When I look back at the beginning of the year, I realize that I have come such a long way in my annotating abilities. At the begining of the year, whenever I was asked to annotate a piece of reading I could feel myself forcing the annotations. However, in the time since then I have discovered strategies for annotating and have developed a mental list of things to look for whilst reading.
The surrounding context for Yo-Yo Ma’s essay is layed out in the first page of the reading, acting as an initial backstory to set the stage for his essay. The essay was first published in January 2004 in Switzerland. Yo-Yo Ma is a Chinese-American cellist and is both a Juilliard and Harvard alum. While reading his biography I was actually surprised that Ma would become a topic of discussion in English class because I realized that I have actually heard some of his music before, as I tend to listen to instrumental music as I do my homework. However, I believe the purpose for reading this text my possibly be to potentially gain exposure to a very educated and highly respected man’s take on the modern-day education system. The “so what?” factor of this essay is that the education system today is flawed. According to Ma, the education system of today’s world only provides students with the bare minimum of exposure to various information. And with that, I would have to agree. Finally, I stumbled across some terms while reading the essay that required me to take a step back and look further into the meaning of the terms in order to get the full effect of Ma’s argument. Here, I’ll proceed to mention them;
- Equilibrium- this is a word that I felt as though I actually had a fair understanding of it’s meaning. However, I felt as though I wasn’t fully understanding the use of it in Ma’s context specifically. In digging deeper, I discovered that the word equilibrium in a context such as this one, is used to describe a state in which opposing influences are balanced. In “Necessary Edges” the word is being used to refer to the internal balance of healthily coping with challenges with the environment while still tackling them as necessary.
- The next word, I can say I’ve never even heard of before; Sarabande. Sarabande refers to a slow Spanish dance in triple time.
- Finally, the last unfamiliar term I discovered was the term ‘organic evolution.’ In digging deeper into its meaning, I discovered that the organic revolution simply refers to the naturally occurring evolution of living things as we learn about in biology.
