Friday, May 17, 2013
Thinking with the Stars
For Tuesday morning, please choose a moment from last night--either Formal Dinner or the IB Dance presentation--and examine the knowledge contained therein. Explain the context, the perspectives at work, and what about it caught your mind's eye. Finish with a KQ extracted from the moment. Congratulations to those of you who danced last night. Your performances were brave, personal, and powerful.
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I found two interesting moments during the dance performance. As one of the performers, I had seen all of our dances before when we did our rehearsal. I was watching the performance on the backstage. When Dorjee started her dance, I suddenly realized that the shirt which was supposed to be tied on her waist was down. I was very nervous about her because she could easily step on the shirt, and fall down. However, she ignored the problem with her costume, and continued dancing just like normal. Because of her ignorance, most of the audience did not realize this problem.
ReplyDeleteAnother moment I found was during the Question and Answer time. The most frequent question that the audience asked was “What was your dance about?” Before the performance, all performers had written the analytical statements about their dances. The statements included the intentions and the motivations of their dances. They were printed on the programs, and given to every audience. It meant that the answers to this question were clearly stated in the program notes. However, people still asked this question, which meant that they either ignored the program notes or they wanted to ask it again. If it was the first situation, I considered it as a kind of ignorance. Although theses two moments were very different, they both related to the idea of ignorance. Thus, I formed a knowledge question from these two moments: To what extent does ignorance influence our life?
During formal dinner, I began to get very nervous about the performance which was coming all too soon and was not over with fast enough. As I got up with the others to get dinner, I realized that I could not eat because my nerves were rejecting my apetite for the appealing chicken. I knew that later on I would be extremely hungry. However, I still did not eat. Indeed, later on I did become hungry.
ReplyDeleteFollowing the performance, I, as well as the others, went back to our rooms to do our assignments. I often meditate and practice controlling my breath and mind at night. This led my to ask myself: In what ways do our eating habits affect our brain? Which is more powerful: Will power or health? The mind and body are mysterious things. I considered a medical perspective that is that without good health, a body cannot function properly. On the contrary, yogis and yoginis eat a minimal amount of food and though he or she might be emaciated, their minds are wonderfully strong and their will power is outstanding though their bodies are hungry. This was interesting to me because the relationship between body and mind has always been interesting - particularly because there are so many possibilities considering a lack of answers.
The moment from the night of formal dinner and the dance performance that I found interesting was my feeling of nervousness. I was nervous that I would forget my piece as I had before. I was nervous that my costume would ruin the dance or become unpinned and I would be stabbed in the back with a few safety pins. I was nervous about the opinions of the audience, of my classmates and of Ann. This nervousness started at the beginning of the day but escalated after my riding lesson and all through formal dinner and while putting on my make up and getting dressed. I was last to go and as I watched everyone else I started to get so nervous I thought I needed to go to the bathroom. But once Ava started to go my nerves started to settle and I realized that I had preformed in front of people so many times before and I have survived through all of them. I had preformed in front of 5 times the people in the gym and on TV, what was I to be nervous about. Right before Ava was about to end I had built up this strong excitement. I imagined that I was with my friend Michelle, about to go on and dace with her. We would pump each other up and tell one another that it did not matter what the performance looked like as long as we tried our hardest and had fun. That was my last thought before Ann started my music and the lights started to turn on. In the end I realized that I was only nervous because I thought that I needed to be. My nervousness is a way of knowing that I am going to be prepared and ready for what I am about to do. When I am not nervous I usually forget something. The knowledge question that was brought out of this was: To what extent to we rely on emotions for security?
ReplyDeleteFrom Thursday nights formal dinner and dance performance I have though of two different interesting moments. That entire day was very stressful and nerve-racking, I was really excited but at the same time I couldn't wait for the day to be over. My first interesting knowledge member was was similiar to Tina's, when Dorjee went to perform her piece I noticed her skirt untied and flopping in front of her. I knew that this was incorrect because I had seen her full costume before. This worried me because I new that she did a lot of movement, and I was afraid that she would either step on it and rip the costume or she would trip and fall. So many nerves went through my head but what was interesting part is, I don't think she noticed throughout her piece.
ReplyDeleteTo what extent can knowing what others do not affect how we live our lives?
My next piece of interesting knowledge was during my piece. Whenever I dance I always get into a certain state of mind where nothing can get in my way. I have been dancing for quite some time now, and this was the moment I have been waiting for my entire life. I have always wanted to do a solo performance but I have never gotten the chance to. There have been many times where I built up my expectations to something that I was looking forward to which turned out to be just "okay." Interestingly enough, Thursday morning I had EXTREME deja vu where I was driving with my dad to the morning shuttle and I remembered that last year this time I was thinking about how my dance would end up a year from that day…weird.
To what extent can pre assumed notions of an event be greater than reality?
My moment of knowledge came to me when I was serving dessert at formal dinner. I was the server, so I had the rest of my companions play a little game. Whoever correctly guessed the dessert being served would have first pick. However, this failed because half the table already knew it was tiramisu. Others had wanted dessert to be chocolate cake. This sparked a conversation about the different types of desserts we preferred and out came the shocking revelation that one of our tablemates had never had tiramisu in her life. For her first taste of tiramisu, she sure liked it a lot. This in turn led to a discussion about the best tiramisu we had ever had. When Lauren (she was the faculty member at our table) asked me, I replied that it was at a steakhouse in Maryland when I spent Christmas with my family. She then made a very interesting comment “Ah, yes. It probably tasted wonderful because you were with your family when you had it.” This caused me to stop short. Was it possible that my taste buds could be altered by me emotional state? Instance from novels flitted back to me; occasions where the protagonist felt as if she was eating cardboard because she was so upset. Surely emotions couldn’t actually change the way our taste buds worked. The tiramisu was just that good.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I wasn’t satisfied with my answer. Lauren believed that taste could be affected by emotion and I was too stubborn to give in. However, this all led me to consider how different ways of knowing can affect one another. In this case, emotion affected sense perception. This led me to the knowledge question:
How, and in what circumstances, do our ways of knowing affect one another?
When I first looked at the list of who I would be sitting with at formal dinner I was a little surprised because I did not know most of them personally. Before Thursday night I had not had the opportunity to talk most of them in an intimate setting before. About twenty minutes into dinner I realized that I was really enjoying our conversation, I realize now that this was because if I had sat with girls that I talked with everyday our conversation would have been not as exciting. This made me think about how most new things seem exciting to us and this could also apply to knowledge. In most cases new knowledge sprouts exciting feelings. Recently I have come onto the idea that new knowledge can lead to newer and bigger knowledge. So, by accepting the knowledge that I enjoyed my new company I was able to openly consider what they had to say. So I thought of this reversed, if I had talked with people that I knew and had a good knowledge of what their lives were like, then was I less open to new knowledge and more critical of what they would have had to say? This idea made me assess the effect of others on our knowledge.
ReplyDeleteKQ-
Do we need others to gain knowledge?
“No man is an island”- John Donne
While I knew all the people at my formal dinner table from one place or another, I had never gotten the chance to really talk to any of them. I had impressions of them from passing them in the hall or hearing about them, but I didn't have a full picture of any of these girls. Over the course of the dinner, each one should themselves more than I had know them before. they talked about things I didn't know interested them and they shared more about themselves than I had previously known. By the end of the dinner, I realized that I hadn't really known these girls before the dinner and I probably still didn't, yet I had relied on my first impressions of them to determine for myself what I thought was their character. This led me to the knowledge question: What is the difference between knowing and understanding?
ReplyDelete