Blogging Around

Dana's post about Education


Dana, I really like this blog post. I completely agree with what you're saying about education turning into a "forgotten issue". This video effectively demonstrates the important cause-and-effect changing the face of education can have in the future of our country. I've been focusing on education for our election coverage, and one of the major problems I've noticed is that it's pushed aside too often. Politicians tend to focus more on issues that they can change with direct results, things that help problems in the present. And while I'm not saying other issues aren't important, the value of education tends to be overlooked. Changes in education aren't something that can have results appear a year or two later; they're changes that take time to develop. If we want to be able to continue to grow as a society, we need to have the enrichment necessary for our future generations to reach their full potential. It's a bit of a cliché, but what if the person who has the ability to cure cancer was part of one of the 1.2 million that drops out per year? My cousin's wife started working as a teacher as part of a program of college volunteers set up to work in charter schools. She fell in love with teaching, being able to inspire kids every day, and now works fulltime for a charter school in Nashville. She sees how important education is in these children's lives, how she sees creativity growing every day. Every child should be put in a learning environment that allows them to grow as much as they can. And Dana makes a good point: it really is up to us to stand for education.

Kara's post about Poetry

This is a really interesting post, Kara. I love the line, "Words were not meant to be wasted on those who are unable to see past their surfaces." There's a craft that goes into poetry that's unique in it's own sense; words have meanings further than anyone can see. But there's also an aspect of poetry found in everything we see, especially music. Kara does a good job of really showing the poetry in music, how it utilizes all the aspects of poetry both in lyrics and in the actual music: rhythm, repetition, variation, imagery. And beyond that, our perception of poetry really doesn't have a great divide from our perception of the world. In retrospect, poetry isn't the usage of words in a certain form, but it's the way things connect, it's the way things are ordered, and it's the way things are interpreted.

iMedia: Sarah Kay, Spoken Word Poetry

In all honesty, up until about 5th grade, I hated poetry. I hated poetry more than I hated waking up in the morning. I hated poetry more than bruised knees. I hated poetry more than dog-eared pages and monsters under the bed and I even hated poetry more than gym class. And I hated poetry so much because as I read it, I heard this pretentious voice echoing in my head. This voice echoed meaningless, muddy words, that only could be appreciated by pompous adults that pretended to understand the meaning.

It wasn't until one day that we had an odd man as a guest speaker at one of our assemblies to read us poems that finally something clicked in my head. Maybe, just maybe, poetry wasn't this distant concept. It could be read in my voice, and it could be relevant to my life.

The spoken word poetry Sarah Kay demonstrates and teaches is a great way of turning perspectives on poetry. Poetry is such an easily accessible mean of art, but it will always be taught with echoed groans. Anyone could write and get energized about poetry if our education system didn't teach it as a chore. Poetry doesn't need to be a struggle. It doesn't need to be spoken by people with extensive knowledge of every particle in our world, and it certainly doesn't have to only connect to one person. Sarah Kay points out that poetry doesn't need to be indignant or arrogant. It can be relevant to you. Good poetry comes from the intersection of ideas.


I've never quite understood the way my brain seems to function. My thoughts don't extend externally. I don't tend to start with a simple thought and gradually grow words and string sentences together. My thoughts sort of start at the finish and percolate from all directions to finish the start. It's a lot like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You know what you're trying to create but you haven't quite gotten there yet--and then two pieces come together in one spot and two in another and two in another until eventually they aren't just puzzle pieces--they're actually part of a picture. Poetry has always been an outlet for me to express myself in that jigsaw manner, playing with the shapes and fits of words. As Sarah Kay says, "Look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of the human mind."

An Inconvenient Truth: Limits of Perspective

The concept of "perspective" sucks. You can distort your perspective, you can contribute to your perspective, but you can't avoid having a perspective. You can't avoid the way you think. Ideally, the perspectives of functioning minds should fuse together in sort of a "symbiotic relationship" (as we learned last year). But perspective has a tendency to block our minds' potentials to enrich themselves with the comparisons to new perspectives. This is where the idea of confirmation bias really comes into play.

But what happens when this confirmation bias blocks your mind from picking up on the important moments? This is probably what irritates me most about perspective. I know I'm never fully going to be able to understand what someone is describing to me. I'd love to one day try to live thinking about life in that Seinfeld perspective, trying to find humor and irony in the most simple life moments I'd never otherwise notice. But in all honesty, it's hard to change your perspective. Maybe you have a moment where something clicks and suddenly your world will never be the same, but that won't always happen. You could spend lightyears trying to explain the appeal of music on the radio to me, but I will never be able to share that same perspective because I'm stubborn and my confirmation bias will block that opportunity from me. 

However, the fact that perspective can be excluding is really the only negative thing about perspective. Our world is shaped by perspectives; perspectives drive creativity. If we didn't have varying perspectives, we wouldn't have our government, we wouldn't have politics, we wouldn't have discussions in class, we wouldn't have arguments with our siblings or friends. We wouldn't have challenges, complications, creations or even change. Yet, if we don't accept the fact that we do have the ability to change our perspective, we won't be able to share new perspectives with ourselves and let in new mindsets. Maybe we should all just take a step back and look at things completely out of any perspective we know.