What is Courage?
What is courage? Is it the ability to prove yourself in war? Or the strength it takes to decide you will not fight? Is courage being yourself when you’re different from everyone else? Is it doing something that even your own father thinks you can’t do? Is courage synonymous with honor? Is it speaking up, even if doing so puts you in danger? Risking death for the person most precious to you? Or risking death for strangers? Is courage facing your fears, no matter how big or small they might be? Is it forging forward into a new life when you still miss the old one? Is courage all of these things? None of them?
The following text set is designed to help ninth grade students create and examine their own definitions of courage. In addition to asking, “What is courage?” it also lends itself to the question, “Where do our conceptions of courage come from?” Courage is the focus of this text set because it is a theme that is prevalent in American society. To be courageous is considered a positive quality, but the examples of courage most often seen in the news and in history books are often narrowly defined. Students need to think more deeply about what courage really is, and to get inside the minds of so-called “courageous” people and learn about their motivations and their fears. Students will be asked to consider a wide variety of characters and situations, all of them potentially courageous, but more in depth focus will be placed on three specific categories. The first is courage during war or revolution, beyond the stereotypical portrayal of the one-dimensional “war hero.” The second is the courage to be different from your peers or to voice your opinion even if it’s not a popular one. T...
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...are designed to help them with this difficult task. By reading and thinking about a variety of possibilities of what courage is, students can both expand and come to a better understanding of their own beliefs on the subject. Through class discussions and writing activities, they can also share these beliefs with others.
Works Cited
Brozo, William G. and Ronald V. Schmelzer. “Wildmen, warriors, and lovers: Reaching boys through archetypal literature.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
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Feinberg, Barbara. “Reflections on the ‘Problem Novel.’” American Educator Winter 2004-2005. 13 Apr. 2005. <http://www.aft.org/pubs-
reports/american_educator/issues/winter04-05/problemnovel.htm>.
Wolf, Shelby A. Interpreting Literature with Children. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers: 2004.
Courage: the ability to do something that frightens one, meaning the act of being courageous is not to be deterred by danger. This one word can categorize a person on a whole higher level. Stonewall Jackson exemplified tho word better than anyone else ever could have. For example, at the first battle of Bull Run, while several Confederate units were falling into disorder and panic, their general pointed to Jackson and his men who were withstanding the attack and said "There stands Jackson like a stone wall!" thus urging his men to gather their courage as well and regroup behind Jackson's position. In spring 1862, in Shenandoh Valley, Virginia, Stonewall created the Valley Campaign. In Jackson’s Valley Campaign, he marched
Courage is not simply about how well you deal with fear, how many noble deeds you accomplish, or how you overcome life threatening situations. Courage is the practice of determination and perseverance. Something like, an unwillingness to abandon a dream even when the pressures of society weigh down on your shoulders; society will make you feel tired, humiliated, broken, and confused. Actually, it can be effortlessly said that daily courage is more significant than bouts of great deeds. Since everybody undergoes demanding circumstances on a daily basis, and most of us will not be called to perform a great deed, courage comes from those daily struggles and successes. However, Kate Bornstein is one person who has been able to transform her everyday life into a brilliant deed of courage. She threw herself into an unknown abyss to discover truth that many others would never dare tread. Ingeniously combining criticism of socially defined boundaries, an intense sense of language, and a candid autobiography, Bornstein is able to change cultural attitudes about gender, insisting that it is a social construct rather than a regular occurrence, through here courageous writing.
Mark Twain best described courage when he said that, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear” (Twain). Both in The One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and Watership Down by Richard Adams, the authors deal with the topic of courage and each share a similar view on it as this quote. Indeed, both authors suggest that courage is not accumulated simply by acts of heroism, but rather by overcoming fears and speaking one’s mind as well. These books are very similar in the way that bravery is displayed through the characters in an uncommon way. Firstly, an example of bravery
Q1: The argument suggests courage be defined based on, the actions of an individual and the situation they are placed in. Someone could be put into the same situation and act on the situation differently based on experience, knowledge, desperation, and the meaning of the action or situation to an individual.(192c1-3-192d7) Someone with more knowledge will act more accordingly to a difficult situation if they know what their chances are in succeeding in that action or the consequences attempting it. Courage is a representation of bravery. If someone stands up for something not only to benefit them but to
“[Courage is] when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what” (Lee 149). In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, courage is an obvious overlapping theme that portrays radical, determined characters that have the willingness to defy common views. Likewise in The Help by Katheryn Stockett, the reader sees what happens when people persevere against the evils of society and take steps for the good of all. In both texts, the reader can see that courage is doing what is right without worry of the repercussions or opinions of others.
