Blog 7

Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education by Yo-Yo Ma

My personal annotation goals are being reached step by step. I have started to expand my thinking by asking more questions about the text but I know that I can continue to work on building my connections to my personal life.

“Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education” was originally published on the online news and blog site, World-Post, in January 2014. It was written by cellist and songwriter, Yoy-Yo Ma. Ma’s greatest achievements include winning seventeen Grammys, recipient of many awards, and graduate of the Julliard School and Harvard University.

I found this reading, more than others, to really stretch my own personal thinking. Initially, I thought I would completely agree with Ma’s point that art needs to be incorporated into life to make it overall a more empathetic place. However, many of the annotations I wrote challenged that original belief. I started to think about how students who don’t enjoy the arts would respond to these demands. My purpose for reading this essay is to challenge my own personal ideas of how and why art should be incorporated into education and life.

The scope of this essay is to look at how incorporating art into our lives creates connections. Through education and globalization, art can create understanding and encourages a new way of thinking aside from strictly scientific ways.

Lewd: Crude and offensive in a sexual way

Lascivious: Feeling or revealing an overt and often offensive sexual desire

Bandwidth: The energy or mental capacity required to deal with a situation