期末報告順序

1(6/7)	馮若陽
2	江穎安
3	楊子慶
4	鄭光宇
5	李欣耘
6	鄭乃瑜
7	李建宏
8	吳停勝
9	鄧圓臻
10	高子晴
11	黃靖媚
12	廖名雯
1(6/14)	廖梓戎
2	康菁容
3	張雅雯
4	林佩甄
5	鄭馨
6	蘇婉榕
7	陳翰泓
8	鮑家安
9	葉欣柔
10	陳思伶
11	李靖誼

1(6/7)	陳亭君
2	劉又菁
3	洪承郁
4	廖元均
5	鮑鳳麟
6	戴婷
7	陳亮妤
8	陳宜萱
9	黃千芷
10	賴禹翰
11	曹兆盈
12	簡嘉慧
1(6/14)	林映捷
2	謝淑方
3	孫嘉芯
4	徐銘傑
5	顏冠睿
6	冉綺蓁
7	王穎心
8	黃威輯
9	劉湘淩
10	毛虹靜
11	林柔加
12	呂喬瑀
13	李昱

Here is the order of your final presentation. Please prepare well, thank you.

Log #7

I had finished the second book, Wisdom of the Peaceful Warrior, from Dan Millman. This book pointed out some important paragraphs in his previous book and gave some annotation and explanation. The core value of this book is similar to the previous book so I won't explain the content again. However, through reading his books, I know clearly of myself that I really value the quality of life and inner heart. Since a few years ago, I tried to find the balance between my life and my heart. I used to study and major in design, but I found that I did not want to do design as my future job. So I took a year off and went traveling to Australia for six months. After I came back to Taiwan, I transferred to major in Language and started to learn in a new field. Along the way until now, I am always searching for myself and my career. I know there is no perfect and ideal job, but I still want to find my career which I meant to do rather than a job that I can handle.

I started to think about some possible choices which I am interested in. I am interested in learning languages, knowing people from other countries, meditation, and yoga, activities like free diving or rock climbing. Before last semester, I dreamed of becoming a dimplomat because I was interested in both language and culture. During the advanced writing class of Gloria's, I was searching for the information of this job. At that time, I found I was actually not interested in the content and the duty of this job.
So I started to look for another possible option. I later found another job I thought I was interested in- a public servant in immigration. I enrolled for a course to prepare for the exam. There were so many books and laws needed to remember. After digging into this field, now I am not sure whether being a public servant as my career can really satisfy myself even though the benefits and the salary are good.

I am a people with free spirit. Can I be trapped in such orderly and limited job?
Maybe I did not think of it thoroughly. I should not find a job only because the payment is good and I have the expertise in this field. But this is still an option for me to choose from since I am not a practical person. I always make the decision based on my feelings and I am too idealistic. Sometimes being practical and finding a suitable job are the ways you should do to fit in the society.

One teaching in the Peaceful Warrior is to find the balance between inner heart and reality. We do not only seek for material satisfaction such as wealth, power, and social status. We also do not go far way from the public and seek for spiritual demand. We combine these two needs to become complete and reasonable.

So for the present stage, I am highly interested in being a person who can help others to find their inner heart because I know the importance with my own experience. I am thinking about being a spiritual therapist using Tibetan singing bowl sound. I once took this sound therapy, and it really had some positive impact and experience. There are some training courses in Taiwan and in India. I think this is one path I can discover more in the future.

I am also interested in the jobs that I can participate in nature such as outdoor activities. I love nature, challenges, and knowing people. Being part of a worker in an outdoor activity company may also be a great choice for me.

Final formal class: readings to understand learning so as to prepare yourself for the 21st century

My friend, the COO (Chief Operation Officer) of one of the (few) technological tycoons based in Taiwan, once told me, to recruit a new member, she focuses on three things in the interview: Professional expertise, language and expressive ability, personality and character.  If you are still new in the professional field, she'd value the latter two. And you'd still have a very good chance to get in if you demonstrate your good character (integrity, attitude, and willingness to learn).  She herself was a law major before becoming an entrepreneur; it was the latter two characteristics that made her what she is today. This is a very inspiring sermon encouraging to you all, I guess. And Google said about the same thing:

1. How to get a job at Google
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a-job-at-google.html

So what is learning in this fast changing world? There has been quite a few discussions in the field of education. So tomorrow, let' begin with the article:
2.  Education and accelerated change: The imperative for design learning
    https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2016/09/14/education-and-accelerated-change-the-imperative-for-design-learning/

