Baldwin – Spencer Darbouze

James Baldwin is trying to say that he tries to enforce curiosity upon his students by telling them that there is much more to learn outside the classroom. He also places a caveat that they have to look for the extra information on their own. James Baldwin essentially issues a challenge, and that challenge is how he is enforcing curiosity. Framing it as a challenge, it kind of activates a person’s drive to win, which starts because we like success, and the reason we want success is that it helps our self-esteem, which is essential, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. To conclude, by framing curiosity as a challenge, he could enforce curiosity by also helping their self-esteem.

I believe that the guardian article is kind of correct. The reason I say that is curiosity is stifled is dependent on two factors. The first factor is the type of teacher. Teachers influence the classroom and how learning is shaped for the current generation, so depending on the teacher’s attitude and goals, they can either enforce curiosity or stifle curiosity. An example of enforcing curiosity is when a new teacher allows questions of all kinds. This happens because a new teacher is more likely to be excited to leave the students happier and relax with the subject, leave them to ask more questions and the teacher’s goal is usually to make students learn as much as possible. An example of a teacher stifling curiosity is its old and jaded teacher, as they would only teach what is on the syllabus. The jaded professor’s authoritarian personality can intimidate some of the students from asking questions, leading to worse overall performance in class. They will not be asking critical questions to their understanding. The second factor to stifling or encouraging curiosity is topic and timing. Based on my personal experiences, I have seen many teachers allowed questions as long as they have to do with the topic. For example, you would not ask about a question about thunder clouds during a history class. To conclude, Public Schools can either enforce or stifle; however, that depends on the teacher and the question’s topic. So the guardian article was correct but only showing the negative side of this opinion.

I was born deep into the modern Information Age, meaning that I have access to all of the human information at my fingertips, so any question I might have from class I have to hold on to until I get to a computer. However, this does present some problems. The first problem is the complexities of the answer. Some answers can be either over complicated or oversimplify and Falls outside of the Goldilocks zone of answers, so you either need to read about multiple words or look for a better definition. So you have to reformat your question. The second problem is the biases. A part of having all Humanity knowledge is having all Humanities opinions and biases, which can be troublesome as most people want to know the truth and objective fact. So if you start your research a question instead of an answer, you will have a lot more which activity then if you just try to start with ma answer.