Javier A. Tabush

If I had to choose two words to describe what we talked about these past two weeks, they would be “observation” and “interpretation”. Throughout the third meta-dialogue I heard Carmen say a quote, “By observing we discover”. Observation is taking that time to analyze something and having that incredible feeling of having your own discovery. Interpretation on the other hand, describes the meaning that you give to that personal discovery. Discovery is having that “AHA! Moment”, that feeling of self enrichment that you found out or learned something you didn´t know before.
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When we are all given the same thing to draw but from different points of view in our drawing class, we all give different meaning to the drawing. Also, depending on what object we are drawing, the meaning can be much stronger to certain people, since the object can hold much more emotional meaning. Since drawing is a type of art, I want to mention poetry as well and the morning meeting thatChacho and Mabe did sometime last week. As Chacho read a poem he wrote, Mabe played a beautiful melody accompanying the narration. Poetry is the ultimate source of interpretation and meaning. It is an extraordinary way of expressing feelings as well as with drawing and painting.
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I had never heard about the TED talks before I came to the MPC, and they are an amazing source for discovery and knowledge. I recently watched the TED talk that Pablito did about Pineapples. It´s astounding how muchhistory the pineapples hold behind the idea of a simple fruit. Meaning is so important, and sometimes we don´t even realize it in the most random things such as pineapples. I also wanted to relate the conversation we had with Dorothy and the other gentlemen that came to the MPC to this whole idea of meaning. These people came with some concrete idea of the term education, and I´m pretty sure that it changed after they left the dialogue. We all agreed that this was the best description we had given so far about the whole idea behind MPC. Connecting to this, I also contacted the college counselor of my old high school and he asked me to give him a description of the MPC and I wanted to share what I wrote.
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“The MPC (Michael Polanyi College) is a liberal arts program with a duration of three years which was launched in September 2012. It is a very new program both in content and in methodology and puts the student at the center of their own learning process…The whole program is based on Socratic dialogues and the importance of being a self learner”.
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The importance of interpretation. We watched a movie this week called 12 angry men and it’s basically twelve men of the jury around a table discussing if a boy is guilty or not. The practice of dialogue we use at the MPC is very well portrayed in the movie since there is a debate of different opinions and what I´m realizing right now as I´m writing this, is that the dialogue in the movie was very well executed even though there was a lot of screaming and disagreement.
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How can we know things? How can we know that we know things? Is it okay to doubt everything? These are some of the questions that rose up during the meta-dialogue. Do you think there is an absolute truth about everything? There is an absolute truth about everything, not that you can reach it but it does exist. The process of finding this truth is much more enriching than actually finding this ultimate truth. I can relate this to the drawing class with Kassandra because she always tells us that it doesn`t matter what the final outcome (in this case a drawing) is, but the process of drawing it and paying close attention to every detail of whatever it is that we are drawing. For example when we were drawing the leaves, we had to look at every little detail, and every little vein of the leaf. It didn`t matter how the final picture came but the process of looking at absolutely everything and trying to copy it to the paper.