And from this article, we can learn fast several important concepts via hyperlinks.
3. Design thinking: https://www.fastcompany.com/919258/design-thinking-what
4. Agile mindset: https://www.becker.edu/academics/undergrad/division-of-humanities/agilemindset

Finally, as a language major, how do you see yourself in the contemporary job market? And how and what to do to prepare yourself? (Discussion)
5. 11 reasons to ignore the haters and major in the humanities:
http://www.businessinsider.com/11-reasons-to-major-in-the-humanities-2013-6

"May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in." ------ Mother Teresa  先破而後立, 先打破你心中所有已知的任何想法, 如此才能擁有更大的世界.....（From 劉安婷's talk on TED)

Log #7

        Some people say that if you want to learn to love someone, you have to learn to love yourself at first. Few days ago, I just got home with nothing but tiredness, thinking about having a hot shower to relieve both my body and my mind. I like to think when showering. In the bathroom, I stood in front of a mirror, stared at the girl in the mirror, looked into the girl’s eyes. I saw through her inner part, filled with unconfience, insecurity, confusion, mess. I knew it at the moment, I disliked her. Yes, I dislike who I am now. Then so many “why” popped up in my mind. Why don’t I like myself? Why would I become the person I don’t like? Therefore, recently, I’ve been thinking about those why and my weaknesses.

        After past difficult time with hard work, I finally entered my ideal university. How come I become a person I don’t like and the person who are getting more and more unconfident and confused? To figured it out, I read many blogs from other classmates because I wanted to know how others explore themselves and learn form them. I am really touched from some blogs and feel better because I know I am not alone and there are partners facing same difficulties as I am. I am also impressed that so many classmates are really good at telling stories and reflecting. Many of them have well cultivated independent and critical thinking, which is what I lack of. Knowing this, I feel more unconfident. But in the meantime, I started to thinking about why some of them are so good at those abilities (independent and critical thinking, story- telling) and why I am not. Recently, I've read some articles related to how to cultivate independent thinking and connections between read and think. I found it is actually related to the capability of thinking and reflecting. So I realized that it somehow results from I am the person who has stopped thinking, stopped writing, stopped reflecting for so long. As I what I’ve mentioned in the last blog, I participate in different school clubs, holding various activities to make my life more colorful, meaningful yet busy as well. However, frankly speaking, busy as I am, I don’t really understand the meaning towards everything I dedicate to because I don’t meditate sometimes; or even I do, I don’t write those thoughts down. I let it be. I let life be. And I gradually realized that’s the problem. I usually let ideas stay in mind instead of organized them and write them down because I see it too troublesome. And thoughts which aren’t noted down are usually not be narrowed down or organized, either; therefore, they may stay in mind in a messy way and easily fade away with time passing. I am thinking that the above may be reasons why I am poor at independent thinking, and even poor at reflecting, which make me feel unconfident and ignorant in front of others.

        In fact, I do embrace the importance of reflection for human beings in life. Reflection reminds us of living more than just alive. It rouses our anger, sympathy, thirst, our all kinds of feelings, guiding us to find the meanings beyond surface. So when seeing a movie or reading a novel, what audiences really gain are more than the stories and the plots but also ideas and metaphor hidden in the words. Because we see, we feel, we reflect, so we would know who we really are and make improvement, make us better people. I’ve stopped writing reflection from movies, from books, from details in life for a quite a while. Now realizing such situation, I’ll try to back to write for the ability of reflecting.

Log #7

I’ve been thinking about what to write down in my newest log, and it’s taken me quite a while to decide that I want to talk about my future. We are required to talk about ourselves in our finals, and it has stimulated me to do a lot of thinking recently. The truth is that, in fact, I don’t know what to do with my future.

A lot of my friends have been talking about what they are going to do in the near future or even further than that, and they have all sounded so certain they have found what they want. I, on the contrary, have been so confused. I have had a part time job now in a political magazine company named Douwai for more than a year now. Even though I am not in the editing department, I have learned a lot from the office, that is, the way to interact with people, especially people you don’t necessarily like. Being in an office is like the reality hitting on me. I am a person who is clear with who I like and who I don’t like, but the society doesn’t allow me to do so. I have learned to respect people I don’t like, not trying to talk behind their backs even when they do (not that I have ever done that, I believe that is very low-class). Most importantly, I am inspired by one of my bosses very much. She is elegant, hard-working, incredibly intelligent, and she is just an amazing leader, and I always admire a classy woman who knows what she wants on both work and personal aspects.

