicz article, "Solitude and Leadership", I thought it was really interesting how he tied the two together. At first, I was thinking, "how is he gonna tie these two together in a reasonable way"? However, after reading it, it actually made me think of my role as a leader, and the things I do in my own solitude to help make me a better leader.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the following statement he made "What we don't have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction- a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision." I agree with, especially as as future teacher. We need to find people who can think for themselves, and who will go above and beyond, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of their students. People who won't just settle for what people says works or doesn't work, but are willing to go out of their way to find what truely works best for each student.
However, in today's society, I think people are too afraid to take that initiative to go above and beyond. So my question, is how do we find those people and get them into the classrooms that need them most, working with students that need them most, to be successful people of society?
Katelyn C.
I found the article "Solitude and Leadership" by William Deresiewicz to very insightful. He brings up the point about who the leaders in America are. They are the people who are the best at jumping through hoops. They are the people who listen to their superiors, do what they're told, and conform the best to society. This type of person is bred from early age. In school they are expected to attend classes, take standardized tests, participate in extracurriculars both in and outside of school. When a person can do this they have demonstrated that they are able to follow orders and conform. This brings up the question why are the leaders in our country the people the are best at following, instead of innovating?
ReplyDelete-John Searfoss
Solitude and Leadership by, William Deresiewicz is a very good article talking about how society isn't very good at independent thinking. In schools were so brainwashed into just trying to get stuff done to get good grades rather than actually learning the material. I feel like a lot of the readings in this class had to do with the same thing. Teachers need to focus less on standardized testing (although its what they are told to do and focus more on actually getting the student to learn something. In my opinion, if a student is actually learning something rather than learning A is the correct answer than they will be able to think well enough to get the correct answer on that standardize test. Teachers need to be leaders because i would rather have someone out in the world with actual knowledge rather than having someone who just does enough to get by and know the correct answer for the time being until they don't need to know it anymore.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the lecture by Deresiewicz. It really made me think about my education and if I am really a "thinker". I came to the conclusion that for the most part, my education failed me in this regard. While I have had a few teachers and a few assignments during my schooling that have encouraged me and forced me to think for myself and challenge common ideas, most of my schooling has consisted of regurgitating information and "jumping through hoops" as Deresiewicz called it. I am a good student because I know what the teacher wants and I do it not because I challenge what I think is wrong and come up with my own ways of doing things. This is a sad, but I think many people in our generation have been programmed to think this way. We are trained to be do things a certain way, many times mindlessly, but have not grown much within ourselves.
ReplyDeleteHow many kids just do extracurricular activities because they think it will help them get into college rather than because they actually want to? I am pretty sure the original idea with extracurricular was not to get you into college rather it was to help you grow as a person. Growth as a person should be the ultimate goal of education not a means to an end.
I found the Solitude and Leadership article to be very interesting. The article starts off by telling the audience that there is a crisis with leadership as well as concerning what the students are told makes a leader. Students are commonly told that if they receive good marks in school and make a name for themselves in the world then they can be a leader. As the author continues on, he tells us that this often is not the case. Solitude is part of leadership because being able to think and be a problem solver is crucial, helping to pave the way for growth. In order to truly lead, we must be willing to find our own path and think for ourselves. The author brings up many relatable examples, examples that show just how easy it is to get sucked into the viewpoints of others. I know I am at fault as well, often getting pulled in to different issues after seeing my friends’ viewpoints on the matter. Possessing solitude entails being able to think deeply, and to be able to come up with our own ideas. As teachers we must stop stressing standardized testing and be open to more than one way to solve a problem. We must allow our students to have the creativity to explore their fullest potential. Friendship is considered to be an important part of solitude, helping one to gather their thoughts and come to conclusions as well as gaining trust in others. The article continues on to state that to be a good leader, we must also truly know ourselves. This notion together with the belief in knowing your audience and being passionate about what you talk about are some of the ingredients towards becoming a leader. It is vital that we don’t just tell our students that leaders are only those who get good grades and make a name for themselves, possibly alienating much of the student population. The main question is how do we change this to where all aspects of a student are considered into what makes a “leader”?
