The Conductor
Your Good Life
The conductor of the band is the one who directs the music and guides all of the different aspects to work together. In the book, Haidt talked about the rider vs. the elephant. The conductor of the band is the rider while the players are the different parts of the elephant. You are the conductor of your own life and it is up to you to guide everything to a balance that makes you happy. This is what will give you a "good life".
Reflection Letter:
Dear Reader,
I hope that you learned a bit about how a band comes together and how music can impact your life. Being part of a group like a band, or even a sports team, can provide you with a perspective on how everything must be balanced and work in tandem with the other aspects to get the most out of the experience. In a band, everyone has to know their own music and be in tune, but they also have to listen and pay attention to everyone else to achieve the best sound. In life, you have to understand and fulfill all of the needed aspects of happiness to be able to bring them together and have a good life. It takes all of these things together to be your best.
I didn’t know what my theme would be right away. I had to think of the most important things to me in my life. I ended up choosing band because I have a lot of experiences with it and I could connect the lessons I’ve learned from it to the material I learned in this class. Once I started thinking of it, I was really easily able to see exactly which aspects I was going to use. I had a harder time finding my artifacts and pairing them with the page topics because I wanted them all to connect but some of them fit into multiple aspects of happiness. I managed to place my artifacts where they are because I looked at them from a distance and decided which aspect of my happiness they tended to have the greatest impact on.
This project really allowed me to put all of the information I learned into perspective with my other life experiences. I learned a lot about myself and how I have changed over the semester already while doing this project. Deciding which elements to tie my artifacts to made me reflect on how those artifacts have affected me and will continue to affect me in the future. I ended up changing a few of my original artifacts because I found that they either overlapped the purpose of another or didn’t fit into it. I originally was going to put a song on each page but decided that the ones I was going to use for the high brass and woodwinds pages didn’t hold the same weight in my mind as the artifacts I ended up using, which were more personal to me.
Having my teacher give her thoughts on my theme and artifacts before I started helped me as well, as I had never done this before and was still unclear about what I needed to do. Having that reassurance that I was on the right track gave me more confidence when implementing or changing my topics and artifacts. I don’t think there is anything I would do differently. I am very happy with my theme and I feel that my artifacts reflect myself and tie into my theme fairly well. If I had to choose a different theme, I would do a recipe as I saw a few others do for theirs. Cooking is another aspect of my life that I value greatly and would have been fairly easy to implement my artifacts into.
I have learned a lot of information in this course that has greatly impacted my view on life and happiness. I took this class because it fulfills a credit requirement and the topic sounded interesting. I did not expect my entire viewpoint to be changed and enhanced because of it. So many of the discussions and projects we did for this class were designed to put our learnings into perspective. None of them did quite as good of a job as this ePortfolio. I hope to be able to look back on this project in the future and see evidence in my life that I have used what I learned and grew from it. I think this will be a good resource if I ever find myself in a bad place and need some guidance to get back on track for a good life.
Thank you for taking the time to look at my eportfolio and I hope that you gain something meaningful from it as I did.
Bonnie Wall
Word Count: 717
Dear Reader,
I hope that you learned a bit about how a band comes together and how music can impact your life. Being part of a group like a band, or even a sports team, can provide you with a perspective on how everything must be balanced and work in tandem with the other aspects to get the most out of the experience. In a band, everyone has to know their own music and be in tune, but they also have to listen and pay attention to everyone else to achieve the best sound. In life, you have to understand and fulfill all of the needed aspects of happiness to be able to bring them together and have a good life. It takes all of these things together to be your best.
I didn’t know what my theme would be right away. I had to think of the most important things to me in my life. I ended up choosing band because I have a lot of experiences with it and I could connect the lessons I’ve learned from it to the material I learned in this class. Once I started thinking of it, I was really easily able to see exactly which aspects I was going to use. I had a harder time finding my artifacts and pairing them with the page topics because I wanted them all to connect but some of them fit into multiple aspects of happiness. I managed to place my artifacts where they are because I looked at them from a distance and decided which aspect of my happiness they tended to have the greatest impact on.
This project really allowed me to put all of the information I learned into perspective with my other life experiences. I learned a lot about myself and how I have changed over the semester already while doing this project. Deciding which elements to tie my artifacts to made me reflect on how those artifacts have affected me and will continue to affect me in the future. I ended up changing a few of my original artifacts because I found that they either overlapped the purpose of another or didn’t fit into it. I originally was going to put a song on each page but decided that the ones I was going to use for the high brass and woodwinds pages didn’t hold the same weight in my mind as the artifacts I ended up using, which were more personal to me.
Having my teacher give her thoughts on my theme and artifacts before I started helped me as well, as I had never done this before and was still unclear about what I needed to do. Having that reassurance that I was on the right track gave me more confidence when implementing or changing my topics and artifacts. I don’t think there is anything I would do differently. I am very happy with my theme and I feel that my artifacts reflect myself and tie into my theme fairly well. If I had to choose a different theme, I would do a recipe as I saw a few others do for theirs. Cooking is another aspect of my life that I value greatly and would have been fairly easy to implement my artifacts into.
I have learned a lot of information in this course that has greatly impacted my view on life and happiness. I took this class because it fulfills a credit requirement and the topic sounded interesting. I did not expect my entire viewpoint to be changed and enhanced because of it. So many of the discussions and projects we did for this class were designed to put our learnings into perspective. None of them did quite as good of a job as this ePortfolio. I hope to be able to look back on this project in the future and see evidence in my life that I have used what I learned and grew from it. I think this will be a good resource if I ever find myself in a bad place and need some guidance to get back on track for a good life.
Thank you for taking the time to look at my eportfolio and I hope that you gain something meaningful from it as I did.
Bonnie Wall
Word Count: 717