Blog (David's) [The Best Of]

Writing reflections was an altogether new experience for me. The combined effects of being someone who’s never kept journals along with my math- and science-heavy coursework left me, as far as I can tell, one of the least experienced writers in the class.

This is apparent in one of my first posts, titled “Reflection 2”. I was clearly struggling with writing style: many of my sentences are choppy and poorly worded, and I frequently interrupt myself with parenthetical asides. The all-caps “headers” seemed like a good idea at the time, but don’t really make sense in the flow of the narrative. They seem to divide the text too much, hurting the overall cohesiveness. Despite the many problems with this reflection, I chose it because I see some positive traits in it. The piece was successful, albeit marginally so, in combining something from my experience with Gawande’s text. (My argument was that independent musical artists used Gawande’s idea of ‘trust’ to for a more effective ‘group’ with their customers, something the RIAA failed to do.) Additionally, the awkward word choices and sentence structures are sometimes lucky enough to appear creative, which at least help the piece stay interesting to the reader.

My comfort with writing reflections increased with time, as can be seen in a reflection from the second three weeks titled “5”. In this piece I discussed my favorite college course, “Mythology of Greece and Rome”. This writing was clearly an improvement over my previous work: it had only a few of the awkward sentence missteps of earlier posts, (the most noticeable being “Daedalus did, so Queen Minos did, allowing Zeus to,”) and the flow of the narrative was uninterrupted and well-organized. Negative aspects, of course, are still apparent in this reflection. Neither the class discussion nor any of the class text is referenced, which would have helped give this reflection more of a point and allow it to fit with all the other reflections. Also, while the piece was fun to write, it didn’t present any real argument answering the prompt.

For my last post in October, I wrote a reflection linking other students’ ideas in “Is Diversity Good?” At this point, I can say that I was perfectly comfortable with my writing style. There are no awkward breaks, no noticeable missteps that take the reader’s attention away from the writing. Additionally, the fusion of Kim’s and Joe’s ideas with my own made this piece a lot more colorful. I’d say this post was easily one of my most interesting, as it involved many different views of the same topic of diversity within working groups. While the post is lacking the “storyline” of some of my earlier posts, I think it makes up for it in a cohesive argument.

My favorite post, the one I consider best, is my argument against the rigid guidelines of graduation requirements: “For Flexibility”. I like this piece for three main reasons: the argument it presents is perfectly cohesive (more so than any other one of my posts,) there are good references to both class discussion and the text, and the links used seem to help clarify the piece even more. Of course, the piece isn’t perfect: my defense against counterarguments could have been better developed. All in all, though, I think this piece stands as my best for the semester.

The weekly required writing was illuminating for me. I was forced to push through my initial inability to convey meaning effectively through text. I found that an easy way to break through writer’s block is to simply tell a story from personal experience (whether it is perfectly related to your subject or not.) As I grew more comfortable writing, I found that reading other writing (be it other students’ blogs, or outside articles,) helped solidify my own ideas and help me put them down in words.

I have a feeling I will continue writing, if only to keep practiced on the progress I have made so far. I doubt I will continue this blog in its current form, but now that I have gained confidence in making reasonable and cohesive arguments, I think it will be easier for me to continue writing on a regular basis.

A Thought on Senge's View of Disengagement

When in class the Professor asked us to consider our disengagement dilemma in Senge’s terms, a thought emerged: disengagement is the lack of personal mastery. In this case, I’m using “personal mastery” to mean the act of constantly striving towards bettering oneself, (the “journey”.) Senge portrays personal mastery in its corporate incarnation. He explains that personal mastery means digging deeper into one’s work, constantly striving to learn more and become more skillful. Such a description can be easily translated to the classroom: a student disengages when they apply just as much effort as is necessary, spending no time or effort in “digging”.

Personal mastery, Senge argues, doesn’t come easily. It takes patience, and clarity of vision. Most importantly, it seems to me, personal mastery comes from the understanding that one will never stop learning. There will never be a person who knows everything, and keeping an open mind to new ideas and changing circumstances is integral in pursuing personal mastery.

In her latest post, Alessandra mentions a stubborn ex-team member who she calls Kurt. Kurt is asked to think of ways that he can involve his community in achieving a visionary goal – in his case, eliminating disasters caused by engineering mistakes. He refused, however, to consider anything outside of his comfort zone, arguing that he could solve the problems by researching solo. It took the rest of the team members’ arguments to show Kurt that his stubbornness was counter-productive to his goal.

While the Kurt Situation might not immediately parallel the obstacles to personal mastery, I think his stubbornness illustrates a common human trait that keeps many from taking on “the journey”. Kurt, like many people, couldn’t see any problem with his solution: he could solve the problem fine by himself, he thought. He considered himself proficient enough to solve his goal without the immediate help of his peers.

This thought is counterproductive. With such a huge goal as solving engineering mistakes, there isn’t a person on Earth who is capable of solving it alone. Kurt is not seeking personal mastery as long as he is considering the fact that he always has room to learn, and other people will always have something to teach him.

Disengagement may involve a similar symptom. When I think back to the classes I was most disengaged in, I am reminded most of a Fusion Science course I took. This class, despite being completely within the topic boundary of my major and interest, was nearly impossible for me to become engaged in. I was the classic disengaged student: I put no more effort into the class than was necessary to get an A.

This disengagement wasn’t because the material was far above my head, and it wasn’t because the teacher was especially boring. I think I was uninterested mostly because I felt like I knew most of the course’s material already. Because my focus is Plasma and Fusion, I had taken courses before (and went on to take classes after) that repeated much of the same material. This course, however, offered the least amount of “new” information. I couldn’t help but zone out in class.

This disengagement, then, is my fault. I refused to pursue personal mastery in the course because, like Kurt, I felt like I had nothing to learn. Had I worked harder at finding new and interesting information from the subject matter, I may have eliminated my disengagement.

My point here is that, in an effort, to eliminate disengagement in a given course, the designer would be best of considering this human characteristic. With opportunities for a student who already knows much of the information to find something new and interesting, disengagement might become less of a problem.