I remember she invited me into her office to have a talk last year July. Her idea was to find out what I want in the future, so she could see what she could offer to help me. She started the talk by talking about her own story. She said she had a part time job in a magazine company in Southern America when she was 16, and every time an incident happened, she was always the first one rushing to the scene, trying to figure out what happened. She told me one time they told her a dead body was found by the river, so rushed to the scene. Nonetheless, her first reaction seeing the body was not being scared but curious about what happened to the person before he died. And she said that was the moment when she realized she was born to be a reporter. She now has been an official reporter for White house for more than a decade, and she said the point for me is to find my own “moment”.

Therefore, the question arrived. How do I find my moment? And the truth is for the past 6 months I have been seeking for the answer, but there is none. And it is scary. Throughout the 20 years of my life, I have never been really good at anything. I like all lot of things like, drawing, writing, and more, but I am not necessarily good at any of that.

I am terrified of ending up being mediocre. What if I am mediocre? What if this is it? I certainly don’t want to be that kind of women who get married right after graduating college and becoming housewives ever since. Not that I don’t respect people who make that kind of choice, just deep down I know that is not me, that is not my destiny. I want to always want more. I don’t need to be rich, but I want to be able to enjoy a little bit when I want to (Jokingly, just like my favorite comic Ali Wong claimed that she wanted to “be able to take a stroll on the sidewalk, see a quarter on the ground, and just keep on walking, like a princess”). I want to have a job that I would not mind working overtime. I want to still be passionate with my life 20 years later. I want to look back 10 years later and know that I didn’t have regrets and I didn’t waste my time on something I don’t want. I know so much, the only thing I don’t know is what I should/want to do in the future to achieve all the things I mentioned above.

I wish I know what to do. I wish I was at least gifted in some aspects. I wish there would be someone to tell me everything would be fine because this is the time when I really need some good advice.

Log #7

   




Recently I have read a book called "The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of leadership." I know, the book looks like it has no connection with self discovering. Well, it doesn't. However, in this book is one point about "love" that I found interesting, and the point can also come to explain my actions after knowing my true self.







The book, although talks about leadership, mentions that one needs to love in order to lead. The definition of "love" here is far different from what I believe. Cited from the Bible, "love" is patience, kindness, humility, respectfulness, selflessness, forgiveness, honesty, and commitment. Love is a verb and thus should be expressed with actions. Then, what does this have to do with  self discovering?

Do you love yourself? Do I love myself? Do I show patience and forgiveness to myself when I make mistakes, or I indulge myself in the self-blaming, self-doubting environment? Am I honest to myself? Do I keep promises to myself? Am I humble, am I respectful, am I selfless to myself? Do I accept myself? After questioning myself, I realize that I do not love myself enough.

If I loved myself enough, I would accept what I truly am. I would not blame myself so hard last week in the log. Now with the new meaning of love, I decide to embrace. Even though I am not courageous any more, even though the reality nearly defeats me, even though I almost lose direction, I have decide to love myself. Without these feelings, these situations, I would not be me. These experiences are valuable because they make me who I am. So, do I take actions? Yes, I would start to love myself.

Own Your Behaviours, Master Your Communication, Determine Your Success |...

LOG#7

Recently, the election of the new leader of the student association of the AFL.

One day, when I was going back to the classroom, I encountered the new leader. He asked me if I am interested in joining the student association. I hesitated for a moment. Then we added each other on Facebook. This can be considered as the biggest change I have ever made in my life. As a lazy person, I always keep myself out of public affairs. Because the first time trying it sucked. It was the graduation song back in my high school. I composed the lyrics. And the result was not what I excepted. And I even been complained for about 2 weeks. It was such an awful experience and it got me frustrated.

For now, I am already busy enough. And I don’t want any trouble. But there’s somewhere deep inside my heart always goes: “I cannot avoid this forever.” We all have to take part in some of the public affairs after we grow up. Whether it’s voting or even join the election. Later, we contacted each other. He said that there was still a vacancy of Activities Director. And he said that I looked a lot like a person who loves participating activities. It’s pretty interesting. Basically, except the classes, I have no contact at all. I asked some of my friends about this. They all said that when they first met me, they also thought that I am a party guy. Especially the ones I knew after entering college.

