Assignment 5c Humanities Wrap Up

What difference did you notice in your choice of topics in the first part of the class versus the topics found in the texts My California and Train Go Sorry?

One of the things that I found different between the first part of the class and the part of the class where we were reading is that there was a difference in what I concentrated on. I noticed that in the first part of the class that I looked more at the surface. As we moved through the class, having been exposed to my classmates’ ways of viewing things, I think that my perception became more finely tuned and sensitive to detail. When I read the stories from My California, that I had a little bit of background about the subject matter because of the work leading up to it, so I was able to concentrate on more details and I was able to pick up on more subtle nuance. When we read Train Go Sorry, we had done a lot of talking about cultures and how different people see things and that in itself made the reading of Train Go Sorry much more indepth. We had already had exercises where we got to get inside the minds of our classmates, so reading Train Go Sorry was like getting inside the minds of kids in the Deaf Community. The assignments I did at the beginning of the class were more like activities in aquiring knowledge and facts, where the reading assignments were more like exercises in understanding.

2. What difference did you notice when you read your classmates work regarding the same topics versus your own opinions? Did their works make you think of something different?

I noticed with my classmates that even if we looked at exactly the same thing, that we would pick up different things from our assignments. For example, for assignment 4c, I referenced Katie Swang’s assignment. For our large cities topics, we both wrote about San Francisco and Los Angeles. Toward the end of the assignment, I wrote that I felt that Katie had seen the cities with a more artistic eye. I noticed that many times my classmates’ work did make me thing of the topics we were discussing differently. I found that many of my classmates, while they may have read the same or similar material, always noticed a detail that I had missed or perceived the material in a different way than I would have.

How would Freire and the idea of dialogue and scaffolding play into your answers?

When we first did our Freire assignment, I was a bit skeptical. I feel most comfortable in traditional learning settings. They’re what I’ve grown up with and I work well within those parameters. Honestly, I didn’t think it would be productive to have a dialog with the students because the teacher is the one with all the knowledge. That said, after having done the class, I found that it would be a huge mistake if we really want to learn the true essence of something, to have just one person give his or her opinion about something and then everyone else memorize that one person’s perception. I really have never thought of it that way. I always figured that teachers assigned group projects so that we wouldn’t lose interest in our subject matter, but in reality there are things that different sets of eyes see that I may not. Teachers really are there to be our guides to open up the discussion and provide us with ways to get the literature and other materials needed so that we each can provide a new topic and each and everyone one of us can add little bits and pieces to the larger picture and we all end up with a much broader, more encompassing understanding than if we were just taught to. This is what happened here. I learned as much, if not more from my classmates than I did just doing the research on my own. Reading how my classmates responded to the assignments also altered how I went forward and looked at the assignments.

4. What was your overall experience with these topics?

Sometimes I felt like I wouldn’t be interested in the topics. I really had no interest in learning about, say, Bakersfield, but the thing that I found was that the reason I had this attitude was because I had preconceived notions about the topics or I had never heard of them at all and had no interest in finding out about them. What was really great about this class, was finding out about things that I never would have Wiki’d or Googled on my own. I found out that a lot of my ignorance is due to the fact that I simply haven’t been exposed to the perceptions of others. What I mean by this is that in our first assignments, we got to pick whatever topics we wanted to write about. When looking at what my classmates wrote about, there was a huge variation of topics. Everyone had something completely different to bring to the table. It was a really great experience to learn about how closed minded I am because I feel that that has been a hinderance and I don't really have the ability to fully understand other people. This was an invaluble lesson to learn especially when it comes to social issues and politics.