Reflection letter

As we near the end of the quarter we are asked to reflect upon what changes and growth we have experienced so far this year.  I guess that each student will have gotten something different out of the class.  I had hoped for, or at least anticipated, an eye opening experience that challenged my assumptions.  But for the most part I missed that.  I have to say that I am a little disappointed coming to the end of class.  Perhaps it was due to the nature of the online community the course is taught in.   For whatever reason I feel that I haven't experienced any changes or growth... nothing that I have noticed anyway.

Maybe a little explanation about myself will explain why I haven’t felt any real growth in this course.  I grew up in the area but moved away shortly after high school.  I spent a year on the east coast, which was where I picked up some sort of weird traveling bug.  After that I moved to Alaska where I lived in a Native American fishing village for several years.  I am not a Native American and I found that this was an eye opening experience in diversity for me.  I became familiar with their customs and practices.  From there I moved to Florida, then to Colombia (the country not the district of which is spelt Columbia).  Again I found myself the minority and I learned a lot about the differences in our culture (and the similarities).

After that I became a bit more nomadic and bounced around a lot from place to place.  These places included but are not limited to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Great Brittan.  That took up another year or two of my life.  I tell you this because I think it shows that maybe, I have experienced diversity to the point of nausea.  I found that most of the assumptions about diversity that the reading tried to break down were not assumptions that I shared.

I would like to say that I have grown as a person because of this course, if anything it would make this assignment easier.  I feel that any statements to that effect would be disingenuous.    

I think that the biggest challenge that I had in the course was trying to manage my time appropriately.  I know that my writing suffered as a result of my inability to devote time to the assignments.  I think that I would have done better at the course, if I did not have so many demands on my schedule this quarter.  But, emergencies happen and work is work.  I think that I would have gotten more out of the class if I had more time to devote to the assignments. 

There were parts of the course that I enjoyed make no mistake.  Firoozeh Dumas’ essay “The “F Word” was a nice start to the quarter, and as I had already read her book “Funny in Farsi” I felt that it was nice to return to a selected reading from that work.  Also to look at it with a critical eye is always a change.

I also enjoyed watching the movie “Fight Club”; again I had read the book and found that enlightening. In a rare and unexpected surprise I found the movie to be as entertaining as the novel.  There were other readings that I enjoyed as well, but in all I feel like I missed some revelation that I was supposed to find.  Maybe it will come to me at a later time when I look back at this course.

The three different categories of focus for our course were Identity, Community and Tradition.  From within those categories we are supposed to focus on four different writings that highlight our learning.

I have chosen the following works:

Critical Thinking:

Movie Review: Fight Club

Revision:

Blogging and the American Newspaper

Audience and Voice:

The “Museum of Me”

Writer’s Choice:

The “F Word”