Socratic Seminar Book Report

The socratic seminar during class changed my thoughts vastly as it progressed. The multiple bright ideas spread throughout the entirety of the seminar created many opportunities to reflect upon the ideas I had going into the seminar. Many of the ideas revolved around the themes of destiny and the idea of Maktub. Overall, the seminar certainly contained a lot of material to build off of. A theme that was discussed repeatedly through the seminar was destiny. Nikol explained that destiny drove Santiago to travel all the way to Egypt and then all the way back home at the end of the book. On many pages of the book, the term, “Personal legend” appears; this refers to, “What you always have wanted to accomplish” (23). The only difference between a personal legend and destiny is that someone must desire to accomplish a personal legend. Once passion and desire exists, your personal legend becomes your destiny, a key lesson within the book. Ben brought up how the book in its entirety compares to the story of each and every teenage child growing up and moving to college or starting life in the real world after graduating. Santiago’s journey into wisdom and
Only one comes to memory for the full length of the seminar, Tanner asked, “which other important character of the King, Alchemist, or Gypsy was most important to the plot?”. Tanner provoked a lot of different perspectives and creative arguments for others to make their case as to why their choice was more important. Tanners question was the only one that really made the rest of us think; I believe that if more of us asked more of the questions that we were proud of, that more conflicting ideas would have emerged and there would have been more room for discussion of important topics. With all the positive aspects of the seminar, the only downside of the seminar was the lack of student oriented