Reflection Paper

I choose to do my local history project on Dowagiac, Michigan which is a part of Cass County. I visited Dowagiac History Museum that has three floors to venture in and 6,000 square feet of exhibits of Dowagiac, Cass County, and Sister Lakes. The price was free admission, and I got lost in history for well over an hour. I learned a great deal about the geography, the original settlers, economic factors, religion, ethnicity, and other interesting facts. I did conduct additional information online research along with the information I received from Dowagiac History Museum.

For the Honors World History midterm project the class was put into groups and we were to make a poster with information about one topic from the first semester. We started with three topics and then picked which idea would be best to transfer to a poster. My group started with the three categories, people, revolutions and countries. We chose countries for our poster. Even though this project was very intimidating and stressful at first, I ended up enjoying it because we worked with other classmates which allowed for more creativity as well as a more complete poster since more people worked on it.

The best piece of work that I did in this class is the beautiful poster project for the first term of U.S history. My poster was on the American revolution. The poster had stuff on the conflict between the Colonists and the British, the acts like the sugar act and the stamp act, highlights of the revolution like the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence, and the end results of the war. Also it had 3 pictures on the bottom to describe what I'm talking about.

Over the years, writing has been my safe place. It has been a security blanket of sorts; an outlet that I can use knowing I will not receive criticism in the same was I do when I speak. Although my writing experience has not consisted of much, I have been able to grow steadily and learn how to engage with an audience. I can identify my strengths, take advantage of them, and work on the areas I find to be the weakest. It has fueled my passion for world change, even though I am still unaware of how it will tie in with my future career path. Writing has given me a voice that I do not have the courage to speak from my mouth.

Ever since I can remember I have talked Spanish and English at home. My mom would say “porfavor” my dad would “please”, and once my sister and I were old enough to communicate, we say both “porfavor” and “please. It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that I began to struggle more with the Spanish language. I had taken Spanish 1-2, which were levels 1 and 2 for Spanish speakers, but now I was taking Spanish 3-4. At first, I believed the class would be an easy A, yet as the year flowed, I realized it would not be as easy as a walk in the park. Due to my dedicated teachers, help from my parents, and assistance from friends, I became successful in the class I believed would be a breeze.

I visualized the entire process in my head: the light coming from the sun, getting trapped as heat because of greenhouse gases instead of leaving the earth and thus heating it. I started to raise my hand to answer the question and got about halfway before it happened. My hands started trembling. My throat dried up and my voice decided to take a vacation off to who-knows-where. I wanted to keep going, but the anxiety wouldn’t let me. Defeated, I put my hand down and let someone else answer the question. I had major speech anxiety.

Writing used to be a challenge to me. Trying to juggle the many nuances of writing such as ideas, organization, diction, and style was always a difficult process and finding a method of effectively handling this issue was a blessing to me as a writer. Writing became a formulaic thing to me. Whenever I was assigned an essay, ideas flow through my mind and I already begin to formulate what I want to do and how I want to organize those ideas. Being able to apply that formulaic mindset of intro, thesis with 3 main ideas, 3 body paragraphs filled with evidence and details to support the aforementioned main ideas, and a conclusion always seemed to give me a solid guideline. From there I would simply fill in the blanks with my information and as a result, the skeleton of my paper was made. My experience in an AP English Literature class during my senior year helped me write more effectively, find the perfect setup for different types of papers, and overall solidify my strength as a writer. Over the course of that class I learned how to be concise and direct with my words, organize the ideas of my paper to flow smoothly, and how to adapt to different styles of writing whether it be personal, academic, or a blend of both.

There have been plenty of times where I found myself asking if what I was doing was truly worth it. I have always been one to struggle with getting things done, because I have this mindset of questioning certain things I do. Why am I in college? Why do I put myself through stress and torture to get good grades when I could just be mediocre? Oh right, I will not give up until I get to where I want to be. Even though it is going to take a lot of time and effort, the thing motivating me the most is knowing that once I walk across that stage to receive my diploma that sense of accomplishment is the ultimate prize. I set extreme goals for myself because I am a very competitive person; sometimes too extreme. I have to build up a lot of will-power to get some of things done. It is all really in my head though. Some tasks take more will power and effort than others, but the feeling of doing it myself is so empowering. Now whenever I take on new tasks, I just keep in mind that even though it may take a while for me to accomplish, when I do finally finish it all on my own there is no greater feeling.

