Analysis 2
1-19-16
Kendal Gast
“Commonplaces”
was a new term for me in the first chapter.
It helped me to grasp what all people buy into and why I get rather
annoyed with a majority of the conversations I overhear throughout campus. The book has trouble directly defining the
word “commonplace” but offers this explanation: “…it is commonly believed by
members of a community” (19). Examples
include “All men are created equal” and “Anyone can become president of the
United States”. After reading the
examples I didn’t think much of these statements. How could they be looked at further? They’re so boring and already true. Or so I thought. The book then pointed out that although
anyone could become president, men have been the only people to occupy the
position.
College
students have their own commonplaces.
During class discussions, statements such as “I feel like the character
isn’t living up to their initial goals” or “There’s this idea of trying to
overcome our own ideologies mentioned throughout the text” are almost always
thrown around. “I feel like” and
“There’s this idea” are the two commonplaces that everyone has said, but
why? Does it make the speaker feel more
intelligent or well spoken if they qualify their drippy little opinions with
those two commonplaces? For me, it doesn’t
matter what you feel like. Why should
your feelings be voiced or heard in the classroom? I don’t care about your feelings; I want to
hear your thoughts. Perhaps a person’s
thoughts could also be thought of as their opinions, but nevertheless I don’t
want to hear “I feel like”. Instead,
replace it with “I think that” or simply “I think”. Besides, how can someone “feel” that a
character doesn’t live up to some sort of initial goal? They can only notice the connections between
details and events in a story or article.
There aren’t any feelings involved.
Another commonplace is “this idea
of”. It is even more generalized than
the previous example. How can
individuals talk about a specific idea when the very idea they talk about is
set off with the ambiguity of “this idea”?
It’s like the idea isn’t even a full idea, just a bunch of fluff that
resembles an idea that could be
talked about by an author or is mentioned fleetingly in a text. “This idea” makes it seem like there’s a
precursor to the actual idea. What’s
before an idea? A thought? A word or thing I’ve never heard of? I think this could be fixed (see what I did
there?) by simply stating “A point/thought/connection appears right here”
instead of trying to sound mysterious and smart by only hinting that something might surface in a text.
Part of the problem, I think, is
because students don’t take extreme ownership of anything. Not their relationships, homework, job, or
health. They prefer to push
responsibilities off of themselves and onto the “stress of school, like I can’t
even do this I just want to kill myself”.
(Commonplace). One of the reasons
why students have problems with professors or supervisors is because they don’t
make their concerns known to the boss, they don’t communicate the work habits
that work best for them, or they voice too many concerns or “wants” too
often. If students didn’t complain so
much and spoke about important concerns, issues that are indeed important and
need to be taken care of, the relationship between the two and thus the
classroom would improve greatly. I think
extreme ownership is difficult to adopt, but is worthy of being considered and
then practiced daily to reduce annoying commonplaces.
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