Courage can lead to positive changes since you are motivated to stand up and make a difference and if one did not have courage, they would not attempt to do such a thing at all; If Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln did not have any courage what so ever to make a change, our society would still be in slavery and also would not believe in equality for all. I strongly believe that if you have courage, you will change something for the best. The reason why I believe in courage being the number 1 way to lead to positive changes is because in the book The Cay Written by Theodore Taylor, Phillip was lost in a shipwreck and was taken in by a crew member of the ship named Timothy both which had sailed to a nearby cay, they both were stranded on the cay with limited resources only to have Timothy die from a fever and Phillip become blind, Phillip had the courage to live on his own and ended up being rescued, which in a way means that Phillip did not give up because he
Courage is not something that we are born with, it is a skill that takes time to learn and only a few are lucky enough to have it. To Kill a Mockingbird is not only about life in a world full of hate, it is about standing up for anyone’s beliefs being brave enough to do it. In this story, Harper Lee says “Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It's knowing you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do” (Lee 112). In To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee illustrates courage through Atticus Finch, Mrs. Dubose, and Arthur Radley.
Many people confuse courage for not being scared of what could happen, Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important that fear.” Courage isn’t being able to act like nothing will scare you or make life more difficult, it’s the ability to realize that something will be difficult or scary and you overcome the difficulty. Courage is the ability to overcome hardship, not avoid it or create more of it to make yourself seem more
Harmon, William, William Flint Thrall, Addison Hibbard, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. Print.
“Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.” Courageous people understand the danger that they face when they act how they do. That is what courage is all about. Many historical events occur due to people having the courage to do what they think is right, or because of those who use their courage to do what they want. Having the courage to stand alone in one’s beliefs may be one of the hardest thing a person can do.
In life there are many terms that are relative to individual cultures. That means that the definition is different depending on the culture's location and its persons believe. The definition for one such term, courage, as defined by both Daniel Webster and Funk & Wagnalls is "That quality of mind or spirit enabling one to meet danger or difficulties/ opposition with firmness/fearlessness." The words that make courage a relative term are danger and opposition.
The problem with the definitions of courage that we covered through the course of this semester is that they are very narrow yet the basic definitions are too broad. As a result of this, each needs to limit the scope of the definition at length. Do we really separate definition of courage for each specific circumstance? Just to name a few, we have battlefield valor, political courage, courage to partake in burdened virtues, religious courage (martyrdom), and fortitude. If a supposed self-evident truth does not hold true in all situations and cannot be aptly summarized in brevity, it is often because of a flaw.
Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts. 4th AP ed. New Jersey: Pearson, 2008. 528-35. Print.
about what is feared and what is not to be feared is what I'm calling courage."
I like to describe them as “loud” and “quiet” courage. People today do perform courageous acts on a daily basis but how they do them really proves who they are. Loud courage is when someone only does something courageous for personal gain, they do these things only when others are watching so that they can receive praise. Quiet courage is the opposite of that; when a person acts solely on their intention to do good and benefit others. That is the type of courage that we need today. Although these are forms of courage, there is much more to the word. Courage can be kindness, taking the lead, voicing an opinion, really anything that may be difficult or challenging to do. Every now and then a person is faced with a challenge or a complicated problem that they are fearful of and can even harm them either emotionally or physically, but a true man or woman that has courage will overcome this obstacle to pursue their inhibitions. Just like in the movie The Wizard of Oz, the lion is supposed to be the king of the jungle but is easily scared of every little thing that comes his way even though it would just be a tree or his shadow. At the end of the movie, when they find out the Wizard is a fraud, he realizes that he was courageous the whole time because of everything he did to get to the Emerald City. So being confident can play a huge role when in it comes to courage. Courage can come in all shapes and sizes but it is