Goal 7 – Modern Western Civilizations [HIST 110-50] {Honors Course}
Modern Western Civilizations is an Honors course that I took in order to meet my General Education Goal 7. I chose to reflect on “Short Paper 2: Analysis of Courage Tastes of Blood” because it was quite possibly the most frustrating paper I have ever written.
Once the students in my class started working on reading Courage Tastes of Blood, we collectively went to our professor to express to him that what we were reading was going way over our heads. Instead of helping us make sense of it, Dr. Holliday left it to us to figure out on our own. I was extremely frustrated that I was doing my best, asking for help, and still felt like I was getting nowhere with my understanding of the book. Dr. Holliday continued to tell us that we were underestimating ourselves and that we needed to just keep trying. He was very vague and gave us little, if any, guidance when it came to understand what the author of the book was trying to convey.
Many hours and many tears of frustration later, each student in the class finally turned in her paper (yes, every student was female!). Once he collected our papers, Dr. Holliday talked to us about why he was being so stingy when it came to helping us with our assignment. His goal was to teach us a life lesson mixed in with a lesson on Chilean history. He intentionally gave us a book to read that was a bit over our heads and which was so obscure that there was almost no other research available pertaining to it so that we would have to think analytically entirely on our own. He wanted us to prove to ourselves that when, in “the real world,” something happens and we have no idea how to handle it, we can figure it out on our own without needing extensive help and guidance from others, since extensive help is not always going to be available to us.
From the perspective of a future educator, I am still not so sure how I feel about having an enormous amount of unnecessary stress placed on me for no reason other than to teach me a “life lesson;” however, Dr. Holliday made one other point that really resonated with me.
After explaining his reasoning behind the assignment, Dr. Holliday pointed out that since we were such a tight-knit class of Honors family members who all lived in the same residence hall and spent so much time together, we had more opportunities to complain together. He called it a “complain train;” he said that once one person started complaining, everyone else jumped on the train and made it longer and longer as well as more and more extensive, which, in turn, stressed all of us out even more than we would have originally been. Since Dr. Holliday’s explanation of the “complain train,” I have noticed that I have made a much better effort to just keep my head down and knock out frustrating tasks without spending so much time dreading and complaining about them.
Have I completely stopped complaining? Of course not. I don’t believe asking someone to never, ever complain is a reasonable request. However, I do believe that I have had a much more positive outlook on tasks since I have made more of an effort to be less negative.
Take a look at my paper on Courage Tastes of Blood below to get an idea of what type of writing I am capable of producing even when I am having a hard time understanding the material about which I am writing.
