Tuesdays With Morrie Socratic Seminars Reflection 5-4

The Socratic Seminars that my peers and I have held as a class, have influenced my thinking and viewpoints in many ways.  Due to the fact that there are over twenty minds and sources of opinions contributing to the conversation, I've been granted the ability to see certain topics in many different ways.  Instead of viewing a life moral or subject in one locked mindset, I can now essentially see through the eyes of many others besides myself.  In some cases, a classmate was even able to completely change my standpoint on a topic.  For example, at first I believed that the common failure to recognize or address a problem within one's family or close friends was due to the love that they expressed for that particular person or for those people.  However, after one of my peers brought it to my attention that fear of results could play a role in that inability to try to fix something, I began to grasp my mind around the true potential power of fear.

In the first seminar that I participated in, I noticed that there were several instances where many students were fighting to talk.  After someone finished, a lot of kids started talking, and I think this is due to the great notes that my classmates and I took.  In result of this, there were some topics that I wanted to bring up and things I wanted to mention that I didn't get a chance to.  A goal that I set in an attempt to incorporate what I wanted to discuss into our conversation, was to be one of the first students to introduce a topic.  Therefore, I would be able to engage my classmates in what I had best prepared for and what I was interested in talking about.

As our progress in the book grew, and as the seminars continued, I noticed something else.  There were times where I had met my goal and was discussing what I wanted to, but some of my peers weren't as involved.  Because of this, I decided to make it one of my goals to do my part in drawing other class members into conversation.  As I progressively did my best to extract opinion and thought from other students, I began to see traces of significant increase in the completeness and well being of the seminars in general

As a class, we had a tendency to come a little off topic at times, or turn the atmosphere of the seminar more humorous.  Many times, this was the result of someone sharing a personal connection between the book and an experience that they had.  As an individual, I did my best to help the situation of prevent this from happening by changing the subject when I got the chance to talk by saying things like, "Well what did you guys think about this part of our reading?" or "Going back to this..."