This type of learning is very effective in the classroom. However, as soon as you leave class for the real world, you're basically clueless. Which is why this World Lit class is so great: it goes beyond the standard definition of learning, beyond the tests and memorization, circling through the abstract realm of experiential learning and bringing the entire process home to the real world. It's like Alice in her Wonderland: everything she learns is experiential, but she has the cushion of Wonderland to learn it in, and once she gets back to the real world she just applies her experiences in Wonderland to life.
Alice will apply things she learns in Wonderland to the real world.
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As far as leadership is concerned, I'd have to say that I learned most in this category when we did our Explore UT skit. I'm an older sister and a babysitter, so I know my fair share about how younger kids look up to older kids. However, I don't think I realized how much of an impact I could have on kids that I wasn't necessarily directly involved in, how I could "make their eyes bright and eager" (Carroll, 127). It not only reinforced my desire to lead through example but also gave the idea of leading through example new depth, because it gave me a sense of... perpetual leadership maybe? The idea that I was ALWAYS impacting others.
I feel like I've definitely been starting to apply this theory of perpetual leadership to my life. In class, we discussed the idea of group mentality, and the way that groups tend to act homogeneously in response to events. Both because we discussed this idea in class and because our Explore UT skit opened my eyes to the fact that I need to act as a leader at all times, I've started paying more attention to the group think and making sure that I'm not getting sucked into something I don't believe in. This class has taught me that being a leader is about acting in a way that you want others to act in.
Ethically, I think I've come a long way in this class. I feel like I had a very basic view of ethics before this year. It's not that I was a bad person, or at least I hope not. It's more that I was naive, I guess. It sounds stupid, but I always thought that if everyone would just act "nice," whatever that means, this world would be a phenomenal utopia and everyone could be happy. This class has taught me that ethics is much more complicated than niceness. This semester especially, through our meditation to better understand the thoughts and feelings of other beings, I've been able to use sympathetic imagination to discover how inadequate the narrow realm of human niceness is when you're trying to live your life in an ethical manner. Part of it is that "niceness," as we've learned through our various explorations of different cultures in this class, is defined in different ways by different people. However, this doesn't really completely cover why my original thoughts about ethics were mistaken, since this idea of cultural differences applies to ethics as well: different people define different things as ethical. It really has more to do with how your actions make others feel. This class has opened my eyes to the feelings of other beings, not all human, and therefore enabled me to live my life in a more ethical manner.
I have this theory that everyone sees the world through their own pair of glasses. Now, when you're born, your glasses are similar to all other baby's glasses. Maybe they're a little more round, or there's a kink in the glass on one eye, but they're close-ish in most aspects to the glasses of the rest of the newborns. However, as you experience life, your glasses keep getting beat up and bent out of shape, keep getting their lenses scratched, until for you to see beyond your own experiences and opinions (symbolized by the kinks in the glass) is almost impossible. I think that this class has enabled me to clean up my glasses a little bit, to mend a few of the kinks, so that once in awhile I'm able to glimpse the world not through my narrow, scratched point of view but from a much clearer and more universal place. Maybe if Alice had looked through a clearer part of her glasses, she wouldn't "cut a slice" (Carroll, 262) out of the pudding and caused it to ask her "how [she'd] like it if [he] was to cut a slice out of [her]" (Carroll, 263). Instead, she would have known how deeply this would offend the pudding and refrain from sinking her knife into it.
Look for the clear spaces!
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