Socratic Seminar Final Reflection

If I were to explain how the Socratic Seminars influenced my thinking about Tuesdays with Morrie, or life in general, I wouldn't have much to say. If anything, the book itself influenced me the most, and the Socratic Seminars only helped tie a few other things into what I know.

I noticed that my personal goals for the Seminars mainly focused on my ability to contribute to the discussion, as well as how much I can contribute. This is mostly because I am an introverted person, and it's hard for me to speak loudly or voice my thoughts well around people I'm not exactly comfortable with (no offense, everyone here is cool but I'm still unfamiliar with you all). This was most apparent during the first Seminar, when the number of times I spoke up was most likely a single digit number. My performance in the second Seminar was a considerable improvement over the first, and thus my goal changed to being readily able to cover a wide range of topics pertaining to the material we were studying. Ironically, I was left speechless in the third Seminar as everyone started talking about subjects mentioned in the book, but with material from outside the book. My goal reverted to the one I had for the second Seminar.

The class changed a lot throughout the four Seminars. At first it was challenging to contribute to the discussion (or talk at all) since we haven't had a Seminar for a few months, but we started picking up after the first Seminar, which influenced me as well. We identified our goal as not to hang on too long or let go too soon from a topic for the next couple Seminars, as a reference to an aphorism Morrie had. The actual reason for this was that we shifted from topic to topic too much, but ironically we hung on to the topic of abuse for 20 minutes straight in the third Seminar.

Usually, we changed topics abruptly, usually forcing another subject into the conversation. Another trend is that most participants who didn't speak out of their own interest in the first Seminar started doing so in the next three, aside from a couple of people. Another was that I usually had to squish myself into a table to make room for people to my right for three Seminars straight.