emotional intelligence

I found the passage about emotional intelligence to be particularly compelling. Society places a significant amount of emphasis on measurable forms of intelligence in its educational institutions and on a personal level. We seem to be inundated with the importance of SATs, ACTs, LSATs, and MCATs while other important forms of education are placed on the backburner. Indeed, all of the decisions that we make in life are "determined by both," "it is not just IQ, but emotional intelligence that matters" (334). It seems that all of our actions are determined by our understandings of emotions. It is worth noting the "power of emotions to disrupt thinking itself" (333) which means that we should have a type of focus on emotional intelligence so thinking is disrupted in ways that are good instead of bad. I also felt like the author's attempts to eliminate the dichotomy between reason and emotion was also useful. Creating a paradigm that "harmonize[s] head and heart" has the benefit of taking all perspectives about a matter into account (335). I think that it would be useful for individuals in society as a whole to move past previous understandings of giving preference to reason over emotion and instead to take both aspects in account equally.

standardized testing

Compassion fatigue is a phenomenon where indifference is developed "towards the suffering of others" as a result of being surrounded by too many depictions to such suffering (347). Many cultural theorists have found compassion fatigue to be particularly problematic as humanitarian groups attempt to raise funds to donate towards impoverished people who are suffering. However, I think that this approach to humanitarianism is somewhat nihilistic. If we are constantly afraid of pushing humans' compassion to the fringe, then it seems that the battle has already been lost. The valid concern of compassion fatigue hindering the ability for people to donate moneys to humanitarian foundations is somewhat resolved by later passages about sympathy. Literature distinguishes sympathy from compassion as the attempt to develop an "imaginative understanding of the nature of others" and the "power of putting ourselves in their place" (350). The problem of compassion fatigue should not be read as a call to reject humanitarianism, but instead should push us to understand deeper forms of emotional intelligence and create a personal ethics that is founded upon this new belief. Compassion fatigue seems pretty impossible in a world where one engages in the type of sympathetic approach that the liteature suggests.

images such as these create compassion fatigue