December 17, 2015 - 17:57
Final reflection
I chose this class because I was attracted by the words “identity” and “story”. When I was in a train station full of people in Japan, I often thought about how each person goes through their lives and has happy times, sad times, exciting times, and difficult times. Those experiences are always tied to someone else, so people are entangled with each other. That is a really interesting aspect of human beings.
As for the environment, I had the idea of oneness from the start. The earth is more tough, durable, and magnificent than humans, therefore I always felt awkward when they say save the earth. People have to save the environment for ourselves to keep on living on the planet. We live in the great earth, and we are never separated from it. I guess my idea itself did not change so much throughout the class, but thanks to Jody I think I improved the skill of conveying my idea logically. The individual conferences especially helped me a lot since I was motivated and encouraged when she understood my opinion. She got the idea, and also always suggested different approaches to progress my writings.
In the class, we had variety of ideas and we enjoyed it. Personally, I have not experienced any racial discrimination nor gender discrimination throughout my life, thus it was difficult to understand what is happening in the US. I didn’t like to talk about those problems since I believed that if we behave like the situation is ok, the problem would disappear. Also, I assumed the media was just exaggerating the issues and having a bad influence on people. However, after the “Community Day” incident, I realized that there is hidden discrimination and stifled opinions in the place I live now. I was surprised because I had thought Bryn Mawr College is one of the safest places. The surface cannot tell everything. I realized the importance of talking about the issue to keep on improving the environment.
As the title of our class says “Changing Our Story”, the environment is changing and the identity is also being changed by the environment. It sounds normal, but it is really interesting to reflect on our environments and identities.