It’s cool, I think. Many of the teachers taught me when I was in junior high said that my vulnerability was caring too much about my reputation. I focus too much on how people’s opinion about me. If their opinions were not what I expected, I would be affected severely. Not only my mood but also what I would think. I would start to think about “why would they have such opinion about me? Have I done something wrong?”  Hence, my productivity declines.

I always want others to consider me as a good person. By good person I mean a person who is almost good at everything. Like personality, knowledge, attitude …etc. and I know that caring too much affects me a lot. So, I’m still figuring out how to stop caring. Maybe life would be better when I stop caring that much. But, who knows? Just gotta try.

Log #7

“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.” 
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I was a girl who was timid and concerned too much. I was afraid to face challenges and to set out my comfort zone. Every time when I was forced to set out the comfort zone, I was anxious and nervous. Changing, in fact, was one of my nightmares. However, those feelings toward changing became totally different since I studied in the senior high school. 

Once I was nominated and had a chance to be a class leader. It was a heavy burden. I was so afraid that I would disappoint my homeroom teacher and my classmates. I was so stressed that I couldn’t sleep well in the beginning. Last, I could not bear the pressure and turned to my younger sister. It was she who gave me the courage. She told me to have faith in myself since my classmates had that faith in me. All the worries were just imagined by myself. Did not think too much and just focused on what you should do. After talking with her, I did relieve a lot and gain confidence. Also, I realized that I was not alone. I stopped concerning too much in advance. I decided to just do it first instead of imagining the worst result before doing it. I pretended to be confident because I thought that if I got used to pretending to be brave and confident, I would be courageous and confident truly. If there were difficulties, I would turn to others, asking their suggestions. Fortunately, there were kind and warm friends and classmates who were willing to help me, which I really appreciated. Finally, I got the good feedbacks from my homeroom teacher and the classmates. In addition, I discovered that taking challenges brought out another aspect of me. I discovered that there were more possibilities for me. Those I once regarded as impossible became possible in the end. When I recalled, I had done a lot of impossibilities. 

Since then, I have loved to take challenges. Even though I still feel nervous and anxious when taking challenges, I feel excited and expectant at the same time. I become more willing to try and learn new things. Tring something new and setting out the comfort zone make me realize more potentials in lives.

Log#7

Log 7

  After reading the novel Divergent, I couldn’t help but search for the series immediately. The second book of the series is called Insurgent. Although the book is mainly the story that is similar to the first one, it taught me a lot of lessons the first one did not.

 

1.      Leadership

As a college student, I usually hear people ask us to have a good leadership. However, being a leader is not as easy as people might think about. Actually, being a leader sometimes needs skills. In Insurgent, there is a leader from the faction of Erudite. She is one of the people who started the holocaust to Abnegation. She is really smart, but that’s all. She was a leader who would be willing to leave no means untried just to control everyone. After reading this books, I found that a leader should not be a dictator. People might not be obedient if you just keep giving orders.

2.      Being honest might hurt people.

In the book, the female leading role Tris killed her friend’s Christina’s boyfriend, Will. Although it happened because Will was the one trying to kill Tris first, Tris still feels really bad. As a result, when Christina asked her if she saw Will, Tris lied to Christina. She was afraid that once she tells the truth, Christina would be mad at her even it was just self-defense. However, all the truth came out when Tris was forced to insert the truth serum. She told the truth that she killed Will. Christina did not talk to her anymore.

As for Tris’s boyfriend Tobias, he noticed that there was something wrong about Tris, but he was truly surprised that Tris kept the secret to herself. he was frustrated, but he decided to forgive her in the end.

From these two perspectives, I realized that truth sometimes does hurt people. However, not telling the truth will make things worse and give people unnecessary hopes. It is better to tell the truth so that you will always feel guilty for the rest of your life.

  In the parts I just read, these two are the most impressing things I learned. I think that they are important lessons for me to keep learning in my life. Since I might get the chance to become a leader or the chance to decide whether to lie or not, I will choose better ways to deal with them. 

Log #7 What Makes Our Life Worth Living

Losing the purpose of life is one thing. But suicide is another whole thing. 

