Although I recognize that I am supposed to use my chosen significant writing project for this prompt, I’d like to mention that I didn’t receive any peer review on that paper. Because of this, I am opting to use my second paper on the goals of educational institutions to demonstrate my progress in this field more effectively. This paper was written after reading both Yo Yo Ma and Ta-Nehisi Coates, two authors who’ve spoken out on education and the importance of empathetic thinking, critical thinking, perspective, and culture. Having read a segment of Coates’ book titled Between the World and Me, we were asked to establish what the responsibilities of educational institutions are. Moreover, we were also asked what the responsibilities should be. In this paper, I argued that educational institutions “are obligated to provide students with enough skill, cultural perspective and background to engage them in intellectually challenging careers that are personally relevant”.
When first starting out in this course, I hadn’t ever truly practiced recursive writing. Sure, I’d had to write rough drafts in the past. With that being said, my rough drafts were always 1-2 mediocre paragraphs with such little thought put into them they likely weren’t even worth revising. Because of my ineptness in this field, it’s safe to say my recursive process wasn’t the best going into this semester. As a result of this, I did little to no revising for my first paper.
While I was writing my second paper, though, I buckled down and decided that I wanted to take the recursive process seriously. I think this is reflected well through the changes I made throughout writing this paper.
The first good example of this in my paper occurs in the introductory paragraph. In my first draft, I wrote:
“Should we, then, be questioning the responsibilities of these same institutions?”
Through the peer review process, I was informed that my wording in this sentence didn’t align with what I had previously set up in the paragraph. Although I had explicitly stated the importance of educational institutions and their responsibilities, this sentence undermined that by questioning whether or not we should be examining what these institutions are doing. To fix this, I wrote in the final draft of this paper:
“Due to this importance, it’s paramount that we understand whether or not these same institutions are living up to their responsibilities”.
Another, larger example of my recursive process is demonstrated through the third paragraph in each version of this paper. Here’s the paragraph from my first draft:
“Coates’ mom was an important catalyst for the growth and development of Coates’ perspective on the world, and Coates’ novel makes it clear that her prompts were what finally engaged Coates in critical thinking and understanding. Encouraged by his mother during one of their lessons, Coates realizes that perspective and bias are implicit in history and culture. In understanding this, Coates notes about himself and those who shaped the world as we know it,“if [he] was not innocent, then they were not innocent,” (Coates 94). Coates then starts to question, “could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?” (Coates 94). In considering perspective and asking questions like this, Coates displays the beginnings of what he should’ve been learning in school. Coates’ mother imbued in him the beginnings of critical thinking and perspective. These are concepts idealized by another author, Yo Yo Ma. In his article “Necessary Edges: Arts,Empathy, and Education”, Ma emphasizes the importance of implementing the arts into the education system. In doing so, Ma believes that students will gain perspective, critical thinking and analysis skills, communication skills, and a general understanding of empathy. This goes hand in hand with what schools should be teaching kids. In many ways, much of what Ma claims is also in accordance with what Coates’ mother provided him with that the schools couldn’t. In his article, Ma notes that “empathy comes when you understand something deeply through arts and literature and can thus make unexpected connections,” (Ma 279). In regards to this statement, Ma also notes that “these parallels bring you closer to things that would otherwise seem far away,” (Ma 279). From reading this, it’s clear Ma believes the integration of arts into education is paramount to the success of educational institutions. Moreover, though, ma believes that empathy and contextual understanding are also aspects of education that these institutions should be responsible for teaching”.
Here’s the paragraph from my final draft:
“Understanding the importance of these critical thinking skills is certainly a responsibility educational institutions should bear. Yo Yo Ma—another author who comments on the responsibility of educational institutions—believes that instilling these skills could boil down to the implementation of more liberal arts courses amongst educational institutions. In his article “Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education”, Ma emphasizes the importance of implementing the arts into the education system. In doing so, Ma believes that students will gain perspective, critical thinking and analysis skills, communication skills, and a general understanding of empathy. This goes hand in hand with what schools should be teaching kids. In many ways, much of what Ma claims is also in accordance with what Coates’ had hoped to get out of his education. In his article, Ma notes that “empathy comes when you understand something deeply through arts and literature and can thus make unexpected connections” (279). In regards to this statement, Ma also notes that “these parallels bring you closer to things that would otherwise seem far away,” (279). From reading this, it’s clear Ma believes the integration of arts into education is paramount to the success of educational institutions. Moreover, Ma’s views clearly tie into much of what Coates writes about in his book. Encouraged by his mother during one of their lessons, Coates eventually realizes that perspective and bias are implicit in history and culture. In understanding this, Coates notes about himself and those who shaped the world as we know it, “if [he] was not innocent, then they were not innocent,” (94). Coates then starts to question, “could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?” (94). By adding this to his book, it’s clear that Coates believes there’s inherent value in asking questions like this and understanding multiple perspectives. Like Ma says in his essay, asking these questions and drawing these parallels likely brought Coates towards things that would’ve otherwise seemed far away for him. For Coates, this was a future that didn’t involve balancing the streets and his personal goals. By failing to encourage these thought processes in Coates, though, the school system once again failed him. Rather than the general education school provided him, Coates really needed a chance to understand his situation deeply and make connections. Once again, this is something educational institutions should be responsible for. Sadly, though, this isn’t common practice”.
These two, distinct paragraph show the extent to which I had to revise this section of my essay. Although I would agree that the final version of this paragraph is wordy and not very concise, the goal of this revision, to alter the subject and argument of this paragraph, was fulfilled. Initially, this paragraph was all over the place. I began by talking about Coates’ mother in my topic sentence, burying the true subject of this paragraph, the importance of critical thinking, in the middle. The revised version of this paragraph starts by talking about Yo Yo Ma, an author who speaks on critical thinking, and the responsibility of schools to teach critical thinking. All in all, I think this revision was a success. On top of this, I’m proud of how far I’ve come with the recursive process as a whole, and I think this paragraph demonstrates my ability in the field well.
