Socratic Seminars Blog

These past three Socratic Seminars have made my thinking of Tuesdays with Morrie and life different. As we went through the seminars we analyzed further into the meaning of the life lessons Morrie taught. One of these lessons that we discussed was happiness. We discussed what it really meant to be happy and why many people aren't. This gave me new insights on what makes other people happy. I compared this to my own opinions on happiness. That was just one way, but there are many more reasons that the Socratic Seminars influenced my thinking. 

There was a few trends that I noticed with myself and personal goals. Some trends that I noticed with my personal goals was that I always wanted to be more involved in the conversation. I usually get caught up in what everyone else is saying that I don't think about what I want to say. Another trend was that I wanted to help the group get back on track instead of talking about things that weren't relevant. This was an important goal because a few times people would bring up things that were not about what we were discussing, and I would keep the conversation moving along. A trend that I noticed about myself was that I always listened more than I talked. By doing this I really tried to understand what the person was saying instead of what I was going to say. 

One personal goal that changed was pulling my classmates into the discussion. This goal changed because as the seminars went on, most of the people participated so there was no need to pull anyone in. Something that I always tried to change throughout the discussions was the amount of me talking. Sometimes I would talk too much and other times I wouldn't talk enough. A healthy balance was needed to make my participation satisfactory. 

Some trends that I noticed with the class was that the more seminars we did, the more people were involved. I think that kids might have been timid or shy the first few times we did it. Then they got more comfortable talking and expressing themselves. Another trend was that I noticed was how we got into deeper topics as the seminars progressed. We would start off with pretty simple ideas and then we would end on entire life lessons. One thing that I noticed that hindered the first seminar was that only certain people were talking the most. This made it so that there was similar opinions all the time. There wasn't a lot of contradictory ideas.