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4.4: “My Curiosity” -- Bridget Magee

  • Page ID
    152024
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    As we’ve discovered through our engagement with the previous texts, noticing can be a way to generate curiosity and curiosity is a powerful catalyst for learning. When we, the authors, first read the title of Magee’s (2016) poem, we assumed that it would be about the topics and issues that she was curious about. After reading the poem, we realized that our assumption proved to be incorrect. Read on to find out what Magee’s poem suggests about curiosity.

    “My Curiosity”

    My curiosity

    needles me to ask

    pokes me to wonder

    pulls my thoughts through

    my confusion

    until I can stitch together

    a deeper understanding.

    After Reading

    After reading the poem, what do you think that Magee suggests about the purpose of curiosity? How is this similar to or different from your notion of curiosity? In your experience, how has school-based learning encouraged or discouraged your curiosity? Note your thoughts below.

    Magee notices several ways that her curiosity functions:

    --needles me to ask

    --pokes me to wonder

    --pulls my thoughts through my confusion

    --stitches together a deeper understanding

    Since we might not be aware of the nuanced ways that curiosity operates or the impact that curiosity has on our learning, we encourage you to consciously explore the power of curiosity. In the section below, we demonstrate how our curiosity sparked a bigger inquiry. Of course, we want to reiterate that there are many other ways that curiosity can operate–McGee’s poem is not an exclusive approach–and that not all inquiries begin or unfold in the same way. We hope our inquiry is an illustration of just one way that curiosity can launch investigation. More specifically, one of the ideas from Wallace’s speech that intrigued us, the authors, was his recommendation to “Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ ” With this idea in mind, we utilized Magee’s lens to generate the following thoughts:

    How is our curiosity poking us to wonder?

    Wonderment – We’re fascinated by the claim that “a mind is a terrible master.” This is surprising to us since the mind is typically regarded as being in charge, not the body. This also makes us think about the claim that the body will do as the mind tells it. Perhaps this claim isn’t accurate. We’re also wondering about the idea that the mind is an “excellent servant” because, if the mind really is a servant, then it must be serving someone or something. In this case, we don’t quite know what it serves. Furthermore, it seems odd that Wallace invoked a cliché in his speech. We were taught to avoid clichés because they are so overused– this causes them to lose their powerful effect.

    How is this needling us to ask?

    Questions – Why is the mind a terrible master? Is it because it can be easily distracted? Is it because it operates from “default settings” that place ourselves at the center of the universe? Why is the mind an excellent servant? Who or what would it serve? Is there accuracy or truth to clichés even though they are overused? What does the word cliché actually mean and where does it come from?

    What was our confusion?

    Further Inquiry – One of the ways that we embodied Magee’s notion that curiosity can pull our thoughts through confusion is by launching more inquiry based on our wonderment and questions. More specifically, we wanted to discover more insight into the mind/body relationship that seems to be relevant to Wallace’s cliche. One of the sources we found was a TEDtalk by science writer Jo Marchant (2019). She began her talk with the question “Can our minds heal us?” She says that negative states of mind, like stress, can make us physically ill. However, Marchant also notes that positive mental states, such as feeling positive, cared for, safe, etc., can actually influence the physical symptoms that we feel. This seems like it suggests that the mind might be an excellent master–a contradictory stance to what the cliche asserts.

    At this point in our inquiry, we were strictly viewing the saying “Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master’ ” through the lens of the mind/body connection. However, after doing a bit more research, we discovered that there is another way to interpret this. Instead of thinking about it from the binary of mind/body, we can think about it through the lens of two roles that one mind can play. As Terry Veling, a theological educator, writes, “When our mind masters us, we enter all sorts of “terrible worlds”–depression or anxiety, yet also delusional power and egoism. A mastering mind is not what we want, or need.What we need is a ‘servant mind’ . . . Among other things, a servant mind is a questioning mind, unafraid to be led by the question, unafraid to lose control, unafraid to serve rather than master. What it loses in terms of mastery, it gains in terms of openness and discovery.”

    How does our curiosity stitch together a deeper understanding?

    Understanding –through our inquiry, we’ve already discovered deeper meaning to both the cliché itself and to Wallace’s invocation of it. It seems that there are two mindsets that we can take: focusing on mastering everything or pursuing questions through an open, discovery-oriented approach. As a master, the mind is certain of things. It aims to know everything entirely. This is the kind of certainty that Wallace warns us about. Just as certainties are often wrong, we are not at the center of the universe, as a mastery mindset might lead us to believe. This insight is significant because it adds more importance to the practice of noticing and questioning.

    Your Curiosity

    Now that you’ve shared in one of our curiosities and observed how it has encouraged a broader inquiry, we invite you to consciously explore the power of curiosity. To do this, see if you can embrace each of curiosity’s functions from Magee’s poem and utilize it as a way of engaging ideas from David Foster Wallace’s speech This is Water. (See “Your Curiosity” Activity). As you become more attuned to your own curiosities, take note of the different ways that it guides your learning.


    4.4: “My Curiosity” -- Bridget Magee is shared under a CC BY-NC license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.