ReplyDeleteryan buening
“The Tragic Sense of Education,” article draws an interesting parallel between the realm of teaching and that of literary tragedies. Certainly there are harsh realizations that teachers encounter in the classroom that can be interpreted as “tragic.” For example, it is not realistic to think that as a teacher you are going to impact the lives of all of your students. In fact you may only impact a couple, which is a difficult pill to swallow for a new teacher. Furthermore, you may have high hopes and aspirations intending to enrich the lives of your students, only to find that you do not have the resources to do so. It is a common disappointment and reality that teachers face. The tragedy tropes of great literary works can definitely be found in the classroom. In fact I think that one of the reasons attrition rates are so high with new teachers is because they do not have a tragic sensibility and therefore are unequipped to handle the realities of their situation.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I do not think that education can be seen exclusively through a “tragic” literary lens, but rather should be seen through a prism of all three of the dominant Shakespearian genres, the tragedy, the comedy, and the history. In comedies, typically the protagonist experiences a series of unfortunate events, only to find happiness in the end. This can be related to teaching. In histories, there are themes of politics and ethical dilemmas, which undoubtedly parallel teaching. For me, the tragic sense is too limiting and pragmatic. As a future teacher I want to maintain a sensibility that encompasses all three genres, with an emphasis on the comedy.
Justin Beattie
I enjoyed reading Deresiewicz’s speech on leadership. He seemed passionate about the crisis he sees in leaders in our culture. He says that leaders have become people who can jump through hoops, pass tests, and climb the pole. There’s no organizing, initiative, or distinguishing characteristics being shown in our leaders, just a knack for maneuvering up the ladder. I like how he said that a true leader can formulate a new direction and has vision. I like this idea because I imagine a leader being a little skeptic of the system in place and always searching for new directions to move in and big dreams for their country, institution, etc. I like the image that “having vision” creates for me, because it makes me think of people who really think about things and create their own ideas while building off of others’ ideas. He also talked about courage, which is rarely seen today. That could be because there is less of a need for courage in a world where people can say whatever they want, but having courage is something to be looked for in a leader. It is the ability to stand up for what you believe. This is a quality I hope to have as a teacher. I hope I will be able to have a vision for my students and give them vision for what they can become. I hope I can move them in a good direction and show them what a true leader can look like.
ReplyDeleteMy question would be: What are some leaders today who show signs of true leadership? What drives them?
I enjoyed the solitude and leadership article by Deresiewicz. I found it to be extremely interesting, applicable, and relatable to my life. It really inspired me to think about things in a different way and to try to do things with a different strategy or way than I usually do. I never really thought about solitude as being a part of leadership, because in my mind leadership is all about others and how you act towards them. I thought it was interesting to think about leadership in a different way. I also enjoyed how he related leadership and issues that go with it to many different situations and generations. I know that there are lots of distractions in our time, but also in others. We focus on how the Internet and TV use up so much of our time, but in other times it was just as bad just in different forms, like radio and newspapers. I think that Deresiewicz made an important point that people, especially leaders, need to stop looking for the quick and easy way to do things and to think about things, if we take our time the benefits will be much better. If we put in an effort to differentiate our ideas and modes of leadership we will do much better in the long run.
ReplyDeleteThe Tragic Sense of Education was probably one of the more pessimistic articles relating to teaching that I have read, but I found it pretty interesting. I like to say I live in the shades of gray of this world, which is kind of what Burbules is saying to do. We have to see both the possible positives and negatives of situations in order to see the whole picture clearly. Education is perpetually incomplete. I liked the statement that, "Our most inspirational metaphors of education (climbing, grasping, journeying, etc.) connote aspiration, optimism, and progress; but such metaphors are, whatever their motivational advantages, fundamentally misleading because they promise more than can be guaranteed." In school, students are always given these sort of sugar coated mantras that are delivered in, usually, a less that sincere manner and are often disregarded or laughed off out of cheesiness. This is not to say that some utopian type thinking is not beneficial. It gives students a direction to look in and something to strive for whether it is obtainable or not. Burbules's assertion that, "the nature of things in education. As a process it is at best two steps forward, one step back—and often just the converse," is an uncomfortable truth, because isn't the point of school to make us better--all positives?
ReplyDelete-Katie Petrolo
Larry Taylor....
