As I sit here in front of my laptop with just days left of my first semester of my 6 year journey to begin a career as an Audiologist; a career I have become very passionate about, I wanted to take the time and use Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature”, to analyze my experience thus far. Audiology is a field of study that is very specific to communication disorders and plain and simple, the ears. Not a single class I took this semester related to Audiology but they were requirements, mere stepping stones, necessary to reach my end goal. I vow to come back to this essay after I graduate with my Master’s degree to see if I feel the same way but I have a strong feeling that my views on college credits won’t change. I want to use this final essay to examine each class I took this semester and view it from a perspective that Percy would use towards the college experience. The irony in this essay will be that regardless of my findings, there isn’t a damn thing I can do to change these college requirements. I’m stuck on this “highway to
Freier stated that the educator was taking away the power of the student to think on their own which turned them into “receptacles”. Freier wrote, “Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are (Freier 216). It seems like these great authors such as Walker Percy and Paulo Freier criticize the role educators play in the education system and urge students to break free the conformity of the way subjects are taught in school and truly experience them through our own dialectical
Baldwin talks about role and how one must change their place in the world in order to appreciate one’s role in society, while Freire talked about how the teachers in the schooling systems needed to change their roles in the lives of those they taught. Baldwin talks about his place in the world and how isolated he felt from the people of America. He had to leave America to find his “role— as distinguished…from [his] “place” — in the extraordinary drama which is America, [he] was released from the illusion that [he] hated America” (Baldwin 2). Going to France released him from the role he thought he was stuck in. Freire adds to this idea when talking about the role of students and teachers who “instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “‘banking ' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (Freire 1). Freire discuses the solution to this problem by using “problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical characteristic of banking education [and] can fulfill its function of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Freire 6). According to Freire one of the main problems with the ‘banking’ is “the banking approach to adult education…will never propose to students that they critically consider reality” (Freire 3). Baldwin also talks about his role when he says that while in France he started listening to Bessie Smith to “ re-create the life that [he] had first known as a child and from which [he] had spent so many years in flight” (Baldwin 1). For years Baldwin had avoided certain activities and foods
In Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” he attempts to portray the idea that perspective can be skewed by another’s story, personal experience, and other factors that lead people to have these expectations of a sight or study that lessen the experience. He demonstrates this when he makes mention of the tourists at the Grand Canyon, and the Biology student getting compared to the Falkland Islander. The facts he presents are true, but Percy does not go into detail about individual cases leading to a generalized essay that does not show that each individual account is different, and not all expectations are changed from other information given to people will taint the learning environment or the experience, and because of this the points that are not mentioned as well as Percy’s thoughts will be explained and expanded on.
How imperative is it that one pursues a traditional college experience? Although it might appear that Charles Murray and Liz Addison are in agreement that the traditional college experience is not necessary for everyone, Addison provides a more convincing argument that higher education is necessary in some form. This is seen through Addison’s arguments that college is essential to growing up, that education is proportional to the life one lives, and that community college reinvents the traditional college experience. Not only does Addison have her own opinions about college, but Murray does as well.
...n losing those positions, intellectualism lost, students lost and the country as a whole lost. The brilliance of her teaching method matches more thoughts of Freire, “the task of the teacher, who is also a learner, is both joyful and rigorous” (Freire, 2005, p. 5). Rigorous, indeed, especially given the predicament she often found herself.
Congratulations on being admitted to State College! I am glad that you have made your decision to come here. State College has numerous great opportunities to offer its students. You also told me that you are enrolled in English Composition 101. One of the pieces of literature you will encounter in this class will be "The Loss of the Creature", by Walker Percy. For your preparation to the class I can summarize and give you my explanation of "The Loss of the Creature". Throughout the essay Percy tries to get across how any person with expectations or "packages" will not be able to fully accept and learn from any experience.
...o think for themselves. He believes that students will become more active and informed citizens if they are brought up to think for themselves (155). Gatto’s proposed solutions can be found successfully applied in Mike Rose’s essay. In his essay he describes the mediocre education he received while on the vocational track. Mike’s future was looking rather grim until he came under the instruction of Jack MacFarland. This man was a wise and enthusiastic teacher who challenged students academically. He encouraged and inspired students to read, to be proactive in their classes, and to think for themselves. His classes were engaging and the students were interested in his teachings (165-167). The fact that the same solutions that Gatto proposed in his essay was successful applied elsewhere proves that teaching practices need and can to change for the better.
