Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Knowledge Travels in a Cycle, Yes it Does...

By next Tuesday morning, please have and document an Ah-Ha! moment.  As we discussed and demonstrated tonight, this moment should originate in a text (idea, discussion, concept, etc) in a class other than TOK.  The Eureka! occurs when you connect it, via a knowledge question, to another area of your life or knowledge.  Trust your instincts: if you intuit a connection, you need not immediately be able to articulate it to pursue it.  That said, please lucidly formulate the connection before you write about it here.  Though of course, you will have formulated your thought several seconds before you're aware you have.  Finally, here's proof I don't make up the songs I sing in class.

10 comments:

  1. It took me a while to catch myself in an Ah-Ha moment, but soon I was finally able to hold on to a small occurrence.

    A few days ago I was reading the newspaper and stumbled upon an article that was about children's addiction to TV. I read about the strong effect that commercials have on everyday audiences and how there is much influence being spread to today's youth. As I was reading, I realized that the topic of this article was exactly like what we are talking about in IB French. We have been reading about addiction to TV and the effect that commercials have on us. It is really quite incredible the level of influence TV has on our thought processing and outlook on life.
    So when I was reading this article I was already aware of the facts being presented and could further my understanding for French class.

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  2. After not being able to recognize an Aha moment this week, I was finally able to come up with one today in Biology class. Right now, we are learning about the heart. In class today, we sidetracked away from notes and started talking about heart transplants. Taylor was mentioning how an organ transplant of any type is major because in essence, it is cutting all sources to and from the organ away momentarily in order to replace it with somebody else’s’. Here, my “Aha” moment came when I realized that the heart, or any organ for that matter, is just like a machine. Any given organ is created for a certain purpose- to help make one’s life easier, and in this case, the purpose of an organ is to allow the creature to survive. When a machine breaks, it either breaks down completely and disadvantages the person using it, or it can be fixed and restored to its original settings. This is just like an organ because if the organ fails, the person can die, or the organ’s functions can be replaced and reset so that the person can use it again. In total, the machine or organ can fail again, but at least it is able to work again for the moment by fixing the problem.

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  3. After worrying over this said moment for what seemed like an eternity, I finally decided to give up the search and just let it come to me. So, just like Sara, my Aha moment came to me in Biology class today when we were discussing heart transplants. The statement that generated my Aha moment went a little bit like this: "essentially, they disconnect all the tubes and valves and then plug in the new heart" (incessantly rough estimate of the actual statement Taylor made). This reminded me of a discussion George and I had about connectedness and disconnectedness. The Aha moment came through the following possible knowledge question: to what extent does the idea of "connection" on any subject influence certain outcomes? When answering that question about the heart, the answer was relatively obvious. The ability to connect (or re-connect) the valves and arteries means the difference between life and death. On the other hand, this knowledge issue also helped with my understanding of the conversation george and I were having. He told me that riding was like a combination lock. One had to be able to find the perfect combination to be able to "unlock" the method of creating a connection with your horse. This was not an emotional connection, but a connection during the rider's experience. Ultimately, the rider's connection with his or her horse means the difference between making a career in the riding industry, or watching it go by the wayside.

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  4. I had nearly given up on finding an Ah-Ha moment when one hit me in Biology around the same time as when Sara-Sara's hit her. We were talking about organ transplants and how basically when an organ is rejected, all the cells reject it and refuse to let the organ assimilate. Basically the root of this was that the organ can be rejected. I connected this to how all of us seniors must be prepared to get rejected from colleges. There is the chance that we will be accepted and then we can assimilate into the college's culture but there is also the chance that we will be rejected and then will never receive the opportunity to join the society there.

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  5. I spent a generous number of my waking hours this weekend thinking about, hearing about, and visiting colleges. During this process, of course, "heart" and "mind" are often at odds, or at least felt to be parallel and distinct. This, I feel, is a vague knowledge question relating to the different ways of knowing and their influence on decision-making. As each of us make hundreds upon hundreds of decisions every day, the feeling of competition between emotion and reason is well-established in our daily observations and feelings. Therefore, this question can be applied anywhere and everywhere - to any decision, and especially to those which one perceives to be made under the infallible influence of either emotion or reason, such as deciding when a proper time would be to do one's TOK post, or deciding on which topic to write one's college essay.

