2024/03/20 Wed
Question:
This week, I want you to discuss assessment criteria. Some schoolteachers give high grades (marks) only to those students who perform well on their homework assignments and tests. Other teachers, however, may give high grades to students who have worked very hard on their assignments but have not performed so well. Which approach do you think is better: Giving grades based only on performance, or grading students not just on performance but also on their effort?
Answer:
I believe that schoolteachers should give high grades only to students who perform well. There are two types of students, one of which is a group of students who are good at academics, and the other is who aren't. A schoolteacher can motivate both groups of students to obtain as many achievements as they possibly can by assessing grades based solely on their performance. To be more specific, students with great performance will be encouraged to study as hard as they have been doing by receiving as good scores as they expected. Students who work hard but whose performances aren't as competent as others, on the other hand, will be galvanized to study harder or alter their study habits to be better off next time by receiving relatively worse grades. Therefore, I remark that schoolteachers should prioritize performance over diligence when it comes to grading.
2024/03/21 Thu
Question:
As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.
Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporthing your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
Answer:
The technological advancement over the past few centuries has eventually ushered us into a society where human beings can delegate to machines all the repetitive drudgery of work. Ever since Sumer, the earliest known civilization, emerged, technological progress has always been intertwined with human history, serving as determining factors in a wealth of such historic occasions as The Late Bronze Age collapse or World War II. It seems that people in the past, whether in the ancient age or in The Age of Enlightenment, deemed every bit of development in technology to be desirable in plenty of manners, except for a few exceptions like Luddites in the 19th century. The concerns about the phenomenon of humanity relying excessively on technology, on the other hand, might have started to be proposed majorly by people in relatively modern society—approximately at the turn of the 21st century. Then, what element makes the two groups of humanity, each in a respective period of time, behave somewhat differently from each other? One of the probable conjectures might be that the latter has witnessed or is witnessing something distinctive. And this is likely to be a certain point in time from which technology has inaugurated to negatively affect the ability of humans to think for themselves, which the prior generations could not observe by any means. Therefore, in the following paragraphs, I will discuss several viewpoints that invited me to think of the proposed inquiry as feasible, each followed by substantive evidence that we can notice on a daily basis.
First and foremost, technological advancement has detached independent thinking of humankinds from the majority of sections in daily livestechnological advancement has widely deprived humanity of the opportunities to reason out in daily lives. Suppose that a hypothetical person is cooking Aglio e Olio, a tranditional Neapolitan pasta, for the first time. Not knowing the exact recipe, he may go search on the Internet, subsequently finding one of the recipes that a famous chef uploaded on his Blog’s posting. He would, in turn, try hard to follow every instruction as precisely as possible so that he can get the same outcome that the chef would have intended in their recipe. However, the flavor of the pasta may sometimes not be as good as he expected or not oriented to his taste at least. What may he, then, do in response to it? In most cases, he would go search another recipe posted on the Internet and give it a shot. And he would rather repeat this pattern of behavior until discovering the exact recipe that goes satisfactory to his standard, excluding delving into such principles as how each ingredient in the recipe contributes to the whole spice or how to make each of the ingredients taste better together. Let’s move on to another instance. There is a hypothetical student majoring in economics, who is encountering trouble understanding her college textbook’s descriptions. What would she do then? She would have recourse to the internet community for easier and briefer descriptions but would not try to understand or spend enough time pondering on it.
All these instances I employed above are exemplary of how technology has negatively influenced human intelligence to think freely. Both the man and woman didn’t initiate the intellectual process through which they can obtain deeper comprehension of the subject each struggled with, such as scrutinizing or self researching. Instead, they opted for resorting to standardized methodologies not originating from them. That’s because assimilating themselves to the banal—common—answers that other people have already offered is far more efficient and safer in terms of time duration or opportunity cost than coming up with new ideas entirely. Apparently, what has paved the way for these phenomena is the advancement of technology, no less. Looking back on the previous generations, consulting to exterior knolwedge was at least as laborious as embarking on pending matters in person. Back then, public transportation, telephone conversation over a long distance, or even a simple interaction with an erudite scholar were not so frequently available as in the present, let alone such thing as the Internet not existing. Information, thus, was precious and elegant, contrary to the way modern people tyrannically handle it. Humanity in the past, consequently, was largely dependent on their own reasonings and thoughts even though the outcome would generally not be as competent or sophisticated as that in the modern society which is consulted by collective intelligence. Conversely, people in the modern era have superfluous access to data, to the extent people in the past could not dare to think of a glimpse of. And the efficiency of relying on the exterior data outperforms that of producing distinctive solutions for oneself. As a result, the opportunity cost of consulting to others has become rapidly affordable, and people begin to produce outcomes with a higher sophistication that previous generations could not accomplish. However, the prowess to think for themselves has drastically suffered, indeed. They no longer utilize their intrinsic ability to resolve predicaments but merely replicate others’ thoughts. Copy and Paste and uniform of thinking, these phrases represent the footing of the modern society faithfully.
Secondly, 기술의 발전이 이전에는 존재하지 않았던 새로운 종류의 문제 해결을 요구한다는 것은 로봇공학과 신재생 에너지와 같은 기술 발전의 최전선에서 활동하는 사람들에게만 적용된다. 일반사람들, 문명의 이기의 혜택을 받는 일반 사람들은 그러한 일과 관련이 없다. 또한 기술이 너무나도 발전하여 일반인들은 자신들이 일상에서 사용하는 도구들에 문제가 발생했을 때 스스로 고칠 엄두도 내지 못한다. 예를 들어 스마트폰은 우리가 모두 사용하고 있지만 그것에 문제가 생겼을 때 이를 해결할 수 있는 사람은 몇 되지 않는다. 간단한 세탁기 같은 것도 어떻게 사용하는 지는 대부분의 사람이 알지만, 그것에 문제가 생겼을 떄는 스스로 해결하지 못한다. 이는 specilization의 필연적인 문제
Lastly, 사람들은 기술의 발전으로 인해 제공된 추가적인 시간을 productively 사용하지 않는다. 지하철과 같은 대중교통으로 사람들의 출퇴근 시간은 줄었지만, 그 시간에 사람들 대부분은 스마트폰을 보거나 소설을 읽는 등, 생산적인 활동을 하지 않는다. 기술의 발전이 더 많은 시간을 벌어다 줄 수록, 사람들은 그것을 더 고귀한 목적을 위해 쓰지 않고 오히려 자신들의 삶을 방탕하게 낭비하는 데 투자한다.
첫댓글 수고했다,,,홧팅,,,