Reflections of the final week, 15.

As the last course reflection, I'd like to talk about two concepts, Extension & Deep Thinking.

(Extension)
Personally, during the last 7 years, I've lived a life, which can be called, "distraction".

7 Years ago, I had to come back to Korea because of my husband's serving the army and had two boys (4 and 7 years old). And from the working, oh, there was always unexpected situation popped up almost every day. ( I'm working for the English institute and there were always calls from parents, asking their kids' performance or complaining of not enough homework.. Now, this summer, I came back to NY with my whole family. It means that I had to consider like dozens of factors to consider when I had to decide the area to live in.

Yes, we are being globalized and extended physically and mentally. But, at the same time, it seems that the importance of 'density' (I don't know exact word for this expression) is getting more attention, also.

For example, moving from one country to another country is a huge agenda because we have to set up whole things from the beginning. When I came back to NY, I had to make every paper document from the beginning, like new driver liscence or new bank account, new PSE&G bill address, new cable & internet account...

But, I think one of the biggest power sources I could handle all of these new challenges is the "FAMILY". I can be encouraged more than enough by my son's laughing or by husband's joke or by family call from Korea. Especially, I think after we move into US which is a foreign courntry to our family, we came to be united stronger. Like when we are out of our country, we feel more patriatic feeling of my country.

I could reach more people through facebook or by hundreds of lists from our mobile phones. But at the same time, I am more filtering out the people with more density from our networks.

(Deep Reading and Deep Thinking)

Yes, I believe deep thinking helps a person to build up the person's identity, vision, personality, or religion. What I believe that 'reflection' makes us objectify our selves or our situations and move on another step of life.

During this semester, this course kept me reading and thinking, which helped a lot for me to understand the whole picture of communication and it confirmed me that I have to continue my academic life in my life career. Especially, 'the allegory of cave' was very meaningful for me to reflect myself and to be confirmed about my vision as an English educator. I've written about this on my final reflection paper.

But, the thing is that I never used computer screen for my deep reading about weekly reading assignment. I always print them out and marked or underlined the important sentences and try to think deeeply. Personally, I enjoy the physical interaction between the reading material and me.Just occupied in a physical space, desk in my room, I can enjoy the touching the papers and breathe with books, sometimes the content or sometimes the author, and had an invisible communication with them or with myself.

I don't know just because I'm not familiar with the computer that much or maybe because this new media doesn't follow the density as much as the 'density' or 'proximity' of books.

More thoughts are left finishing this course, but I love to participate in 'thinking'.

12/17/09
Joohee Son