I think I am becoming more engaged with the text and responding actively to it compared to the last set of annotations I completed. I learned more information about concepts I was unsure of and ultimately gained a better understanding of the text.
This essay was written by Yo-Yo Ma, a famous cellist who was won Grammy Awards and released an abundance of albums. It was originally published in the online news site World-Post, in January of 2014. I noticed that the biography preluding Ma’s essay states his many achievements and introduces him as a cellist which the majority of us would know him as automatically. I, like so many others in this country, went to a high school in which the arts are not considered as an integral piece of education. Schooling revolved around STEM subjects, as Ma dives deeper into in his essay and discovers how this can be a detrimental way of educating. Yo-Yo Ma makes the intent of his writing very clear from the beginning. His purpose is to reflect on how the arts have made him a better man through intellect and empathetic lenses. He largely tries to communicate that these qualities are what make humans human. Ma references hard to swallow concepts such as death and the human way of coping being ignoring the subject. He explains how this is like ignoring the arts in education, which takes away our ability to strengthen our empathetic thinking and lead a meaningful life for ourselves.
3 unfamiliar concepts I had to “gloss”:
- Neurobiologist – A neurobiologist may conduct a variety of experiments with technology to study the nervous system and to understand the connections it has to functioning and behavioral traits.
- STEAM – Science, technology, engineering, arts, and math centered education. What we typically have in America today is a STEM focus. Yo-Yo Ma believes we should incorporate the arts into this system.
- The edge effect – This is an ecological term that refers to an area between two types of ecosystems where the species there flourish due to the ability to draw from the core of both ecosystems. The broad diversity allows new life forms to emerge.
