Reflection: My goals of the beginning of the semester were ultimately for me to grow as a writer as I was leaving American History class in first semester, and going into English. I worked to meet these goals by improving my writing in both projects (see English projects) constantly, especially in the imaginative nonfiction piece. I want to work on developing those skills more, and I'm most excited for seeing what lies ahead in the rest of my creative writing career. (I'd be happy to have a book published ASAP!!)
We started the second semester of English by talking about stereotypes and different kinds of lenses to look through when thinking about different kinds of people. These lenses included Critical Race Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postcolonialism, Queer Theory, Feminism, and Reader Response. Critical Race Theory is about the effects of race and racial identities in society, psychoanalysis is using the basics of psychology to analyze characters, post-colonialism is the evaluation of colonies and colonizers, queer theory is the study of gender and sexuality, feminism is the lens of the dynamics between females and males in the story, and reader response is a response to the text that relates to the reader's personal experiences.
We made pictures of our faces with words both negative and positive that have been used to describe us along with mantras. Mine was "I am not other's opinions of me." In class, we also did multiple readings and annotations followed by a Socratic Seminar. The authors of the articles we read were by James Baldwin and Gloria Anzaldua. James Baldwin wrote about the stereotypes and what living in the U.S. is like for black citizens, Gloria Anzaldua did the same thing about Latino immigrants. We also watched a Ted Talk about a writer from Nigeria named Chimamanda Adichie., she talked about how Western culture had African culture all wrong when it came to how they were portrayed in the media. After listening to her stories we listened to other people's stories on how they view or handled their own race or racial stereotypes. For example, black and white citizens and cops talked about their opinions and outlooks on police brutality.
Our fourth quarter of the school year, we continued in English but directed our learning to the American Justice System. We watched a documentary called 13th on Netflix about the corruption in our judicial system. We talked about private practice prisons, like CHP, and how the black to white ratio when it comes to incarceration affects many things politically and socially. The documentary also talked about laws that allowed mass incarceration and how Obama released the most prisoners in U.S. presidential history, and still it didn't make as drastic of an improvement as he hoped.
We listened to a podcast called "Serial" about the murder of a girl named Hae; the prime suspect being her ex-boyfriend Adnan. We had discussions on it in class, acted as the "jury" and voted after each episode whether or not we felt he was guilty. The podcast was long, but walked you through each piece of evidence and information. Adnan is arrested, however, the listener is questioning all along if there was enough evidence to make the case that he was guilty.
I enjoyed the second half of the semester more due to the American Justice System aspect since I want a career in law. I found the 13th documentary extremely interesting and it was one of my favorite lessons the whole semester.