I.
Summary
Davenport
relates her essay “War Doll Hotel” as a series of snapshots over various
portions of her lifetime, focusing on her stay at the YMCA in NYC during the
1970’s as its central focus. Davenport, in her essay, reconciles her divided
self of her youth in NYC that had not yet embraced multiculturalism as openly
as it does today, by looking back through the lens of her present state, one of
a more profound appreciation for not only her own uniqueness, but realizing
that we all come from a place of searching for what we are, and having to go
through our own journeys to find ourselves as well.
Analysis
Born to a Hawaiian mother, and a Caucasian father, neither
of which imprinted their culture upon her during her youth, she flees her
native Hawaii for NYC in the hope of escaping
the place of her birth and youth in the hopes of becoming successful in
assimilating to the larger, corporate America.
“You see the trouble I was in; I still didn’t know who I
was. I would lose a whole decade, all of my twenties, before I learned that
recognizing who you are isn’t the subtext of a life. It’s the main point” (14).
She arrives at NYC in her early twenties, hoping to find
success in corporate America,
a form of America
that was mostly Caucasian, believing that the assimilation into this culture is
the definition of happiness. She finds herself at the YMCA, amongst other
refugees from other places and cultures, that had caused these women to be
labeled outcasts by others, or causing the women to see themselves as outcasts
from a circumstance that they were running away from. Some women are more
readily able to assimilate themselves into the culture, Davenport herself appeared white and thus had
an advantage. Other women had a more difficult time in assimilating, using
other methods such as finding husband’s which they believed would give them a
way into being accepted by the larger community. The women at the YMCA became
their own tight-knit family, in order to support each other, and help each
other make sense of this new society that they had to somehow navigate. Other
women could not so readily fit in and develop this ability (the suicide and the
woman who appeared to have gone insane), and I noticed Davenport did not
mention these women by name, as they were probably incapable, possibly through
their own negative self-beliefs, to join and participate within this group of
women. The women who did succeed were able to reconcile themselves within the
needs and requirements of the larger society as a whole. Some retained their
personal uniqueness, while other women may have had to shed their past
identities completely to adopt one that they felt would compel society to
accept them.
“I think the fact that we could do that, that such
profoundly dislocated, homesick young women could buoy each other up, assemble,
and take aim; well that was the
important thing. New York,
the target, was insignificant. Targets change” (15).
Synthesis
One is not the sum of one’s potential lineage although the
traditions and rituals handed down to people through their heritages gives them
their sense of identity as a means to participate in the world before the
person find’s their own traditions and rituals with which to adhere. One is how
well one can read one’s environment and meet its needs and help participate
toward its goals. As society becomes further fractured there is very little
holding it together. In the past there were more clear and precise demarcations
for the roles of women and men, and for black and white. Society used to be
much less difficult to read and participate within as most of us looked like
each other, causing us to mostly copy one another in behavior and thinking. Now
that society is becoming more increasingly used to seeing various races and
cultures, the lines of what is acceptable as to what group to belong to, and
thus what behaviors and ideals to adopt and emulate as our own are more
confused. We are now subject to the value judgments of many kinds of different
people, each one right according to their own culture and place. It is now up
to the individual to have to successfully mitigate many different kinds of what
is right and wrong in many different kinds of circumstances. To the uninformed
individual, our society may appear as just a random set of happenings, causing
the individual much confusion and distress in one’s participation of the world.
The individual, in this day and age, is compelled to not only try to make sense
of the world in order to better fit in it and prosper in a myriad of forms, but
to make sense of the world to define ourselves, and what is proper for us as
the individual as to how much of society has a personal worth, and what of its
values are worth devoting our energies to, and which have no worth to the
individual whatsoever. Essentially our lives are a series of photographs, it is
only through our environments, and an informed study of it, which gives us the
meanings that we assign these moments of time in our personal history.
“When we’re young, we record things very fast. Life develops
the film. Ritual for sleepless nights: shuffle mental snapshots, fan them out
like playing cards. Choose one” (13).
II.
- Bloom’s Taxonomy is actually unfinished, having only completed the first two domains. Others have attempted to create and define the third domain but it has not yet been officially recognized. The taxonomy that we have been exposed to in the course only touches upon the Cognitive Domain, and not the Affective Domain, or the Psycho-Motor Domain. If the other two domains were taken into account, the taxonomy may become even more of a useful and powerful tool in its application.
- Taxonomy should be made available to school children, as well as teachers. It would perhaps better inform the students as to the process of teaching, understanding the fact that there is a tool being used in how they are taught by the teacher. Students would be perhaps more interested in learning if they could engage with the subject of learning by anticipating the possible approaches the teacher may use in their teaching, recognizing at what level the subject is being taught and tested upon by being informed of the various keywords with which are being used. It would also be helpful for the student to be aware that there is a higher process of thinking than only one, and that everyone is capable of these higher processes in some form if only they are given the means, and one devotes oneself to using them for their personal gain.
- One’s thinking occurs on several different levels, active engagement with a subject is the only means to which one can achieve the higher orders of thinking concerning any subject. Ones ideas can go from the general to the sophisticated and the taxonomy is a useful tool to examine any subject from multiple points of view in order to not only retain the basic fundamentals of the subject, but to achieve more than a superficial understanding of the subject as well through being able to see and use the subjects through a variety of means.
- I watched some videos on YouTube and looked at the various images of “Bloom’s Taxonomy” through Google. Seeing it in its many forms helped to more deeply appreciate it and make it all come together. I think seeing it from various perspectives better informs one’s sense of what Bloom Taxonomy is, and better gives a broad awareness of what the taxonomy is. It is after one finds a broad view, or overview of the subject, the learner can then narrow down further into the respective categories of what the taxonomy is. When one finds a multitude of ways of how others have presented the subject, it makes it more readily able to choose which one fits us the best, yet understanding that other people may understand the subject in a completely different way from ours.
- The difference between Declarative Knowledge, and Procedural Knowledge was something that I needed to define.
Declarative knowledge is knowing that
something as an indisputable fact – “that J is the tenth letter of the
alphabet, that Paris is the capital of France.
Declarative knowledge is conscious; it can be verbalized” (para. 1).
Procedural Knowledge, on the other
hand, “ involves knowing HOW to do something – ride a bike for example. We may
not be able to explain how we do it. Procedural knowledge involves implicit
learning, which a learner may not be aware of, and may involve being able to
use a particular form to understand or produce language without necessarily
being able to explain it” (para. 2).
- Definition of terms used in Bloom’s taxonomy were also necessary for me. Most people assume the given meanings of everyday terms, and to help myself I had to define various terms in order to know that my understanding of the terms used were not based falsely on assumptions, thus leading to a misunderstanding.
Works Cited:
Davenport,
Kiana. "War Doll Hotel." Daily
Fare: Essays from the Multicultural Experience. Ed. Kathleen Aguero. Athens: The University
of Georgia Press, 1993.
65-77. (in Selected Readings booklet). Print.
http://unt.unice.fr/uoh/learn_teach_FL/affiche_theorie.php?id_concept=90&lang=eng&id_theorie=1&id_categorie=3.
“Declarative Knowledge vs. Procedural Knowledge”. Accessed 09-27-2012.
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