Jacob LaFlamme
Professor Beals
December 1st, 2017
HIS 130
I Believe That in Order to Understand We Have to Listen.
I was born and have lived in San Francisco my entire life. San Francisco is my hometown and, like any other city, is made up of communities and people working to find the right place for themselves and their families. Also like any other city or town, San Francisco has its own distinct history and diverse population, which leads its residents to have unique and not always mutual understandings of the world. It is in these unique points of view where we have to listen to understand. We often listen to other people, but many times it is just to get to our next point or in order to be able to respond. If we could take the moment to listen in order to truly understand, we could better appreciate the differences that make us unique and the similarities that make us human.
Growing up in an open-minded family, my mother would often cite two rules: first, always show up; second, do not be silent when it comes to righting wrongs. San Francisco was a fertile ground for both of these rules. Sometimes though, the opinion of one person labeling a behavior ‘wrong’ was entirely different from another person’s point of view. For me, as a kid, rights and wrongs were pretty black and white. For example: Sasha hits Taylor with his lunchbox, grab the lunchbox before Sasha can go any further. As I grew older it became increasingly harder to so easily discern ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. At the start of the Iraq conflict in 2003, my mother took me with her to march against the war. She pointed out the police along the route and told me to watch them as they watched the protesters, to see how they were communicating that they were at the ready for any incidents that could cause harm to anyone in the surrounding area. She told me a crowd of this size could make police officers anxious; although we had every right to march, we did not need to act stupid and put the police on edge. Rather, we needed to ‘listen’ to what they were saying by their postures and non-verbal communication. They had their job, we had ours. Each of us had to understand the other.
In high school, I found that people and opinions became more and more intense. I saw my classmates clinging to their own opinions, without trying to listen to different points of view. Of course I stuck to my opinions as well f because when someone is not interested in understanding me I feel frustrated and angry. It was during my first year of high school, playing hockey, when I understood clearly about listening in order to respond verses listening to understand someone else. After I took an unfortunate penalty, my coach talked to me about the next play. Instead of listening, I tried to explain the penalty, arguing the call was bogus and unjustified. My coach just looked at me and said, “Oubby, I am not listening, you just need to understand the next play.” In that moment, I realized I really did need to listen to him and that talking myself was an entirely moot point. That moment struck a chord with me: don’t just listen for your own opportunity to talk, listen to understand.
Once I began to listen to understand, it became obvious to me that I could recognize a connection to people I was conversing with. Of course, there were and continue to be exchanges in which it is hard to comprehend the other person’s point of view, but I strive to, at the very least, work to understand why a person’s views are what they are. As the internet continues to allow the world to become closer and we are exposed to more cultures and different viewpoints, it becomes even more important to listen to understand before we think about responding
Frame Statement:
In this essay I was able to utilize the full extent of the skills that I learned from English 110, especially so since this essay was written towards the end of the semester. One of the big things that I utilized for this essay was peer review. I asked a family member and friends if they could look at this paper and give me feedback on it and thanks to the peer reviews we have had in class I was able to understand and receive the critiques that my peers gave me. This ended up really helping my paper be strong and fully get it’s message across. Another thing that helped me was learning about organization and how to properly organize a paper. The first draft of this paper was disorganized and the message that I was trying to convey in this paper was all over the place and sloppy. So after I had written the first draft and left the paper alone for a day and came back to it with a fresh mind on how to re-organize the paper. Thanks to the skill of being able to properly organize a paper that I got to hone and learn more about in English 110 I was able to re-organize the paper and put things were they should have been in the first place and moving paragraphs or completely rewriting paragraphs so that the flow of the paper was good and easily readable. Another skill that helped with this paper was learning how to focus in on the thesis or my core idea. Like I said earlier my core idea of this paper was all over the place and a bit sloppy. So I focused in on a certain aspect of my core idea (which was too general in the first) and changed the theme of my paper to fit this new core idea and it worked out very well and helped my paper have a strong thesis and message.