Remember the phrase that says "the value of a thing will greatly increase the moment we lost the thing? Apparently, this applies to almost every one of us. This fact had made me pondered for as much as I could remember and started to question myself a lot. Such as how could we appreciate our life without having the need to encounter such a loss? How do we be grateful for everything before anything undesirable happen and make us think "Oh I wish,," -- before everything is too late to be reversed. I think the answer to this is closely related to how we view and how we live. By setting our attitude to appreciate everything and to live in the moment will change our entire world. Of course, it is very hard to have such determination and motivation and this is why the percentage of less happy people in the world were are overflowing. But if you manage to have this attitude applies to your daily life, you will understand the feeling that only you could understand. 

So in relation to this "life appreciation" I would like to share a story of my friend, and a book- When Breath becomes air.

To be honest, I never really know this one friend of mine. we just happen to be in the same summer school for the whole 2 months but never talked to one another (We were both from Indonesia). The first news I have heard from her after 2 years, was her attempting suicide. After a lot of stories from her friends and her status update in social media, I finally found out that she had been suffering from severe depression and chronic insomnia. I could somehow relate myself to her since I also suffer from a mild depression. She said she got bullied by some girls in her current university. She also had a problem accepting her appearance which led her into the embracement of depression. She had planned for a suicidal thought for a very long time inside her mind, and just one night, she built up her courage and swallowed all of her prescription pills. Fortunately, dying from overdosing were not very effective for her. (she survived and undergone gastric suction). Nobody could be sure whether she would not try to do this attempt again in the near future, but through this experience, she realized that there were still a lot of people who care for her, and it is her right to be alive. 

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

 

The reason I chose this book was because of the low-tide I was feeling at that time and I came across this book with a depressing title and cover. I was hoping that I could attain, even just a bit, ray of hopes and motivation from the story. 

Indeed as the title, you could guess that the main character died at the end of the story (oh how I love this kind of ending). But the shocking fact is that the main character in the story was no other than the author himself. He wrote this books in the awareness that he was going to die soon. (He never finish the book :()

For brief information, the author used to major in English literature and human biology. He later finished his master in history and philosophy of medicine and continued to enter medical school and became an outstanding neurosurgeon. 

the author had spent his entire life chasing his dream and building potential, the potential that would later go unrealized. Until one day of his mid-30s, he was diagnosed with a stage-four lung cancer. I still remember his regret. "from all the time, when I finally ready to do an amazing thing to the world, I had cancer". 

During his several years battling cancer, he was searching for the answer of "what makes life worth living". He also said, "You have to figure out what is most important to you". In his case, he was faced with a dilemma whether to give up on his neurosurgeon title or became a writer instead. He never know how long does he have. 3 years then he will be a writer, 10 years and he will spend 7 years as surgeon and rest as a writer. But unfortunately, Life isn't something we could make a prediction of. Sometimes, when we are about to lose everything, we started to feel that everything are important to us. There are still a lot of things we want to do. and we wish we would have more opportunity to be living in this world,  as a healthy person, doing everything we like, and appreciate all we have when we still have the ability to appreciate. 

"Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living"

Log #7

·     Yours Turly, Shirley (Chapter 1 ~3)
- A book about Dyslexia (which is why the title spells "Truly" as "Turly")

    Before I start to share the details about the book, I would like to give a brief introduction of dyslexia.

    Dyslexia, is also known as reading disorder, is characterized by trouble with reading despite normal intelligence. Different people are affected to varying degrees. To be more specific, problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, "sounding out" words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads. The difficulties are involuntary and people with this disorder have a normal desire to learn.

This book’s main character is Shirley Basini who is in fourth grade. Her scholastic performance is poor because she is suffering from dyslexia, reading order. Her disability makes reading difficult for her. She ends up struggling with feelings of inferiority and fears of disappointing her parents, especially since her older brother, Joe, is intellectually gifted. He always gets straights “As”. In the very beginning of the book, the author indicates that if Shirley does not do well in school this year, she will probably be held back.

For me, I think Shirley is not the rare case when we were in the elementary school, but due to the conservative learning ambience, a lot of parents and teachers just ignore their “SOS” crying. Moreover, a lot of teachers don’t know how to deal with this kind of students, for example, in the story, one of the teacher, Mr. Bradley said “If you like, you could even get some extra help in the Resource Room.” “The Resource Room! But that’s for RETARDS!” said Shirley. (Loc. 130 of 1509) From this plot, It’s not easy to interact with dyslexic students properly, as a result, in my study, I’m eager to study how to help these people study!