Semester Reflection

This year one thing I have learned was how to prefect a two paragraph response paper. At the beginning of this year I struggled a lot with this concept. I had trouble breaking down two reasons of support and staying on topic. I struggled so much for about the first months getting back low grades on the responses. I kept working at it and finally one day I got it. I now know the concept of writing a paper, using support, transition, Ethos, and Pathos. One of my favorite pieces of work that I did this year was the Paul Letter I wrote. I was able to include all those above qualities in the paper along with a good thesis and I did really well on the paper. “Imagine a child going to school every day, and everyday he gets beat up by the school bully. No one says anything to the bully, no one tries to intervene, and everyone just looks the other way as the boy is beat. That is very similar to the situation we are in now. The people in my hotel are that schoolboy and the Interahamwe the bully, but in this case the bully won’t stop till death. Now you may ask who you are in this situation and right now you are the children standing by and doing nothing to help that poor boy who is enduring so much pain every day. So as the time draws nearer, I ask you do to what you can to help. Maybe it’s not my family you save but the other 1,263 people are just as valuable. Please stand up to the bully and send troops to protect and transport the refugees at my hotel.” As a writer I have come so far this year and I definitely think the two paragraph response papers played a big role in it.

Although I believe that everyone in our class including me thought that margin notes were a huge pain in the rear end, margin noting really helped me to understand things that I read a lot better. When I first started reading articles this year they seemed very complicated and almost impossible to understand. The article involving Dick Cheney or the article about how China will soon be the most dominant country in the world were just a few of the very difficult articles we were expected to understand. In past year I probably would have read it once and given up but that wasn’t an option this year. This year we all were forced to really think about what we were reading and work hard to understand it. Without margin noting I doubt I would have been able to understand any of the articles. With margin notes I was able to break the article down and put it into a prospective I could understand. As I continue reading more difficult pieces of writing I will definitely use margin notes as a way to better understand what I am reading.

One section this year that really had an influence on me was learning about the Rwandan Genocide. I have become so much more knowledgeable on what actually went on in Rwanda. Before I learned about the Rwandan Genocide if someone were to ask me what happened I would answer a bunch of people died. Now if someone were to ask I would be able to go in great detail. I know I can speak for most of us in the class that when we were given the group in which we were supposed to represent we all thought our group had done the right thing. It didn’t matter if you were representing the Red Cross or the Interahamwe the people representing their group felt like their group did the right thing. We all were almost like attorneys trying to prove that our group did nothing but good. My group represented the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Some called them a rebel group who only caused trouble but to this day I believe that without the RPF the genocide wouldn’t have ended till every last Tutsi and moderate Hutu was murdered. This project also opened to my eyes to how many different viewpoints could be drawn from this event and how putting the blame on one group of people would be too hard. In the end every single group played a part in the tragedy of the Rwandan Genocide whether they will admit it or not.

Another thing I learned was about a story having more than what it is just explaining on the surface. Learning that some stories have a deeper meaning that what is actually just written. We were given the analogy to the glacier when comparing it to this type of story. What you see of the glacier on the surface is maybe just the tip of it. Under the surface there is so much more of the glacier you can see. This was like the story The Man in the Well. At the surface it seemed as if we were just reading about the man in the well. About after hearing it and reading it numerous times I found a deeper meaning. I now am always trying to look for a deeper meaning in something. It has opened my eyes to the fact that a story can say something but it means something way more meaningful.

The Power of One was one of my favorite movies I watched this year. Not only the fact that one of my classmates starred in it as a great actor but the fact that it was so realistic to the things that went on in South Africa during apartheid. It chronicled the life of PK and how much struggle he went through being a British kid often surrounded by Afrikaners who showed hatred toward him. One scene that will forever be etched into my brain is the scene in which PK is actually being urinated on by the Afrikaner boys. It really paints the picture of how the Afrikaners thought of the British. Another group in which the Afrikaners discriminated against was the native South Africans. The movie clearly displays what was thought of the Afrikaners and how very little land they were actually given to live on. This movie really inspired me because PK was able to do so much and preserved even though it seemed like he lost everyone close to him. He continued on in life and made a difference. It was an amazing movie.