Reflection on Winter Quarter
Thinking back on Winter Quarter of Humanities, as a writer, I feel as though I’ve only improved by a little bit. I learned more about how to use sources, and, whether it be primary or secondary, the class has built upon my previous understanding on how to use these sources. Despite that improvement, I don’t feel like I have improved on my vocabulary or writing style. Personally, I resort to simple words that I typically encounter often and I think my writing style does not flow together nicely and seems amateurish. While I don’t think I improved greatly in writing, I think I have become better at thinking, more so in thinking about what I am seeing, rather than numbly watching. In my free time, I usually watch a lot of anime or play video games. With the Winter Quarter, I have begun to look more closely at the stories and the elements that these media types possess. It’s not in depth analysis of these medias, but because of the Humanities class, I begun to see what common themes or storytelling elements that correlate between the things I see.
I think that most of the improvements come from The Tempest portion of the Quarter. It’s easy for me to understand why, since that unit was the most interesting to me. While the Inca unit was fascinating, I’m not a huge fan of history, and the most memorable part of that unit was the excursion to the Getty Center. I recently went to a few museums during the summer and I realized that I liked to wander around them. During two months, I went to different places in Europe (London Natural History Museum, Louvre) and got to see different places to wander around (although since my cousins lived in New York, they were used to walking eleven miles a day, unlike me) and in New York, got to go to one of Brooklyn’s science museums. Although in each I ended up discouraged by the amount of people that packed the areas, I enjoyed the moments where I could walk around when we went early. The Getty Center adds to my list of enjoyable places to walk around, despite not being able to see most of the Center. Because I haven’t seen most Getty Center, I most likely will have to return and experience the rest of the Center. The Tempest was the most interesting to me because I haven’t read a lot of Shakespeare. In my high school classes, I only remember reading Romeo and Juliet repeatedly and briefly reading Antigone. The more I think about it, the less I know why I found it very interesting. I think the highest possibility is that it seemed the most creatively inspiring. Although I couldn’t participate in The Tempest competition because I fell behind on my schoolwork, I liked the ideas that could come to mind and the comparisons to other texts were fun too. Finally, we finished with a unit on India. I was not that interested in the unit, although I found analyzing Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj interesting. I was tired as I still struggled to catch up with my work, and it is toward the end of the quarter, but I thought that, while analyzing one chapter of the Hind Swaraj for an assignment, it was enjoyable to decipher his argument.
While browsing Reddit, I accidentally found out about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It’s also known as the Frequency Illusion or Recency Illusion, where upon seeing something once causes you to see it everywhere, although it’s just your brain selectively noticing these objects that you just experienced. Once I thought about it, I realized that some of the things that I have learned from this quarter my fall under this phenomenon, but I hope that most of the information from this quarter will remain with me, just as the painting of “The Birth Of Venus” did when seeing the scene of Caliban.
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