Skip to main content

Space

It took me several years before my classroom looked anything near respectable. I remember a few colleagues noting calmly before my first year began how barren it looked with its blank walls. More concerned with how to teach, I was content to keep it that way, until a friend and colleague offered to help decorate. My attitude toward that classroom on that hot August day is similar to the one with which I treat my personal space in general. This, perhaps, reflects the sentiment that a person's sense of self is composed mainly in his character rather than his surroundings. Still, some of what a man is made of is visible on his person, the way he carries himself and the way he dresses. Should it be any different with the way he treats his personal space? An acquaintance once called my apartment, before I moved, "spartan." I suppose that comment, and my attitude toward my blank classroom, revealed just how inattentive I can be toward the outside world. This has its benefits and its drawbacks, I suppose, as you are just as likely to miss outward flaws as you are to notice something positive about yourself or others.

Maybe I'm not as sentimental as others are about their space, or maybe I haven't had the connection to places that others have. Whatever the reason, I don't believe I have a place about which I would be hurt upon learning it was destroyed. The question calls on our sense of nostalgia. Nostalgia I have, but it is a nostalgia more for memories with people, and not the places in which those memories took shape. I remember peanut butter pancakes on a Saturday morning with a best friend, but it could have happened in any home and been equally meaningful; I remember dinner with family just after spending a few days alone in New York City. Still, the memory could have been equally pleasant in another room of the house, another house in the neighborhood, or another neighborhood in the city, state, or country; but the warmth I remember from that cold autumn night would be just as powerful, not because it took form in a particular place, but because it took form among family.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...
Post a Comment
Read more

Comparison

Psychologists and others have studied ways in which we compare ourselves to each other. One man named Leon Festinger argued that we tend to compare ourselves to other people when we don’t know how good or bad we are at something (like football or playing the guitar). One way we do this is when we compare ourselves to those who are not as good as we are, to protect our self-esteem (called “downward social comparison;” example: we’re playing basketball and miss most of our shots, but we feel okay because a teammate wasn’t even given the ball). Another comparison we make is when we compare ourselves to others who are doing much better than we are (called “upward social comparison”). When we see others who appear to be doing better than we are, we can respond by trying to improve ourselves, or by trying to protect ourselves by telling ourselves it’s not that important. There was a study published in 1953 by Solomon Asch, who asked students to take part in a “vision test.” The par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Learning and Change

In a recent article in National Geographic ( "Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science "), Joel Achenbach attempted to explain why humans have trouble believing the evidence laid out in scientific research. In the article, he cited a phenomenon called confirmation bias , our tendency to adopt the evidence that fits what we already believe. Now, I am a feeling person by nature. Subconsciously, I make choices in my environment based on my emotional reaction to it. Similarly, I have found that the information I remember most is the information I respond to with strong emotion, whether that emotion is humor, anger, shock, or something else. This is why I believe confirmation bias exists: we respond to facts emotionally. However, sometimes we learn information that, instead of confirming what we believe, has the opposite effect. We are introduced to facts that shock us out of our complacency. That shock can jar us into questioning long-held beliefs, and even entire worldviews...
Post a Comment
Read more