ReplyDeleteThe quote that stuck out to me the most while reading Burbule's article was “we help some students necessarily at the expense of neglecting or inadvertently harming others”. I agree with his statement and reflected on my own teaching when such instances occurred. During my student teaching I have noticed times when I have given some students extra help without doing the same for all students. It happens. You can't be with every student individually during one class period. You can, however, come up with a system that helps you spend one-on-one time with each student during a week. Target certain students one day, then target others on another day. I found that it can be easy to brush off students because they are either too far behind, or more advanced. In either case, not giving both types of students the attention they need can be detrimental and it is the teacher's job to figure out ways to reach each student individually.
My goal as a future educator is to encourage my students to think for themselves. During the middle childood ages, peers are such an influence that students who usually make good decisions start to make poor ones based on what their friends say. More than likely I will not teach a future Yale student, but I do know that being "privileged" or "prestiges" has nothing to do with leadership. I think that a true leader will stay true to their beliefs and will fight for the underdog. In some cases like the students of schools like Yale and West Point aren't trying to be leaders that will help social mobility. I just had an assignment discussing schools like Yale, Harvard and Princeton and the lack of respresentation of lower middle classes or lower socioeconomic status. I hope to teach my students how to be leaders in their community in hope to change the future for them or at least their kids in the future.
ReplyDeleteNorma
I loved reading this article dealing with Leadership and the lack of it. I completely agree with this article. Personally, I feel that the lack of leadership today stems from the stupid self esteem movement has taken over schools everywhere. Teachers and parents both put way too much emphasis on children having high self esteem. They have taken it all way to far. Now a days children are rewarded for everything and told that everyone is a winner. That's not how life works and children need to be taught that. What incentive does a student have to work hard and focus on a project/assignment if they know that everyone will get rewarded or a high grade. Why try when everyone gets the same reward. A book I recently read titled "Generation Me" even goes as far to say that the rise in depression rates in children/young adults can be linked to this high self esteem movement. The author believed that children grow up hearing how great and wonderful they are, when in reality they merely average. Then life hits these individuals and it hits them hard. For the first time they are told they are not great and they can't handle it.
ReplyDeleteI found the lecture from West Point to be particularly interesting. I consider my self to be anything but a conformist. Obviously we all conform to the rules and expectations of society in some manner or another. That's why I was somewhat surprised by my reaction to this lecture. When I think of the military, I often picture individuals who are rigid and ritualistic in their habits. When Deresiewicz suggest that today's leaders must be willing to think for themselves and to some degree question the norm I was a bit inspired. I found this article to be relative to young teachers because I believe today's educators must be willing to ruffle a few feather for the benefit of their students. My fear is that to many of us will just adapt to the system and conform to what is expected in the name of higher test grades. I hope to be able to project an atmosphere where critical thinking is rewarded not only with high grades but a sense of accomplishment and pride.
ReplyDeleteThe most enjoyable aspect of this reading was understanding who Deresiewicz was addressing when he gave this lecture. The fact that he is encouraging military personal to rethink "how it does business" is just brilliant. I hope he managed to inspire young cadets to be more mindful about the choices they will have to make once on the battlefield.
After reading this article, I found it to be very interesting. Waying the positives and negatives during a situation should be considered anytime we make a situation. This article really seemed to be pesimistic at times, but I found that I agreed with a lot of things he had to say. I feel as though he is talking to individuals who are entering college in which they have so many paths to choose from. One of these paths is the military. Military people have to be able to think for their own and adjust to others as he states. He does this in such a brillant way that I hope young children thinking about going into the military read some day. This may be a piece that actually inspires them to do so. Finally, I want to leave on a thought I had throughout the reading. If we always live in the "gray area" that he suggest, then aren't we going to be questioning ourselves to much? I think at times it has to be black and white and that is just the way it has to be. I know that is not for every scenario, but I do think it is for some. Just a thought I had when reading.
ReplyDeleteSCOTT LAMAN****
I found that Deresiewicz was so right when he was talking about how much college prep has changed since the 80s. I personally do not know what the 80s were like, but I do know that the process of getting into college was intense. My experience with getting into college was based on whether or not I took advanced courses, my gpa, ACT scores, and an admissions essay with two prompts to choose from. I was solely a number who's statistics were the only thing that mattered. Even the prompt (of which I chose one about what makes art, art) can only be depicted in so many ways. I believe that if the protocol for universities would be to have a personal interview with university admissions that I would have been able to get into many more schools. It was intimidating and I wish there were better ways to judge my collegiate ability.
