Week 8 – Olympics and Democratic Practice
Use the theme above as your prompt and/or the general writing instructions below to begin your writing then follow what inspires you to write what you need to write tonight. Write your truth, what you are sensing, feeling, and thinking reflecting on the topic discussed in class.
Please use the text box or upload a PDF or MSWord doc or docx file with your one-page (250-300 word) writing assignment.
Weekly Writing Assignment
It is possible that most of your assignments, in most of the courses you take at this university, have not asked you to begin your work by recognizing, closely examining, and gradually understanding your true, deepest, and most complex feelings.
This weekly assignment invites you to acknowledge and explore your emotional life, tracing the roots of your deeply felt, innate, visceral responses, which underlie, motivate and ultimately shape your actions.
AWARENESS
FEELING
THOUGHT
ACTION
In each weekly one-page paper, please begin by describing a moment of awareness when something strikes you and you feel a sudden new level of understanding, or conversely an unexpected level of confusion, disturbance, anger, or loss. Describe and explore the feelings that emerge from your moment of awareness. Then, notice and describe how those feelings become thoughts, ideas, opinions, convictions, or intuitions. Finally, describe how those thoughts trigger and result in actions, instantaneously or across time.
Each week, you will take yourself from awareness, to feeling, to thought, and to action in the course of writing a page. The idea of moving through the same process of recognition and writing each week is to generate a new habit energy in your life, which becomes stronger, more natural, more satisfying, more insightful, and more readily accessible with each paper. Hopefully across the term you can become more alert and more conscious of the way your emotions are functioning, and increasingly more skillful in shaping your life experiences.
None of these papers should be formal academic papers with official topic sentences and the usual apparatus. This writing is meant to be as personal as possible and can take the form of notes, mental and emotional leaps, flashes of inspiration, questions you suddenly want to examine, or a flashlight that lets you search out and peer into dark spaces in your life. Please write in a way that connects you most fully to your feelings, to impulses, to your thought processes, and that lets you see your actions from the inside and from the outside.
It is definitely important to write from personal experience and imagination. Please recognize where your voice is situated and don’t assume omniscience or omnipotence. Our process and progress will be made communally. We will move forward together.
The actual process of creating change on an Olympic scale is detailed and intricate. Generalities will not make the grade. This class is focused on creative change, which requires both knowledge and vision, and in order to succeed, needs to be articulated brilliantly and convincingly in a way that sways public opinion. The weekly writing assignments are meant to be explosions of ideas and feelings, insights, and new understandings. Please write to win the day.
The post Week 8 – Olympics and Democratic Practice
Use the theme above as your prompt and appeared first on Course Hero.