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  6. I had trouble trying to find the right Ah-Ha moment, but this is one I found.
    I was doing my art homework on Thursday and one of the questions I had to answer was about originality. The question went along the line of how important is it for artwork to be original. To answer this question I said something along the lines of how nothing is original because everything is influenced by each other. A few days later I was on thinking about how the “typical teen” wants to be different from everyone else, but if everyone is trying to be different wouldn’t that make them the same? Everyone is searching for originality and individuality but their efforts make them the same, so who’s different? Who/what’s original? That was my Ah-Ha moment.

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  7. My struggle everyday is music class, and recently, I've had an AH-HA! moment in that class. As part of our final IB grade, we have to study these two prescribed works so right now we are looking at the scores and analyzing the music. Last year we did so many different things about music theory and it seemed random at the time. Although, now that we are looking at all the pieces of theory we learned last year, it all makes sense and comes together to use all of my musical knowledge at once, instead of just memorizing and forgetting everything the next day. However, it is still very challenging for me to put all the pieces together, it makes sense as to why we did all that tedious work last year. This relates to how there are so many things which you do when you are younger which may not seem important at the time, but later when you are faced with real-life situations you are able to take all the little things you learned to make a big decision. Just like in music, all the things I’ve learned growing up come together in one moment to make sense of a greater challenge.

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  8. Today in Biology class, Taylor said that transplants are amazing because they entail cutting off all connections that an organ, like the heart, has in the body. Cutting an aorta, the vena cavas, and the pulmonary veins is a serious matter!

    In the moment that we all had to marvel at the amazing transplant process, I gasped. EUREKA!

    Instantly, I thought back to sitting around the fire with Masai elders in Tanzania. They took the time to answer some questions we had about the Masai, and now it was their turn to as questions. They heard that back in the United States, we eat human body parts. I cannot remember the exact phrasing of it, but that was the main idea. Somehow, we got into a conversation of transplants, perhaps to offer a commonly used alternative which still entails taking actual human part and adding them to another human. All of the elders were shocked. Amazed and confused, one of the warriors named Ngongoi asked, "But how do you replace a kidney. By eating it, or what?" That moment was wonderful.

    The knowledge question that stemmed from that amazing memory is: who determines what is normal? what factors contribute to the labeling of "normal"?

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  9. Finding an Ah-Ha moment was quite difficult for me until I remembered the discussion I had in French class. Recently, like Mary stated we have been learning about TV being an addiction. In a discussion, I mentioned a commercial on TV I saw of two children wearing dark 3D glasses while watching TV. This image strangely reminded me of the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and how books were being burned and “walls,” which are the equivalent of TV in the present day were popular. This book was created to give readers a peek of what the future might look like. From that image of children watching TV, I thought of a future with no books as depicted in Fahrenheit 451.

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  10. Today in IB art, we were learning and researching about the concept of abstract art, and how the idea was always hidden behind the painting. Ms. Mahoney chose to show us how in cubism, the artist illustrates different sides and points of views of the same drawing, landscape or self-portrait. It is then left up to the audience to acknowledge and remark these various sides. And this is what made cubism so popular in the time that Picasso had first used it. Because not only it appealed to the people as something new and fresh but also because provoked their thought in the sense that no one before had ever thought of that. This concept of cubism applies to how I interprate things on a daily basis when they are presented to me. I could either look at the same situation at a different point of view when making a decision, or I could pretend that there is only one way to look at it, if I only want to make that one decision. So just like Picasso, I could create something with different points of view to it, but could argue that I did it by only looking at it one way. So at the end of the day it is our decision as humans to be able to recognize and give credit to the side alternative side that we notice, or just stay silent and believe that everything was only made with one goal and purpose.

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