Method Of Development (Analogy)

Job searching is like fishing; You can put your line in the water all day, but if the fish don't bite you'll still go home with nothing. As the fisheries become more congested with more and more fishermen going after the same or fewer fish, each fisherman's effort gets less productive. This being the exact same for job searching too, it becomes less productive when the job markets are more congested with many unemployed peoeple. Also you have to keep trying, you can't just had out one résumé and figure you've got a job, you need to keep trying and disperse them all over the place. By doing this you will have a lot better chance on getting a job, this goes for fishing aswell except with catching fish. If you only cast once you won't have a high chance of catching a fish, trying over and over will give you a lot better probability of having a good catch.

Metacognitive Reflection #1

In regards to my socratic circle experience I feel that I am good at listening to others with either agreeing or disagreeing with what they are saying. When I try to voice what I am thinking it's hard for me to organize my thoughts in a way to make them clear and worthwhile within the circle. In my mind I am not convinced that what I am about to say is something productive and therefore I mostly just listen to others. I notice while listening to others I notice and pick out a lot of what they talk about and I can also realize where I might of had a biased opinion or missed something rather important.

"You Call This Literature" - By Ashley Laframboise

Looking through the "Literature" section and expecting to find articles on Woolf and Morrison, Pound and Hazlitt, I was disgusted to see "Dan Brown" littered all over the place like candy wrappers in a field, and realized that this is in fact what we have come to. This is not to criticise Brown (although his earth-shattering theory is not even his own, and his writing is generally quite uninspired, blunt and bad) but what I find appalling is how a best-seller, based on plot and a juicy story everyone loves to believe, is what defines what we talk about, is what defines what we all think we ought to read.

Popular literature has hit an all-time low to the point that fine literature is being overlooked by so many of us, to the point that Chapters, "aiming to achieve Wal-Mart excellence", has candles, calendars, journals and pens at the front of the store now, and we have to go to the back to see what is supposedly really selling. Moreover, on the tables nearest the entrance are shiny, colourful, hard-covered best-sellers things written by Dan Brown and anything with Oprah's Book Club's seal of approval sticker. In fact, it took William Faulkner almost an entire century to finally be recognized as a valuable writer by most of us when Oprah recommended a three-volume set of his "best" work. We read what Oprah tells us we should read, find it at the front of Chapters, and, for the select few of us who actually want to read more of an author's work, are hardly able to find anything else he wrote in the store. It seems we all want what someone else thinks is "best," without having to do any research, without having to dig through piles of books, to find the overarching narrative of an author's career. Rather, we gather bits and pieces, as if all works were separate, only caring to read the author that the New York Times deems "Brilliant" and "Dazzlingly unique" as if they weren't all the same or something.

Some of us haven't even heard of Canadian writers, or at the very least, Canadian writers who don't base their stories in the mid-western U.S. in order to sell more copies. Many of us have never read anything by Atwood or Munro, who are, surprise, surprise, hardly even being considered in book stores "Best Selling Novels," while others like Henighan are being almost completely ignored. No, it seems we'd all rather read up on astrology and Devils wearing Prada or updates on the celebrity life. I figure that if there's really something positive going on, we wouldn't feel the need to try to "think positively," or, more specifically, to not think at all by numbing our brains with cliché and individualistic, self-indulgent ideas. It seems everyone wants to "escape." Everyone wants to read for "enjoyment," to dissolve into a world where a beautiful young woman falls head-over-heels for some man who has some dark and foreboding secret. Have we become so passive, so hopeless, that we feel we have to escape our lives and put our brains in the numb cloudy box of predictable plots with happy endings about boring people just like ourselves? It seems we don't want to look around us, don't want to read about things that matter, and this is not only egotistical, but obtuse. I recognize the need for enjoyment and great writers like Brand and Rhys and Joyce and Chesterton inform and inspire as well as delight which take us all a lot further than a bestselling Dan Brown or Stephen King. Literature is what makes us human. And if what we're reading is mass-market, bestselling, cliché plot-driven books, I'm concerned about what that says about us, and, more specifically, where humanity is headed.