Brandon Colcord
Professor Frank
English 110
October 13th, 2021
Newstoks Point Of View
Passage: “People on today’s left and right are misguided on this point, making them strange bedfellows. Progressive educators have long been hostile to what they scorn as a “banking concept” of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge in passive students. Nonliberal reformers – the ones who have been assessing you for the past dozen years-act as is cognitive “skills” can somehow be taught in the abstract, independent of content. And Some politicians seem eager to get rid of teachers all together and just have you watch a video. You, having been born when Google was founded, probably take it for granted that you can always look something up online. ” (Newstok, Pg. 4, Par. 3)
My response: This explains how knowledge is easily accessible, and the knowledge required to become successful isn’t taught to us through teachers. He is saying that you can’t teach life skills within a classroom, you need to actually go out and experience it. Which he is not wrong about in a way. I just don’t believe life experience would be enough. Being told what to do and what you need to know in a classroom format is helpful because it holds students responsible in a way. Having no teachers is a terrible idea and so is spending all day looking stuff up online. That would make it so students wouldn’t really retain a thing.
Passage: ”Part of what made Shakespeare collaborate so well with others was his radical sense of empathy; he probably would have called it fellowship. “Researchers have found that literary fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling.” Shakespeare developed his empathy through his schoolboy exercises of “double translation,” when he was impersonating the voices of others, as explored in Lynn Enterline’s ork on character making (ethopoeia). ” (Newstok, Pg. 7, Par. 2)
My response: He is trying to explain that you can develop a sense of empathy through books that are not real and that will in return improve your ability to communicate, which to me personally wouldn’t be a bad skill to develop. Only issue I have with this mindset is you can’t just depend on others’ knowledge to succeed, can you? Aside from that Just having an imagination isn’t going to help you in life, let alone throughout college. It may help with certain assignments and it may help with communicating with others, but personally I don’t believe that’s enough.
Work cited
Newstok, Scott. “How to Think Like Shakespeare” The Chronicle Of A Higher Education, August 29, 2016, No Pg.
