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| Taken from Book Cover |
I was taken aback at first by the text, thinking it was going to be like a self help book, looking at greatness, but pleasantly, found it just the opposite! Chapter 4, Being a Contribution, probably had the biggest impact on me. I am always looking for ways I can grow. One area I can grow is through being a contribution and also recognizing everyone has the ability to be a contribution as well. By recognizing not only my own ideas, but also the ideas of others and their importance, I feel I can live my life in a better way by making a contribution a priority as a teacher, and as a Christian.
I also found this chapter to shift my thinking in the classroom. My students often reflect on their learning each day. This chapter forced me to go another direction and examine what might happen if I get students and myself more interested in contribution. That might mean contribution to class work, contribution to our class as a community, or contribution to the world at large. This takes pressure off students to be right, and allows them to take risks and be involved, to contribute.
I am glad to see that after you made it through the first few chapters of the book you were able to make a connection in chapter 3 and to the video. Sometimes I think just being open to other people’s point of view can change our perception of the world and of them even if it does not change our mind about how we feel.
Brian’s Blog Post:
I think the thing that I learned most from the first two chapters of this book was something about myself. This “thing” is something that I’ve had to deal with throughout this course and upon reflection, throughout my entire life. I’m talking about the types of books that speak to me and the type that I really cannot in any way relate to. Unfortunately, this book seems to be of the latter. I would classify it as more of a philosophical get-in-touch-with-your-inner-self type book. After finished up the first couple chapters, I felt a rush of all the books I’d read come back to me – those I enjoyed and those I did not (regardless of the genre or content). As an individual with a severe case of concrete logical-mathematical thinking, I realize that my brain has a particularly hard time processing text that is deeply philosophical, yet reading a physics, chemistry, or calculus text is relatively easy. As is reading any manual on whatever the topic. And I find some of the statements in the book particularly hard for my brain to accept. Take this passage on p.20 for example: “The pie is enormous, and if you take a slice, the pie is whole again.” (Zander, 2000) Now, as we all know, if you subtract a part from the whole, as long as the part is > 0, you no longer have the whole, as is insinuated by the authors.
Poor mathematics aside, the awareness of my own strengths and weaknesses in reading opened my eyes to the difficulties that some student may have in reading such texts as I enjoy, and quite truthfully, this was my greatest take-away from the first couple chapters.
So, that aside, I do see the value of thinking outside the box, as explained in the text. Another part of the text that resonated with me was the part about scarcity thinking. I believe as Americans, we have really fallen into that mind-set and try to accumulate as much as we possibly can, without much regard for those that have little to nothing.
Moving into chapter three was fearful (because it was much longer than the infinitely long previous two chapters combined) but I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed the authors take on “giving an A” and thought at length about what kind of effect that would have on a student population I might be working with next year.
Ironically, I didn’t really start to get into the text myself until I watched the TED talk (which I had seen a couple years ago) and remembered how much I enjoyed watching Ben Zander. And at that point, I decided to give the book an A, and have enjoyed it much more ever since.
(image from the cover of The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander)
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