In my showcase writing project, I got my first draft back from my peers and Elisha. I realized I had a lot of work in front of me. The prompt for the showcase writing project was Please write a 1,250 – 1,500 word essay arguing your opinion for what the ideal relationship between art and science looks like inside your projected career path or current discipline. Focus your opinion on the relationship you feel that your discipline of interest should maintain with the arts. I had addressed the ideal relationship between science and art but I failed to properly and adequately address how it would look inside my projected career path. On page two of my returned First Draft, Elisha commented: “what is pharmaceutical science?”. I went a whole page without addressing half of the prompt. My peers also gave me the same feedback that I didn’t sufficiently talk about my projected career path. I had all the facts and evidence I needed, I just needed to take the big global edits my professor and peers told me and apply them to my paper to better fit the prompt. I sat down to edit my paper and I struggled. I thought I was going to have to re-write the whole essay. Instead, I took what I had and took what my peers and what Elisha gave me and applied it to my paper. I knew that they were only trying to make final draft better. In order to address my projected career path, I took my second paragraph and edited it so it included more about pharmacy in general and how the incorporation of art can benefit the career.
2nd Paragraph of First Draft:
As we grow-up and move throughout the grades, we develop and learn new skill sets. Arts and science should be incorporated together in education because of the skills and assets that it teaches. When art and science are taught together hand in hand, it allows for the student to think in different ways and be creative and innovative. “The values behind arts integration — collaboration, flexible thinking, and disciplined imagination– lead to the capacity to be innovative (Ma)”. Innovation leads to new ideas and thought processes that help us understand and develop new scientific ideas and insights. “By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress (Lehrer)”. By incorporating arts and science together in education, it will begin to associate scientific reasoning and development with the values behind the arts. When we start incorporating the two fields together when we are younger, the ideas and concepts will already be linked as we move into higher education and our careers.
2nd Paragraph of Final Draft:
As we grow-up and move throughout the grades, we develop and learn new skill sets that we are taught to build on. In middle school, we learn the basic scientific process and then we build on the basics as we go through high school and then on to college and then our careers. If we incorporate the arts into education at a young age, it will blend the art into science keeping the two together throughout our educational and professional lives. Art to some may just be seen as painting or coloring. Art can be painting and coloring, but the skills that come with it are far more than just that. “The values behind arts integration — collaboration, flexible thinking, and disciplined imagination– lead to the capacity to be innovative (Ma)”. Art lets us be creative and lets us think out of the box. Innovation leads to new ideas and thought processes that help us understand and develop new scientific ideas and insights. Jonah Lehrer, author of “The Future of Science… Is Art?” writes that art pushes science to be more than just the facts, art pushes science to be more than what we already know. Lehrer says without art, science struggles to make breakthroughs or revolutionary changes since the creativity level isn’t there. “By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress (Lehrer)”. By incorporating arts and science together in education, it will begin to associate scientific process with the values behind the arts. Linking art and science will help in the field of pharmacy to help better conceptualize things like the interactions of the drugs in the body, the chemical make-up of the drugs we are compounding, and will help us push beyond what we already know about the world of pharmaceutics to gain more insight to help more people. Art helps us learn the composition and shape of the molecules. When we construct the compositions and shapes of the molecules, they become 3-Dimensional, which is how they are in real life. It shows us a better representation of the molecules so we can better understand how they will interact with other molecules and how they are made. If we already have been taught the scientific process with the arts incorporated into it, the conceptualization piece of pharmacy will be easier to do later in our education and our careers.
At first I found the task of incorporating pharmacy daunting and impossible, but if you just go paragraph by paragraph and use the recursive writing process, making global edits isn’t that bad. To add facts about pharmacy, I went back to my outline and I connected the quotes and main ideas I picked out to pharmacy skills and traits so I could incorporate them into my draft. Then I edited it all over again, and I redid this process until the paragraph was to my liking and the whole essay was ready to be turned in.