Bird, Caroline. "College is a Waste of Time and Money." The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository Prose. 9th ed. Ed. Linda H. Peterson et. al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. 481-490.
During my first semester of college, I felt like this course overshadowed all the others. I faced many challenges, gained better habits, and even increased the value of myself as a scholar. Not only did my professor provide her students with the course material she built a confidence inside of us that will allow us to be able to tackle any task, especially pertaining to any written compositions. The things that I have learned from this course could and will be applied to any and everything I do from here on out, whether that writing an essay or even taking a test. Again, the journey was long, but I will be forever grateful for the things that I, and all of my peers have gained from this
In today’s culture people are not individuals they are consumers and they have lost their ability to have their own experiences. In “The Loss of the Creature” by Walker Percy, he talks about why people have lost their sovereignty and how they can get it back. There are a lot of things that people can do differently and regain their individuality back from the consumer culture that they live in.
Once this becomes the norm for teachers they tend to become uninteresting, and students are the ones reaping the consequences. Rose acknowledged this cycle of learning apathy, writing, “But mostly the teachers had no idea of how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond”(1989, p.2).
In Paulo Freire’s essay “The Banking Concept of Education” he talks about how in education there is no conversation between the teachers/professors and their students. In this essay there are a few points I do disagree with, such as that there are some class in which there cannot really be any conversation or discussion, for example mathematics cannot be disproven because there are theorems and concrete facts, so teachers and professors have to teach for memorization. Another reason I disagree with Freire’s way teaching is because in the banking concept Freire is against when teachers are just telling students things and they are regurgitating them, but some students learn better using memorization for learning in the class room and also when studying. The next point I disagree with in Freire’s essay is he doesn’t really look at it from the teachers stand point, because in the United States at least the teachers are now forced to only teach certain points in their subject because of all the standardize testing that they now have in place, specifically grade school. The last thing in Freire’s essay that I disagree with is how he seems to kind of put down teachers.
Kozol perceives a war waging between teachers and the public school system (Kozol, 3). Teachers are trapped victims confined to the two purposes public school is attempting to accomplish. Those two goals include “class stratification and political indoctrination” (Kozol, 7). He believes that students should be aware of what is really being taught so they can react accordingly (Kozol, 9).
Freire presents “problem-posing” system as an ever changing reality, facing challenges as interrelated to other problems expanding on critical thinking. In the film Todd Anderson’s character is portrayed as a shy nervous student. Keating taunts and pushes the young man to describe what he sees and feels when looking at a portrait of the poet Walter Whitman. Anderson creates this emotional poetic expression that starts from something he related to down in his soul, a fight with a blanket that is never quite big enough to cover and hide you. In the article “Cultural and Political Vignettes in the English Classroom: Problem- Posing, Problem-Solving, and the Imagination”, Jacqueline Darvin writes about a 7th grade classroom in East Meadow, New York middle. The students are asked to respond, imagining being in a difficult social situation and carefully considering their roles in the school community. One of the series had to do with bullying, the students not only respond including words, but actions as well. Darvin captures the following quote from Maxine Greene, in her classic Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, writes , "It may be the recovery of imagination that lessens the social paralysis we see around us and restores the sense that something can be done in the name of what is decent and humane.” Only by giving students the opportunity to practice thinking and planning how one might respond to an uncomfortable situation brings one to actually respond and interact, instead of ignoring and not getting
The process of obtaining a college degree is not an easy task, it requires a large amount of time invested. In order to graduate, colleges and universities require a certain amount of credits. These credits achieved by taking courses referred to as general education classes. Colleges set these courses to enable the students to “Explore, Discover, and Transform.” The general education courses prepare students to acquire knowledge and skills to become well educated people, that are then ready to interact with the outside world in a responsible manner (“Degrees: General”). The general education courses include English, History, Science, and Mathematics. In order to receive credit for the specific section students are required to take one or two classes that fall under each section. In addition, specific majors require
... generally accepted that a teacher’s main role is to facilitate learning rather than to be the source of all knowledge” (p.2).