Semester Reflection

The biggest thing I learned in the semester was what a thesis statement actually is. I now know that you don't need to put your support in the statement, that's what the following paragraphs a for. Also, I learned that your whole peice you are writing is based on the thesis statement. What I mean by that is, your support has to make sense.

The Paul Rusesabagina letters that we wrote really showed me how hard it is to write for someone else. My first thought was "I can't imagine how he felt during the genocide, so if I can't imagine his point of view, how can I write the letter?" I kind of just thought back to when we watched Hotel Rwanda. I took everything I learned from that movie and tried to make sense of it on paper. The letter probably wasn't even close to his thought or what his words would be if he actually wrote the letter, but it definitley helped me understand what was going on. Also writing the analogy I did in the letter, gave me a good comparison.

I really liked doing the group myth. It was really fun coming up with ideas. I also like the question you gave our group, it was definitley a challenge. I loved coming up with the names of lands we were talking about. Also, developing the characters was a good way for us to think of what a god in a myth would be named.

I loved watching The Power of One. Each day I was so excited to come to class to finish it. It is such a good story. Even though we watched it with very little knowledge of the apartheid, I honestly learned more about apartheid from the movie better than researching and writing an overview about it. After the movie I learned that all of the South African natives were smushed into this small camp. There were people everywhere, you couldn't even see one spot of land! It was interesting to see the hate between the Germans and the British. In the school that P. K. went to when he was younger, he almost got killed for being the only Brtish boy! Also the way the older boys were all for Hitler was crazy. The movie was really sad, but my new favorite!

Q.C.V.Is really help me with understanding the stories we have to read. It's good for me to write down my questions, because I know I will forget them. It's also good because it's a challenge to come up with a good discussion question. Connections give me a better way to understand the story because I compare it to other events in my life. Vocabulary steps up my understaning even better because there are a lot of words that I don't know, and I would be completley lost reading. Writing down important passages is my favorite thing to do, because in the myth Osiris and Isis there sure was a lot of them, like how Isis put the queens baby in the fire thinking that the baby will gain immortality.I'm not so sure how to explain why I think They are important though. I just like them.

I would want to be a native in Rwanda when it is first being colonized.

Even though Rwanda was under the control of another country, they never got their lives taken away. Their was no slavery, and you were a free man. Sure you got discriminated against, and you were considered underclass(assuming I am Hutu) but that is way better than the life of slavery. I also would rather be paid cheap for my hard work. I might be concluding that the Tutsi's attacks to regain power were not very harsh, but I would not mind someone trying to take power because I certainly am not a leader. I don't like the fact that there was so much segregation in Rwanda, but then again it is something you could live with.

I would not want to be a native American because of getting my home taken a way from me. I also would not want to be a subject of war. They also didn't get the rights of the average whit citizen. As for the native Australians, I would not want my culture, and my people to die out by the time my own child has their kids. Even though that is the only thing that happened to the Aborigines, I wouldn't want my descendants to lose the life that I had grown up with. Last, I would not want to be South Africa because I would get kicked out of my home, and cramped into this little refugee camp. Although there were laws that said they were free, they truly had little rights of a free man.