I remember in the year of 2016-2017 attending a school in California. After spending most of my time in the Northeast and Midwest, it was amazing experiencing weather that was above forty degrees year-round. In the month of April, in the nighttime, on my bed, I prayed, “Lord what should I do when I get back home to New York?” It was in the middle of the night, in a dream, I heard the words “Don’t forget about my daughters.” When I woke up, I immediately knew my journey with God began, by going after His lost sons and daughters. I felt God spark a dream inside of me to see lost sons and daughters come back to the heart of the Father. After leaving California mid-May, I traveled back home to New York and stayed at my parent’s house and several weeks later had a meeting with home church pastor.

I have always had an interest in the history of the world and the different cultures that have developed. History was a fascinating subject it lets you look into the past, but it will also give you a glimpse of the future if you pay attention. So I went and took all the history classes that I could at Crafton. The religious classes in the beginning were just to fulfill the prerequisite to transfer, then it became if you take these two more classes you will get a degree in it, then it became my major when I decided to transfer.

In 1994, my parents immigrated to Canada from Vietnam to seek better living conditions and a promising future for their soon-to-be children. However, to live in a free nation filled with opportunities, the two left everything behind. While living in rent, my father worked full-time at a factory while my mother had found a job as a cashier. Although they had a sustainable income, my father understood that raising a child would cost them more than they were currently making. In 1997, my father decided to study computer science at Langara in search for a better-paying job while working part-time as a security guard. Meanwhile, my mother took up housekeeping, working at two different hotels to earn more money for their coming child. Understandably, my parents had made their lives much harder immigrating to Canada, but their sacrifices - I can say - has paid off.

Everyone has at least one point in their educational life that has shaped them into the student or person they are today. For me, coming together after being separated as the “Germantown” and “Farmersville” kids for the first six years of school changed the way I built myself as a student. Becoming friends with new people, having new teachers for every subject, changing up the routine, and actually having to switch classes has taught me a lot of different things.

So First off I wanted to talk about our group presentations and how it made class more exciting and enjoyable for me personally. Watching everyone’s presentations and observing what he or she had to say about their certain topic in the class made me more enlightened or aware about their topic. I believe having to go through these presentations helped me learn a little more than what I already knew. The presentations made me have a deeper learning experience than just the tip of the iceberg. It made me have better understanding of concepts.

From the early moments of my childhood, I remember seeing my parents go to Russian Orthodox Church a lot. They would explain to my younger brother and me what was right and what was wrong from the religious perspective. On my 4th birthday, my grandma gave me the Bible for kids as a present, and I remember my mom reading it to me before going to bed. Back then it was just another interesting story that happened somewhere very far away. And yet mom would always find a way to tell these stories in such a manner so they translated really well into the reality we were living in. The more I grew up the more I realized that there was something missing in the big picture of my understanding of the world. I saw a lot of suffering that was happening everywhere, death, natural disasters, and I thought there must be a reason for all of it. Otherwise, the God does not care about any of us. I started to look for the answers everywhere: in the philosophical and religious books, movies, wise counsel from the people who lived a long life. I could not find the truth in church because the whole purpose of its existence with all its rules and restrictions, its idea of God who is something or someone out there, separate from us, and the only being that knows all the answers, was totally alien to me; mainly so due to my unwillingness to accept the fact of transferring all the responsibility for everything one does to someone else. I believed it to be a weakness to acknowledge one’s bad thoughts and deeds as something natural, as an external influence of the evil spirits. For me, it sounded like people who agreed with this concept simply wanted to escape the punishment for what they had done, choose an easy way out.

Since 2011, I devoted my life to God, this happened when I get convert and be baptized to the church of Jesus Christ. I was still a babe spiritually. I learned many things in the Gospel and I felt the Love of my heavenly Father. I couldn't speak English back then when I joined the church, but through reading the scriptures daily, the Lord help me learn and understand the scriptures. Today, I can testify to you that I have read the bible many times from the start to the end. And most importantly, I teach the Gospel in English.