10 part skill in listening

So the article that was presented to us was about the 10 parts of listening to become an effective listener. The article talks about how the different parts that we usually tend to do when we're listening and how we should change it. The 10 parts of listening is finding an are of interest in the article, judge content not delivery, hold your fire, listen for ideas, be flexible, work at listening, resist distractions, exercise your mind, keep your mind open, capitalize on thought speed. Each one of these might seem easy to do, but it is what we're constantly not doing, or not doing enough. It gives good examples of what we're doing wrong, and the correct way of fixing the problem. The article made me think that I do some of these things. There are many distractions that can be found in listening, but it is up to each person to try and fight the temptations so that we can fully comprehend the material being given. It is a good lesson for us to take with us because we all have a problem with listening in one or more form of what the author states.

6 Types of Non-Listening

The six different types of non-listening is pseudolistening which is pretending to listen to somebody, monopolizing when you're dominant over the conversation and not listening to the person who's speaking, selective listening when you only listen to certain parts of a conversation and ignoring all else, defensive listening when you take all comments and think that you're being attacked, ambushing when you listen closely to find something to pick at so that you can attack the speaker with, and literal listening which is listening for literal parts but ignoring the personal communication that the speaker is trying to give. I believe that everyone has these in common in their communication. We aren't perfect, depending on the situation, we've all done this at some point in our life. It's inevitable that we avoid any of these 6 types of non-listening. I think the one that I use the most would be pseudolistening because I have a bad habit of pretending to listen when I'm extremely tired, lost in conversation, or the conversation is boring (I need to stop that). Getting more rest, or pausing somebody and asking them what they're talking about, and try to engage myself more in the conversation would be the ways of stopping, or not do it as much.

American Society

The metaphor about America being a melting pot, actually meant something else to me from my previous course. I thought of it as that we recognize that the United States is land of the many different cultures. Just like a melting pot, we're throwing everything many different ingredients or as in this case, cultures, into the pot, and recognizing them. I've learned to not strip them of their culture, but to embrace it. The metaphor I would suggest would be, to just leave it. From what I learned in my other class, I've learned that America is a free land that has numerous cultures living here. We are recognizing that we have different cultures living with us, and that we're trying to embrace everyone's different culture. What happens in a melting pot anyways, when everything mixes, we eat it and enjoy the different flavors that got blended together while still enjoying the original flavors that was in it. We aren't necessarily wiping out the cultures, we're just mixing it together. I guess some would see that we're wiping them out because we're trying to have them assimilate to our culture. In a way, it's true, but they still retain their own sense of beliefs while learning and recognizing our beliefs and views. I mean, we are living in America, they do need to learn the language and culture, it is almost impossible for them to come here and retain their lifestyle. They're going to need to learn English and some of the our customs in order for us to understand them. Going back to the question, the reason why I think that we don't need to change the metaphor is that we're still retaining our own customs. We're not all becoming "American", people choose to keep their traditions and cultures or they choose to change.