ReplyDeleteI liked Burbules' piece and really related to it. I think he ultimately wants educators to focus on what they can do, realistically, to completely devote themselves to their profession, without any misguided attempts to romanticize teaching or to fall prey to the temptation to view education cynically. When I graduated from college 6 years ago, I dissuaded myself from becoming a teacher. Internships in NYC schools made me feel that I would hate working within public schools and conforming to all of the state requirements and testing (in some cases requirements as absurd as dictating how students were seated or how folders of student work should be displayed). But after time and consideration, I feel it would be a waste to ignore the desire I have, and have always had, to teach. I was in grade school when my teachers began sending me to other classes to tutor or pairing me with included special education students to complete assignments. While I suppose I could be successful doing a number of things, teaching is the only thing I have ever felt excited about doing. And I don't mean that in a giddy lighthearted sense, but rather that I feel an ignition or activation deep inside myself when I am in the position of teaching something to someone. Yet I don't approach teaching optimistically. I recognize that it will be difficult despite my personal motivation to teach, that I will not be able to reach all of my students, and that there will be bad days as well as good. I will be satisfied if I can make any difference, however small, for some of my students. That is not to say, of course, that I won't devote myself to helping each and every student I have as much as I can; I simply acknowledge that an educational utopia is impossible, and that that is ok: being overly optimistic or pessimistic will lead to burn-out, which won't help any students.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading Deresiewicz‘s article. Even though the title of the article was contradictory as the author mentioned but it made more sense to me as I was reading through. Simply when I want to make a decision or take the lead on a situation that is going to have a huge impact on my life, I should organize my thoughts first, look at the decision? What is its impact on my life? What are the consequences? And may be consult a close friend or a trusted someone to help me focus on my decision and how I want to proceed about taking an action upon it. From this simple example we can see that solitude and leadership go hand in hand and not against each other.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with Deresiewicz that great leaders should be more like thinkers other than just followers. Even the words explain themselves, when they do the routine thing or the exact same thing that others before them were doing, they are following the same path, and they are not taking the lead on changing that path for the better. They are not thinking for themselves or their country, they are only thinking about keeping that title or position of a leader. As future educators, we have to be good leaders, with vision, with open minds to be able to understand and accommodate all of our students’ needs. We have to be able to think for ourselves, and as a result, our students will follow this path for thinking about themselves and be future leaders.
With carful thinking and measuring all aspects of making a decision about an issue that would impact our career as future educators, how are going to go about carrying out that decision? Are we allowed to go against the flow? Against the rules and regulations? Or against our supervisors? Being good leaders requires deep and focused thinking, which in other words, requires solitude.
Solitude and Leadership
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear that an exam or assignment is going to be critical thinking and analyzing rather than question and answer I immediately start to worry. I am a good test taker, I have been trained by our school system to be just that. I can memorize information in one night and spit it back out on a test to get a good grade, then immediately after I purge in order to make room for the next cram session. This is something that I am not proud of, but it has gotten me through my education with very good grades. This is, I feel, how a lot of American students view their schooling. Why should we actually think about something when all that is asked of us is to relay the facts that we have learned, word-for-word, onto a piece of paper? The classes that I loved and that I still remember what I learned in are the ones that forced me to think and use my own views and opinions. We have a lot of issues with our school system that need to be reconciled, and I believe that the root of all of the problems is our extreme focus on testing. We are currently producing a generation of citizens that do not know how to think for themselves. They do what they are told, when they are told, and they never question a thing. How is this ever going to change if what we teach them their entire childhood and beyond is to repeat exactly what we tell them?
There were a few points in these readings that really stood out to me. For one, in Burbules "The Tragic Sense Of Education," I was interested by idea that educators inadvertently harm some students by the mere fact of helping others. I saw a version of this first hand in my FEEP experience. While I believe the teacher I was placed with does a great job for the most part, I saw that she was hardly giving aid to a couple students in particular, both of whom had untreated ADHD. She spent a lot of time helping other students and I was bothered by this. When I asked her, she said that in a class of 28 it's very difficult to help every student, and that it takes significant time to help these "problem" students. She saw it as if she spent too much time helping them, she would be neglecting all the others, and so she was choosing the lesser of two evils.
