Reflection Blog

I registered for the Lives and Times course, unaware of the fact that it is completely discussion based. Lucky for me, discussion has always been my strong suit. Through the process of asking questions, I was able to make connections with aspects of my everyday life. Listening to the opinions of others and analyzing specific pieces of work as a group broadened my horizons and opened doors to new ways of analysis.

            My personal planner is my life. That being said, I have always been that person who needs a written reminder for everything. This translates into my incessant note taking during classes, although note taking for this class was different. The input from my class mates provoked new ideas that I could expand on in my writing. I found myself putting stars next to the thoughts that inspired me, and often these were the concepts that I blogged about.

Although the style in which my blog posts are written are overall pretty similar, each blog has its own uniqueness to it. I was able to relate much of what we read to my own personal life and compare and contrast many of their elements. I showed this in a few of my blogs. In home is where heart is, I brought up a connection with my home life and Maya Angelou’s perception of ‘home’. It was a fascinating to put into writing the connections I had made with Maya Angelou. I seemed to have made personal connections with this novel especially. I blogged further about my personal life, by analyzing specific people that I have known for a very long time. Through comparing my two best friends in A SIlent Power, I delved deeper into the discovery of how people cope with certain emotions, just as Maya Angelou does.

Not only did I compare my personal life with what we read but I also found relations in other works that I have read over the years. In one of my first blog entries The Assumed Danger Behind Womans Education. What gives?, I compared the idea of education that we had discussed in class to a book that I read my senior year of high school. The thoughts that entered my mind during class triggered this connection and make me consider other works as a way of supporting this broad theme. A later blog, The Yellow Wallpaper, Breaking the Fourth Wall, connected the work we had discussed with a concept that I had read about for a theatre class. The common themes that were present in Lives and Times and other classes I had taken were astounding.

Through this comparison process, I found myself asking questions that didn’t always have a direct answer. Often, I built my blog entries around a specific thought provoking question that had either been touched on in class or was something I formed because of a recent discussion. In The Coming Of... What Age?, I expanded on a single question that had been raised. This caused me to come up with new ways of intellectual thought. On the contrary, Sharing Thoughts was a blog in which I chose to briefly discuss a topic and in turn formed questions that allowed me to delve deeper into that thought process. The questions went hand in hand throughout my personal blogging process and making new discoveries. This makes me wonder, where would I be without asking questions?

The connections that I made and the questions that I asked inspired me to use writing in more areas of my life. I now have a folder in my documents where I pour my thoughts when I need to put them somewhere. This has helped me in understanding situations and further reflecting on them. Although I may not have been able to give my blog as much attention as it deserved, it inspired me to apply new ways of analyzing in my own life. I hope to continue to blog in my spare time. I believe that translating thoughts into writing is a very important skill that has helped me in discovering more about the world around me.