Complicated Conversation...

So, the title of this week was "Anti-Intellectualism and Complicated Conversation," and to be completely honest I feel like I have stayed in the state of "complicated conversation." There were so many different topics that were touched on...the privatization and feminization of education and their negative effects; education becoming a business model and being destroyed because of that; teachers who start out committed, yet end up losing their focus; the somewhat negative idea of teachers starting families; the difficult implications of teaching morals to students; and the societal shift of seeing intellectuals more negatively as eccentric. Usually, I leave class feeling inspired to do something or change something in my actual classroom on a daily level, but this week I left feeling a little directionless. The issues discussed were so big and over-arching, and sometimes I question my ability as one single teacher to truly change anything in a monumental sense. I know that all of the things that we discussed are extremely important to discuss, but I felt that some of the discussion was a little more negatively focused than usual. To be completely honest, I believe that some issues were overly generalized, which led me to remove myself a bit from the conversation because I do not deal well with confrontation.
As I reflect, while I do not have some great revelation this week that will change the way I teach forever, I do feel that I have gained a greater understanding of myself as a student. I have to be willing to stand up and speak my mind and disagree in a respectful, forthright manner. If I cannot become comfortable to do that myself as a student, then how can I expect to cultivate that as a teacher in my own students?
I am still processing my thoughts from this past week, so this reflection may not be as rich or refined or complete as I would like it to be, but that is where I currently am, and I cannot become good at reflection unless I am honest about where I am in the process...