ReplyDeleteAnother point that I found interesting was in the lecture on leadership, where though we are all expected to complete our education in order to become "leaders," leadership is different than accomplishment, aptitude, excellence, etc. Many people succeed in their education, which as an institution works to create leaders, but very few actually are. I like that Deresiewicz emphasizes that good grades do not equate a good leader. I thought this tied back in with several other readings and discussions our class has had, such as the graduation speech from a few weeks ago.
As a first thought I found the definition that is given on solitude rather interesting. Solitude was described as being alone completely, like a man in the woods, however I feel that solitude can be internal and someone can feel alone and solitude even a room of crowded people. Those who lead our society and show authority I feel are the ones who feel the greatest sense on solitude because I do think that many people search for the simple things in life again.
ReplyDeleteAs another thought I found the points that Allie (a couple blogs up) had made. As students there is so much pressure to pass a test, to either pass a class or even graduate. By placing such emphasis on our tests I do not think as students are actually retaining the information and using it for later purposes. I know personally that I retain more information when there is not pressure of a test lerking around the corner. When the pressure of a test is placed on a student I simply retain the information to pass the test but how much of it I actually take with me farther than the test is very slim. I believe that if more emphasis was based on students retaining much more information by not putting such large emphasis on tests and make them more practice based and to take them a bit more casual I feel much more information would be retained and taken from the classroom.
The Barbules article was very interesting and addressed many points that I felt were valid in the educational systems of today. The part in the article about being sensitive to the fact that students' world views can be drastically different due to how they are brought up. This point also brought up how religion can affect how a student can perceive the information taught. This also alters how they can retain concepts and understand them as well. I personally feel that this is true and teachers aren't always aware of this fact and may sometimes teach in ways that exacerbate the problem. Along with this the author says that we as educators need to find a balance between pessimism and optimism. Teachers often get really burnt out in their career due to this unbalance and I am sure if they were made aware of these facts, this would be a much less likely scenario.
ReplyDeleteThe Tragic Sense of Education was a very different read for me, because it left me a little conflicted. Perhaps the paper killed a bit of my joy; it's a possibility. I am not often confronted with how the interconnections of society extend so that the smallest acts of kindness for one person will leave another neglected. I typically stop looking after the kindness happens. I liked the assessment of Utopianism, because it is easy to dream without giving the ideas life or direction. Education, especially at higher levels, discusses what is wrong in the world, but there is little implementation of what's concluded. Modesty should be used in education as well. Whenever I was the pupil of a teacher who admitted flaws in their knowledge, I respected them more. They seem more reliable, honest, and human.
ReplyDeleteI think Deresiewicz is right in his personification of what it means to be a true leader. To effectively lead, one must be able to do their own thinking, and be able to act upon their ideas. When one is in solitude, they are able to relect on things in their life and better understand themselves. Introspection gives us a chance to look back on situations and examine the ways that they have affected us and the impacts they've had on our lives. I also agree with the author when he talks about how today's young people have mainly learned how to conform to what's expected of them and jump through the hoops that are put in their way. Rather than thinking outside the box and trying to be a leader, the majority of our youth are learning how to follow the rules and work the system to get to past the stuff they don't like and get to a point where they feel comfortable. Are there benefits to excelling at being able to "jump through the hoops" and conform to what's expected of you?
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Solitude and Leadership I thought about many different things. The first thing I thought was how funny it was that someone was talking about West Point about the dangers of being a conformist. Isn't that the place where everyone is supposed to conform so that they are able to work in the military. I think that he is right, that we need to stop teaching conformity. I feel that we are nothing without our creativity, and that we would be no where today without having people that thought outside the box. After thinking about this some more I came to the conclusion that this was, in fact the best speech for West Point. The people there aren't being trained to conform, they are being trained to work with others, while still being able to have their own opinions. I think that in the end, this was a really enlightening speech, and I hope that the people that were there to hear it in person really took it to heart.
