The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/term_papers/reflect.txt

Text File | 1993-06-20 | 4KB | 70 lines

         Change: Man's ability to adapt his thinking


  In the novel To Sir With Love various human characteristics are
portrayed. Of these, the idea that humans are able to adapt and
change their way of thinking seems to be demonstrated throughout
the story. In the novel, both the teacher, Braithewaite, and his
students end up going through many changes that ultimately result
in their coming to change their way of thinking about each other.
In life, as in this fictionalized account, the ability to adapt to
the world around one's self is a very important trait. In my own
life, this has occured on many occasions. Thus, it can be said that
to be able to change and adapt ourselves and our ways at looking at
things to our to our situations we are truly at advantage.
 In the story, Braithewaite begins with a set of preconceived ideas
about his students. He expects them to be unintelligent, rough,
racially intolerant children with no future-hardly deserving of his
respect. But, as he sees later, they are are the total opposites of
his of his initial ideas. This is gradually shown through their
actions, such as such as the students all going to visit the house
of their black friend during his crisis, or their learning to treat
each other with respect;they learned to address each other as their
last names, inthe case of the boys, and "Miss", for the girls. For
the students,they learned to respect and really learn from their
teacher,something they had never cared to do before. Braithewaite
helped them to break out of the the pattern of intolerance and
roughness that society had placed them in. They began to respect
themselves and then to respect others. In short, it was obvious
that both the teacher and his students were able to adapt their way
of thinking to their advantage;they did not get stuck in their
original set of preconceived notions about each other. This is a
key point of the novel, this idea that people can change their
ways.
 In my own experiences, I have ended up changing my ways as I have
become wiser. One example would be my relationship with my older
sister. As a child, I constantly fought with her over everything
and never tried tried to get to understand her. Gradually, though,
as I grew older, I learned to accept and to understand her. Now,
though we still argue about a lot of things, I feel my relationship
with her has improved and I am beginning to understand her. This
has taken a complete change in my way of looking at her;I now look
at her as a nice person with much to offer me, rather than as my
evil sister.This has been a true example of my being able to change
my way of thinking towards an individual.
 The concept of man being able to alter his ways is a crucial
element to his living in a society such as ours. All of us must
learn to accept individual hardships, and all of us must be able to
adapt to our ever-changing world. World leaders must adjust their
way of thinking about an evolving third world country, or a growing
superpower. An employee must adapt to be able to perform his job
adequetly. All of us have had to gradually adapt in order to live
together as a relatively cohesive, well ordered society. It is
clear that nothing remains constant in our world of change except
change itself. It is our ability to learn and to adapt our ways
that has brought humans as far forward as they are today. As a
species, we have gone from living as naked savages to relatively
living as relatively civilized individuals. This would never have
been possible had it not been for our ability to change our ways of
thinking. For humans, then, it is our ability to change that has
put us where we are today and is our key to further advancement,
both as societies and as people.