Week 2

Chapter 1

August 25

2:00pm

After the first class, I immediately jumped on to doing the work for the week. I pulled out my Tombows, my white-out, and my gel pens to do some classic Windsor-style notes. I first went to Kallion, and found what my subject matter was and made the header you see below.

I glanced over the objective and immediately thought “Beyoncé” and started answering the questions in my head. When it came time to put pen to paper, I realized I read the directions wrong and the point was to not recognize the person in the portrait to prevent biased answers. I then went back to Google and searched “portrait” and found this portrait:

I thought it was the perfect portrait so I started doing the assignment; I came to realize that some of the questions were directly related to the physical appearance of the person in the portrait. I did not want to start over so I pushed through making inferences and made the person’s features in my mind and translated it to the type of leader I thought they would be. I prefer to use gender-neutral pronouns in cases like these where the gender identity is not clarified or apparent, so in a lot of my notes and assignments, I use they/them pronouns for people and hypothetical leaders as to not reflect any stereotyping. I chose this portrait because it was different and caught my eye more than any of the basic black-and-white portraits from my Google search. I guess you could say the portrait called to me, maybe it is the colors or the lack of eyes but it just called my name and told me to pick it. I guess that also has something to say about my leadership development, trusting my intuition and letting it guide me. By trusting my intuition and letting it guide me, it helps me as a leader make split-second decisions in situations where I do not have the luxury of time to think about.

Chapter 2

August 31, 2020

8:00 pm

Reading through this week’s focus on mentors and bringing out the best in others, I think about my English teacher from sophomore year of high school. She was kind of a mentor to me in high school, she wrote me letters of recommendation, helped me with essays junior and senior year, and pushed me to think outside of the box. She is the type of person I want to emulate: kind, intelligent, and challenges you to be a better person.

Athena’s mentorship of Telemachus is interesting because she herself is the goddess of wisdom and war yet most of her advice is violent. Such as suggesting that Telemachus kill all the suitors in vengeance for his home and his father. Yet there were sprinkles of wisdom in her enigmatic advice to the son of Odysseus.

September 1

9:40 am Class

Leaders do not just give people what they need, but teach them how to be self-sufficient. Leadership development also means self-reflecting to see how I can become a better leader and what I need to do to become a great leader. Leaders find great alternatives if a path is blocked, and sometimes it is a better option. Operationalizing a concept. Someone activating the potential in others gives accurate feedback, constructive criticism, and gives advice with good intentions- not to tear down. Criticism in a way that lifts mentees up as well that prepares mentees to receive criticism. Mentors have to see their way through the advice they give, not do the opposite of what they say. By practicing what they preach, mentors set an example for their mentees to follow. Mentors can be someone who is trying to redeem their character. A great example would be Phil from the movie Hercules, although Hercules is seeking guidance from Phil as a mentor, Phil refuses at first because he does not want to fail again. By the end of the movie, not only had Phil redeemed himself, he set the foundation for Hercules to become a good leader. Mentors use stories to convey a plan exactly like how Athena gave Telemachus a plan to go see Nestor. Speaking up on behalf of the community is an important action to take as a leader. It takes guts to stand up and advocate for your community not only as a leader, but as a human being. Especially today, standing up and speaking out is so important and without a voice supporting a community, change and progress would not occur. Just one person can be a catalyst for change in a community just by standing up and speaking out the way how Telemachus did. Would Athena be a good mentor today? Athena’s advising of Telemachus would lead me to say no, in the sense that today killing others who tarnish you or your family’s honor would land you in a prison cell rather than praised by the King and Queen. But on the flip side, Athena would be a great mentor today because in the current state of the world coupled with her vast wisdom, Athena would be able to give and find solutions to any problem her mentee would face.

September 2

11:50 am

After learning about the quiz for tomorrow’s class, I immediately went back to Chapter 2 and started making a Quizlet to help me prepare for tomorrow. I first went through and wrote down all the characters referenced and their importance to the plot of The Odyssey. After that, I defined all the Greek words. In order to fully prepare my self, I reviewed the flash cards first, then did a Quizlet-generated quiz over the cards, and finally went back through the excerpts from the poem.

Related posts:

This is a question we have been asking ourselves since PM Lee Hsien Loong launched the Smart Nation initiative in 2014 with a vision to weave technology into nation-building. As PM Lee has put forth…

Only seven months ago, open source chips were a dream of some, and clearly impossible to others. Today we know better. In a joint effort between efabless, Google, and the SkyWater foundry, everybody…