ReplyDeleteI think Deresiewicz is right in his personification of what it means to be a true leader. To effectively lead, one must be able to do their own thinking, and be able to act upon their ideas. When one is in solitude, they are able to relect on things in their life and better understand themselves. Introspection gives us a chance to look back on situations and examine the ways that they have affected us and the impacts they've had on our lives. I also agree with the author when he talks about how today's young people have mainly learned how to conform to what's expected of them and jump through the hoops that are put in their way. Rather than thinking outside the box and trying to be a leader, the majority of our youth are learning how to follow the rules and work the system to get to past the stuff they don't like and get to a point where they feel comfortable. Are there benefits to excelling at being able to "jump through the hoops" and conform to what's expected of you?
ReplyDeleteEric Border
I thought that the leadership and solitude article was very interesting, I loved how it connected two totally different things to make them seem like they really do need each other. The importance of solitude in any aspect of life is really undeniable. We need to be able look at our own lives, our own struggles, our own beliefs independently before we can hope to teach them to others or even understand them ourselves. Taking the daily distractions out of the equation is very important, solitude requires it. This is the only way that we can be alone with our thoughts and understand what it means to lead, to get the distractions away and learn what our beliefs truly are. I like the example he gives about what happened in the Army and he explains the fact that we need to know the following, "who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe." In order to lead properly in any situation we need to know these things.
ReplyDeleteThe Tragic Sense of Education was a really interesting read. It upset me but I agreed with his thoughts at the same time. It is terrible that we have to deal with this awful reality of the education system. This quarter I tutored a student and because this was a tutoring situation it was one on one, this was an amazing situation because I got to see my student twice a week for an hour. After doing this I had to write a reflection paper from the quarter on what I have learned and how i would like to incorporate this into my future classroom. Reading this article made me think of this reflection paper because I wrote about how I would like to include as much one on one time with my students as possible in my classroom because I saw first hand this quarter how much students can benefit from this one on one time. I know that it is not a plausible thing that I will get to have one on one time every day with my students but I think it is something to work towards and try to include it as much as possible.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this article. I believe that this directly applies to teachers and those going into teaching. We are told about the classroom and the theories about it. But when it comes to actually teaching we hear about the classroom like it's some sort of mythical creature. Our professors talk about all of the different things in the classroom but we never get a lot of time in a classroom. We need more time spent in classrooms if we want to be successful teachers and leaders. The ability to lead doesn't come from theories and books, it comes from experience and the ability to work with people. Steve Jobs didn't go to college and so did tons of other successful people. It really isn't a measure of success if you go to college. I know plenty of people who actually fail at the majority of life, but they've gone to college. Grades are no measure of success either. It's really easy to memorize and puke what you've memorized back onto a test. That gets you good grades but since we never have to apply what we learn in the classroom, what do we care? How will we better ourselves if we never get experience? Thanks OSU, it's been real.
ReplyDeleteIn response to the Solitude and Leadership article I found it very relatable to me even though he was addressing the plebe class. As much as the military is a completely different lifestyle than being a college student, they are very closely related at the same time. In the military it is all about behaving a certain way while you are at work. The military does not really care what you do off the clock as long as you show up to work on time, get your job done, and stay out of legal trouble.
ReplyDeleteThat is kind of the same thing as school. Teachers really do not care too terribly much about what you do outside of their classrooms and off school ground. But the better behaved you are in class and the more extracurricular activities you are in the better you look on applications to colleges. Everyone has the people in their classes that have a comment about everything and go above and beyond to get noticed by their teachers and administrators. This quarter I had a teacher tell my class that her best advice to us would be to make noise. That since OSU is such a large university that so many students get lost in the shuffle and only get by and not thrive with their education. She encouraged us with class discussion and to basically be in constant communication with her. She even admitted that she favored students her talked to her in and out of the classroom whether it be via email, Carmen, office hours, she even “Skyped” with someone the other day instead of emailing back and forth. I think it is important to make sure that students are doing what they need to do to get the grades they want, but is it really fair that just because some students do more outside of the classroom that they get better grades or accepted into better schools? What happens of students have to work? Or are is single parent? They have very limited time outside of the time they are already devoting to the class and the workload that goes along with it. Sucking up does not make you a good leader or prepare you for anything.