The importance of asking 'why?'
Asking "why" is so important. I see it as the most pivotal piece of our evolutionary puzzle.
As humans, we can't seem to avoid the need to ingest and express opinions. It's a survival skill. Or, it used to be. The thing is that the environment—and our relationship to it—has changed dramatically.
My English teachers were the ones who had the largest impact on my critical thinking skills. With a couple of notable exceptions, I liked most of them, but I respect them all now. I struggled with fully embracing that then. As a freshman in high school, English class was both grueling and illuminating. I wrote more in that class than was required in any of my college courses, but fluff wasn't allowed—every word had to serve a purpose.
I hated that.
Because it felt subjective, and, well, she didn't like me all that much. I've even written about my relationship with her before. I remember that fall we read and wrote about the poem, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" has stuck with me ever since. I've always felt a tone of ritualistic resignation in that poem. I don't see toxic positivity so much as blunt objectivity: the world is as it is, and so we must be.
Now, this teacher would not stand for trite claims or summarized filler, either... the whole point of essays she assigned was for us to start asking "why?" Not of her, but of the author. She wanted us to practice using our heads to try theirs on. When reading their words, she made it impossible for us to not consider their perspectives. To make certain we were giving it an honest go, she ran our work through plagiarism detection software back when Sparknotes was cutting edge—before Obama's first term.
I'm better for it now, but it was...uh... a journey.
She'd wanted us to think about how the author might've seen things, but the teacher I had the year after wanted us to start wondering why they saw things that way. He was incredibly inquisitive where she'd been bullish about writing tactics. To their credit, they made a pretty great team... accidental, sure, but effective. By the time we got to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, and Vonnegut, I was reading to find out "why" instead of "what."
The root of media in any form is observation. What we see, hear, feel, and experience shapes who we are and what we do.
Do not go gently into that doom scroll.
Rage, rage against the anti-thinking role.
Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
61/365
What's something you learned from a teacher that you'll never forget? Why?
onward.
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