A thought-provoking piece. The following passage got me thinking: "Ghalyela’s old-school work ethic, her attention to and passion for every little detail of the job — from which she derives her sense of dignity — seems archaic compared to youngsters like Brooke who 'seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes'...wishing 'to be not so much esteemed as admired' and 'to be envied rather than respected.'" It got me thinking about my students, too many of whom beam when I praise their talent, but shrugg off my insistence that they cultivate that talent with work. When I give them a B rather than an A for their half-assed rewrites of their potentially superb papers, they feel almost betrayed, like I promised something that I whimsically didn't follow through on.
the solipsism comes from the fact that we don't talk to anyone more than five minutes a day, but spend an hour with the Harry Potter characters after school or work. When we spend more time with fictional characters than the real, when we know them better than real people and maybe better than ourselves, then the people in our imagination are the actual real people in our lives. The only real people are those inside of minds and therefore reality is the reality inside of our minds. And the black smoke from our mouths means there's no new novel that we're interested in yet
A thought-provoking piece. The following passage got me thinking: "Ghalyela’s old-school work ethic, her attention to and passion for every little detail of the job — from which she derives her sense of dignity — seems archaic compared to youngsters like Brooke who 'seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes'...wishing 'to be not so much esteemed as admired' and 'to be envied rather than respected.'" It got me thinking about my students, too many of whom beam when I praise their talent, but shrugg off my insistence that they cultivate that talent with work. When I give them a B rather than an A for their half-assed rewrites of their potentially superb papers, they feel almost betrayed, like I promised something that I whimsically didn't follow through on.
the solipsism comes from the fact that we don't talk to anyone more than five minutes a day, but spend an hour with the Harry Potter characters after school or work. When we spend more time with fictional characters than the real, when we know them better than real people and maybe better than ourselves, then the people in our imagination are the actual real people in our lives. The only real people are those inside of minds and therefore reality is the reality inside of our minds. And the black smoke from our mouths means there's no new novel that we're interested in yet