What have I Learned?

This semester has been very eye opening and I have learned many things i never knew before about cultures and English. One of the many things have learned has been how to margin note. Margin noting is writing down your ideas and other things you are thinking about as your read a story. You can write down emotions of how you felt, questions you have about a part, vocabulary questions, or even just plain out comments on how you feel on what the author is saying. It is also a way to help keep your thoughts organized.

Along with margin notes I learned that discrimination and segregation happens in almost all new colonies and cultures. Segregation has occurred in many of the stories we have read in class or movies we have watched. In Rabbit Proof Fence the Aboriginal people were segregated against and forced to change their cultural ways. In South Africa we learned that the whites turned the black population into slaves and made them live in run down parts of town. Last, even where the two groups of people have lived in the same area there is segregation. In Rwanda the Hutu wanted to get revenge after all of the many years of the Tutsi whipping them and treating them bad. So segregation is not only among blacks and whites, but among all different cultures.

Along with these important things we learned how to find credible sources while looking for information on papers or projects we are doing. Having a credible source is one of the most important things to having a good paper. For instance, when your are writing a persuasive paper, you are trying to change the other person's mind on a certain view point. They might not believe your research though if you get a paper from Bob' Blogs over a credible site like the CNN or the BBC (It is hard to find a good credible site to use so i suggested that Google make an advanced search option that you could choose credible or non credible).

Another important topic I learned about was colonization. What I learned about colonization was, that dominate cultures take over the lesser one's and try to change the natives culture to make it like theirs. There are countless examples of this through out history such as in South Africa. When the Dutch and British came they basically kick the native bushmen out and took over their land. In Australia they tried to breed the Aboriginal out of the people there and make them British citizens. This has even happened in America. When the Americas were colonized the pilgrims acted like friends to the Native Americans at first then later on, they turned on them and forced them onto reservations.

Last but not least, I learned how to wrap my head around the whole story and see the big picture not just the obvious. In class we described this as a ice berg. A story is like an ice berg, you may only see the outer part of the ice berg, but there is much much more to it under water. Likewise in stories there is the obvious that you can understand, but there is also a bigger picture and hidden meanings. Like in the story The Man in the Well, there is the obvious that a man fell into the well, but there is also more to it than that. It goes deeper into the story and can sometimes even have a more religious or spiritual meaning. This semester was very eye opening and I learned many new and useful things and tactics that I can use in the future for projects, papers, and just reading stories.