Symbols Gone Wrong

As we learned during the first few weeks of school, a symbol is simply any image that has added significance associated with it. In literature, two of the ways that we interpret and analyze literature are through the tracing of imagery and the interpretation of the symbolism attached to this imagery. Although we are never sure what the author intended to say (unless we are somehow able to bring the authors to our classroom and interview them about choices they made during the writing of their books), we are able to infer a great deal about their intended messages by exploring and analyzing the use of imagery and symbolism in their works. In fact, the intended message becomes quite unimportant once a piece of writing, art, music or theater hits the public realm; the most important factor then becomes the public's interpretation of this message.

If the intended message and the perceived message happen to differ, there is very little that the author or artist can do to bring the public back to his line of thinking. When art or literature is released to the public, it becomes public property in a very real sense. Think of a politician who delivers a controversial speech that is not well-received. She may have intended to wow a group of potential voters with her wit and intelligence, but the intended message got lost in the delivery. Instead of being impressed with her command of the election issues, the public now views her as elitist and out of touch with the common man. In the end, her intended message matters little; the only thing that matters in the wake of her speech is how the public has received the message.

The public display outside of the library in our school is a prime example where the message intended differs from the message delivered. The title of the display, "Homosexuals in the Holocaust," suggests that the creators of the exhibit intended to deliver some sort of message about the persecution of homosexuals in the Holocaust, but their misguided use of the Nazi swastika rendered their intended message moot. The swastika was originally a symbol in Hindu derived from the word for lucky, but its intimate association with the Nazi movement and the extermination of 11 million innocent victims (5,000 to 15,000 of whom were targeted homosexuals, according to website Non-jewish [sic] Victims of the Holocaust, http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/fivmil.htm), has rendered it a powerful symbol of hatred, fear and the incredible depths to which humanity can potentially sink. It is precisely for this reason that modern-day Germany has outlawed the display of this symbol in association with Nazism, and it is also for this reason that such a symbol has no place in our school, regardless of the intended message.

Excuses

So here it is, Sunday afternoon, and I am just now sitting down to write my blog. As you all know, the blogs are due on Friday, so I am late in submitting this post. I do not have a good excuse, and I am willing to take the late grade on this blog post- minus five points. As long as I don't make it a habit to post my blogs late, this will not make too much of a difference in my final grade for the term. If, however, this is the beginning of a new trend of getting my blogs in late or failing to do them at all, there might be a problem.

Late work is not acceptable. But have you ever sat down to think about why teachers give you due dates on assignments? The first reason is convenience for them. No, not convenience; necessity. If teachers started allowing each student to pass assignments in whenever it was convenient for the student, there would be complete chaos. An important part of a teacher's job is to use student performance on individual, "small stakes" tasks to gauge how much each student is learning and which areas the class might need a bit more instruction on. If the class is not completing all of the same assignments at the same time, the teacher is going to have an extremely difficult time deciding which concepts or lessons might need a bit more attention: the choice to review certain topics would be based completely on guesswork, not on trends of student achievement based on quiz or test performance. The teacher would invariably end up reviewing topics that most students in the class had already mastered, and would miss out on reviewing critical topics that the class was struggling with.

The second reason for imposing strict due dates for assignments has much more to do with the educational mission of schooling: when you are an adult working at a job and you are expected to complete a task by a certain date, your boss and supervisors will not be pleased if you have not completed the task on time. They will care very little about what the excuse is, even if the excuse is entirely legitimate. Their main thought will be, "so and so did not get the project completed on time, and this is not the first time that he or she has been late getting tasks completed." Since an important role of schooling is to prepare young people to be productive members of a democratic society, it is important that many of the rules commonly found in school are relevant to what is commonly found in the real world. Assignment deadlines are among the most important of these rules.

Your professional deadlines will not be arbitrarily chosen; they will usually correspond with other people's deadlines. Here are a couple of scenarios to illustrate this point. In the first scenario, you are expected to complete a PowerPoint presentation for a meeting that will be attended by everyone in the company, and if you are not able to get it done on time, the meeting will not be productive and everyone will feel that their time has been wasted. Your supervisors will have to make a host of choices at this point: run the meeting without a PowerPoint presentation (the information in the meeting will therefore not be presented in the most organized and visually appealing manner), ask somebody else who has more time than you do to complete the PowerPoint (making it necessary for that person to neglect other essential tasks that they were responsible for completing), or pushing the meeting back a day or two so that you can finish the PowerPoint (several people will not be able to attend the next meeting because they have already scheduled other obligations for that time slot). None of these choices are going to be attractive to your bosses, and they might be inclined to find a different person who will be able to get things done on time, and you will be out of a job.

Here's another scenario: you are expected to write an important product report in advance of a crucial decision by the bosses in the company to invest in (buy) a certain product. If your report is not finished or is not completed well, the decision makers of the company might make poor choices and invest in inferior products or technologies, the company might lose money, and the blame will be placed squarely on the person who failed to complete the product report on time. They will not care that you had a true emergency you had to deal with, which was the real reason why you were not able to complete the task. The only thing that they are likely to remember long after the missed deadline is that one person's inability to get a task completed on time cost them millions of dollars in wasted money. This would not bode well for your future job prospects within that company. You might have to find a new company to work for.

So here's the message: get used to completing assignments on time. Make sure that excuses are kept to a minimum, and realize that even the most legitimate of excuses do not excuse you from having to submit assignments. And finally, although firm deadlines often dictate that handing something in late is not worth handing it in at all (see the two scenarios spelled out above), if there is a choice between turning  something in late for partial credit and not turning something in at all, it is always better to get partial credit. The caveat to that statement is that partial credit will not always be available.

So here is my excuse for submitting my blog in late: my dog ate my homework. No wait...My computer crashed...