Final Reflection Blog

TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING

One of the most important things I learned from this class is the idea of social construction and its impact on my everyday life. For the longest time, I avoid doing house chores when my mom asks me to. I didn't think it was fair that I have to do house chores because I am a girl while my brother doesn't have to do anything. As a girl, I tried so hard to not fit into the traditional stereotype of a woman. I know that there are gender values that I'm raised with through the teachings of my family and social media. Through this class, I was able to further see how deeply integrated these values are entrenched in our everyday life. It's important to learn this because I'm able to see where my beliefs originated from and whether or not I should be holding my beliefs based on social opinions. I'm glad I took this class because I will now be able to take what I see through social media with a grain of salt. I always based my beliefs on what I see around me. However, just because I see it on social media doesn't mean that it's the right thing. For instance, back then people created Snow White as a character with the main priority of finding a husband and being his housewife. Over time, people see that this is not the right value to set because it's restricting a woman's ability to achieve bigger things in life.

Another thing I learned from this class is researching secondary sources to further expand my idea about the topic I'm talking about. It's important to look at other sources see other's perspectives of the topic. This will allow me to have a wider knowledge of the topic. With Disney, there are so many subtle gender values that the audience can easily miss. When we look at secondary sources we will see an analysis of many other scenes from the movie that we didn't think about. Not only that I learned to integrate these sources into my writing to further support my argument. Back then I didn't see a point in looking at secondary sources to incorporate into my writing. However, secondary sources contain many statistics that can further elaborate on in our essay. Having this skill will be beneficial for my future classes with all the new topics that I will learn about.

TWO PROBLEMS AND A PLAN FOR THE FUTURE

One of the problems I have is going back to the discussion posts to leave a peer review. With all of my previous courses, all we needed to do was finish an assignment. If we want to look back at the assignment, it's just to read the comments from the teachers or see the grade for the assignment. This writing course forces us to go back to our discussion posts and leave peer reviews on our classmate's posts. It was hard for me to go back to the assignment and leave a comment because my mindset is that I'm done after I post a response to the prompt. By going back to an assignment to leave a review, it is forcing me to continuously build upon what I found. All the assignments we did throughout the quarter are the stepping stones to the final essay. Forces me to not forget what I learned and to continuously refresh my memory and build upon the knowledge I have. I learned that I need to change my mindset and see that I shouldn't throw away what I learn as soon as the class/ assignment is over.

Another problem that I have is that I tend to procrastinate on certain assignments. It's very difficult to do annotation on a movie that's hours long when I would wait until the last minute to do my assignments. With procrastination, I wasn't able to get more analysis out of the movies that I'm annotating. If I did my assignments at an earlier time then I would be able to carefully analyze each scene and put more thought into how the characters are teaching gender values. I think it's important to have a lot of time analyzing because Disney teaches gender values through many subtle hints. Due to this, if the audience is not paying attention to the details then they would miss it the same way I did before I took this class. To continue working on this problem, I will write down the time my assignments are due and try to work on it before the due date.