October 7, 2008

Today’s Agenda

1) Take out homework: Review and circle key points or concepts.

2) One reason for writing this is to put into words – now – part of the answer to a very common job-interview question: “What did you get out of college?” Another part of the answer (you’ll get this part later on) would be your professional training, but chances are that any interviewer would be most interested in your capacity to learn, and this ability to change your mind and improve it is a big part of what that interviewer wants to hear.

3) Small Groups

a. Groups of Three: Timer, Scribe, Taskmaster

i. Part of the job here is training yourself to report accurately and briefly on a conversation, an important skill in almost every profession. Be sure to quote, and document who said the things you found helpful.
You have THREE tasks to perform.

Task 1: Identify what the papers have in common, and how they differ, and write those down as a summary of what the group thinks about how we change our minds.
Task 2: assemble a group sense of what “changing my mind” in the full sense really requires and means in the context of “higher learning.” This is to be a well-developed and SPECIFIC statement that your scribe will present to the class (6-8 sentences).

Task 3: Students will summarize the similarities and differences of their groups on the board.

Large Groups

Each scribe reports to the large group – clearly, as a demonstration of professional, oral communication.

Each student listens to other groups’ reports, and adds similarities and differences to his or her own individual list, again “attributing” remarks to the people who make them.

Journal Assignment for today:

Is your transition from High School to University complete? Or will you require other resources or help? What kinds of actions are required of you to prove that you have really changed your mind?

Homework:
Read chapter 36 from Pride and Prejudice, http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/ppv2n36.html which contains one of the fullest accounts of someone changing her mind ever written in literature or psychology. Focus on Elizabeth’s state of mind. Elizabeth has just read a long letter from Darcy (it’s in chapter 35), and she is changing her mind not only about him, but also about Wickham, a man she has thought she loved. In a way, her whole world is turning upside down. Write a journal entry on that aspect of this chapter.
Helpful questions to consider:
How does Elizabeth change her mind?

What emotions does she feel? What do her emotions tell us about the potential cost of changing one’s mind?

What does Elizabeth have to be like, in order to change her mind?

What key words does Jane Austen, the writer, use?

How is Elizabeth’s experience like or unlike the experience of changing my mind that I wrote about and the experiences I heard about in class 2?

The point of this entry is to focus on Elizabeth’s emotions as she changes her mind. Literature can often supply this sort of “model” or extreme case or even guide, especially when (we would say today) the writer intends to provide a kind of “virtual” experience. If the writer is skilled, he or she can show aspects of an experience we might not have thought about. Then when we undergo the experience ourselves, we are not so bewildered as we might otherwise have been.

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