For the first unit of Language Arts, we explored the connection and difference between power and leadership by reading novel and biography as well as watching movies. I discovered my own path of the understanding of power and leadership through the process of doing assessment task and writing the essay. Before this unit, I know that power and leadership cannot be separated; power can be used well only with good leadership. And leader always leads and influences the group.

However, when I finished reading the novel The Wave, I realized that leader could also be influenced by the power of the group. So for the assessment task, I decided to do a PowerPoint to demonstrate the relation between the leader and the power of the group. But as I was doing it, I found myself fell into a strange circle: groups influence individuals, the leader influences the group, but the leader is also an individual. It became confused and hard to explain clearly, so I communicated with Mrs. Taynton about this. She said I didn’t need a result; I just needed what I found. So I grab a paper and wrote down what I have already had, by doing this, my conclusion was groups influence individuals, the leader influences the group, the leader is also an individual, so the groups can also influence the leader. To my surprise, it was a successful assessment task though it was my first time doing it.

For essay writing, since it was the first time for me to write a Language Arts essay, deciding thesis statement became my first challenge. After reviewing my notes, I got different perspectives on power of groups, but it was hard for me to combine them into one thesis statement, so I chose one of them as my thesis statement at last: People are attracted by the power of groups because everyone has an aspect of evil within them. This was a difficult thesis statement because it’s not easy to prove everyone has an aspect of evil within him or her. So at last I wrote about even if not everyone has an aspect of evil within him or her, people all have potential to do harm. I wrote about the situations in The Wave and Lord of the Flies to prove my idea. It was a challenge to write my first essay, but I learned a lot through the process, essay is an analyze article, it needs to be very compact, everything in essay is for proving thesis statement. I also learned about how to do work cited. It’s a very important skill for essay writing.

All in all, through this unit, I experienced many first times and learned a lot through the process of doing them. I also have clearer and deeper thoughts about power and leadership through finding my own path and researching. I enjoyed this unit a lot and I am also looking forward to next unit.

How did I come up with my research question?

For the couple of past weeks, we have been working on power and leadership. I did a presentation about power of groups and individual and it was successful, so for essay research question, I decided to keep working on power of groups. First I made a table to review my notes on The Wave, Winston Churchill, The power of One and Lord of the flies. I divided the notes into three parts: individual, group, and both and tried to find relation between them. There are my five conclusions according to the notes:

1. The power of one can start a group to become the power of group, once it become the power of group, it will bond together as the power of one again.
2. Distinguishing levels of power and threat and seeing clearly through the things make a person not be caught into a group and then not be able to get out of it.
3. Once a group of people has the same thought and the same aim, they become power of one.
4. People are attracted by the power of the group because everyone has an aspect of evil within them.
5. Although the leader is a person who has power in a group, once the leader is caught into it and loses ability to think and judge, the leader will be swamped by the power of the group.

I found it difficult to mix them together to get one conclusion because they are completely different aspects about power and leadership. After considering and talking with Mrs. Taynton, I decided to use the fourth one as my thesis statement: People are attracted by the power of the group because everyone has an aspect of evil within them. Although it’s a very strong thesis statement and it’s arguable, it’s hard to explain people all have an aspect of evil. So in my outline, I use one paragraph to talk about even if not all the people have aspect of evil, they all have potential to do harm.

Last week, we finished our presentation for Language Arts on power and leadership. I learned a lot through the process doing my project, I also learned a lot from others’ presentation.

Jay’s presentation was about power of students. The power of students may be more powerful than the power of a leader. Because the power of every single student is small and you can hardly notice that so you will think it won’t make any influence. But if a hundred of students or a thousand of students getting together, the strength will be unbelievable. It makes some relations with my topic: How does the power of group influence the leader? Normally is the leader leads the group, but if the whole group wants to change something, then the group will influence the leader easily. The reason why the leader can lead a group is the leader is doing something follow the group’s thoughts.

In Taewoong’s presentation, he demonstrated his understanding of the difference between power and leadership— the use of the power.

As a leader, the ways you use the power decide whether your group will follow you or not. So it’s important to a leader to use the power correctly.

Jan’s presentation tell us the inequality of the society, which gives the reason why the students in Jay’s presentation want to start a revolution and it also gives the reason why people notice the power of students hardly. Most people think only the upper class of society can decide the way of society to go, but instead of that the power of small people combine together, it will make a greater influence that individual leader.

All in all, I enjoyed doing my project and reading and listening others’ presentations. And I also leant a lot from others.

For the past few weeks, we were learning about power and leadership. I choose to read the novel The Wave and the biography about Churchill. As I read The Wave, I found an interesting fact. At first the leader started the group and influenced the group, as the group get bigger and the group began to influence the leader, the leader knew it should be stopped but he didn’t because he kind of enjoyed the feeling of being that position. According of that I formulated my research question: “ Will the leader be influenced by the power of groups?” I made a power point and did a presentation to demonstrate my understanding of that. While I was making my power point, I found myself getting into a strange circle, when I was trying to demonstrate how does the power of group influence the leader, I found that its reason is kind of the same as why we follow, we are following as individual, but leader is individual, too, individual can be influenced by the group easily. So I talked about this with Mrs. Taynton, She said I don’t need to have a result, what I need to do is showing the process of thinking. So I made the conclusion using The Wave and Nazi that the leader started The Wave but didn’t control it well, instead of that he was influenced by the group, so it caused disaster, Hitler led and influenced the group but no one in the group was trying to influence him because they didn’t think about what they were doing, that caused disaster, too. But if the group of Nazi think independently and judge what they were doing and try to influence the leader, the disaster maybe can be prevented. Generally I think I did a good job, but the logic of the structure of the power point can be stronger, the cause and result can be more obvious. During doing this, I found it important to keep you main topic in your mind all the time so that you won’t go away from the topic so far and it can also keep your logic clear all the time. And when I was doing presentation, I also have something need to be improved, first of all, I don’t have enough vocabularies to demonstrate my ideas effectively and I was a little bit nervous that I forgot to talk about something I prepared. I need to work on it next time.