December 12, 2016 - 22:17
Dear Jody,
This semester has been a challenging but interesting one. There were a lot of things I learned, not only about myself, but also about the world around me. Things that I hadn’t expected, and things that I had vaguely wanted to explore. Of course, I don’t think I was entirely prepared for college writing after being told in high school that many college professors believe that high school students are not adequately prepared for college work. In a sense, they were right. The things we worked on during these past couple of weeks were a lot different than anything else I had done before. It was very different from the structured, month long, five paragraph essays that I had been writing for the past four years. We’ve spoken about this before, how different writing every week was. While challenging and frustrating at times, I did end up appreciating it, considering how it helped to develop various skills that I never really used before. To be able to draft up papers so quickly and work within a given deadline is an important skill that I could work on throughout the course. These one week and two week cycles proved to be a challenge, yet also proved to give me the opportunity to develop not only my writing, but drafting and organizing of thoughts.
The course content was different than what I had imagined. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I enrolled in this course. I hadn’t expected such a wide range of literature, a list that went beyond simple ideas of who we are. Instead, I learned that our identity comprised of more than who we were and what we identified with. Rather, we would have to expand to our connection to the rest of the world and our identity is also shaped by the communities we interact with. Not only were we able to learn from the novels and readings assigned to us, I learned a lot just from the people sitting around me. Given our different upbringings and backgrounds, I managed to learn how much of a difference there was from one experience to the next. What I am most grateful for are the varying perspectives that were offered throughout the course and the willingness of those partaking to share their stories and opinions. I feel as if without such an open environment, I would not have been able to absorb as much as I had done especially because I had been learning how to be open to other’s opinions as well as the information offered.
Thus, how I came to understand identity has been severely complicated from what I had thought it to be. When coming into this course, I believed that identity was a concept that we used to label ourselves and didn’t think to complicate it. Often, my focus was placed on issues regarding race seeing how, for me, that was the largest issue at hand. Although I knew of other issues about identity, I didn’t place much personal focus into exploring those causes. However, since taking this course, I have come to the realization that identity is a much more complex concept that is very difficult to simplify as I had done before. When thinking about identity, there is the push and pull from identity and environment, from what we put out and what we take in. Identity is made of labels that we place on ourselves as well as ones we gain from around us. As a fluid concept, identity may be always changing while maintaining the same static aspects that define us.
Of course, at times it was difficult to comprehend all the nuances that came with identity and what it meant. Sometimes, these concepts become so large that they go over my head. Still, by dissecting and taking the time to stop and listen, I could open up and give all things an opportunity to teach me. This course taught me a lot, and thank you for creating this space.
Much love,
dorothy kim