Reflection Project Reflection Paper

When I first decided to expand my education, it had been so long since I had been to school, and I was very hesitant. I talked at length about my decision with my husband and with his encouragement, decided to enroll but still was not quite sure which degree program to enroll in. I knew that this was something that I had always wanted to do since I obtained my Associates Degree in Nursing, but I did not have the courage, nor did I want to give up the time with my family and children. I second guessed my abilities and my knowledge because it had been so long since I had been in college. Now that my children are about to graduate high school and

Here I stand on the brink of adulthood, a daunting place to exist. I peer over the edge and gaze into a chasm, bright but blurry. I am afraid. I am anxious. But I am hopeful. I am hopeful because I know that my past has defined me, but it is my future that will continue to mold me. As my years as a teenager draw to a close, I find myself reflecting on pivotal moments that taught me what it really means to be a good human being.

As you are no doubt well aware, this entire project has been a labor of love for Matt and I. As a group we ran into one road block after another. If nothing else, this project has taught me that everything will not go smoothly, no matter how good the intensions and how to persevere in the face of adversity.

Learning something new is something to strive for. However, are all the lessons we learn good ones? After all, there are two sides to every coin. A lot of the times it is easy to find the bad lessons learned but what about the good? Well, that takes a lot more thought. Ironically these were the thoughts running through my head that day, that dreadful day which is permanently burned into the back of my mind.

Every challenge I have accomplished has aided in my dedication, which has in turn allowed me to maintain focused on the future I’ve chose to build for myself. With each new day, new challenges arise also, allowing me to change my approach thus not losing my dedication to overcome these hardships. I have allowed the experiences and challenges in my life to make great changes personally. My dedication thrives knowing the immediate pain of discipline is greater than the pain of failure. For instance, knowing I was assuming the role as a single mother at the age eighteen was frightening and soon to be extremely challenging. Though finances, lack of family help, mental and physical exhaustion from being a single parent would be less tiresome had the other parent assisted in half the parenting duties, I now feel more capable of overcoming future challenges because I have not allowed for them to defeat me thus far. The many challenges I continue to face have not only change my perspective on life, but allowed me to stay dedicated meanwhile maintaining motivation while I travel this journey to

Nelson Mandela, a famous president in Africa, once said “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” There are many times that this is an appropriate motto in our lives. When we approach large obstacles, when the problem seems so big and the finish line so far away, when we don’t think we could ever accomplish the goal. That’s exactly how I felt about undertaking my senior project. Most kids in my class had already been planning their project since the summer before, but of course not me. As usual, I put off working on it or picking a topic as long as I could. Everyone seemed to have chosen topics of what they were going to major in or what job they wanted to be doing in the future. Quite frankly though, I found that a little boring and cliché. Often people hate working on their project because they chose a boring topic. I didn’t want that to be me. I wanted to have a unique project where I actually contributed to something. Where it was more than just a grade or a simple pass for graduation. Although it took me a couple weeks to come up with a topic, once I found it, I knew I had chosen the right one. Now to give you a little back story on my topic, I first heard about it at a little church camp I used to go to every summer. To be honest, I hadn’t

Growing up for me went a little something like this. All three of my sisters and I shared a king size bed in the attic of a rental house off 17th & Dorcas. In the mornings we would wake up to mom’s chorizo and tortillas on the stove. In the background you could hear Telemundo, a Spanish channel, on the television. Being that I was one of four siblings Birthday parties came often, and were celebrated with lots of carne asada, jugo for the kids, piñata’s, guacamole and lots of beer and music for the adults. These parties were huge and went all night long. I guess you can say this was the Hispanic traditional way to throw a kid’s birthday party. Growing up biracial, and multi-cultural Mexican- American, our primary language in our home when we were younger was Spanish.

Growing up I was always told that I was very mature for my age, I always attributed that to the fact that even though I have many siblings I was very much raised as an only child and set in my ways before the first one came around. So as my parents got more and more busy I just started doing things for myself. That and my acute perception skills made it fairly easy to remove the shroud of childhood wonder that blocks the truths of the world. Looking back I realized that’s only part of the reason why, it’s also because for the most part I spent my childhood alone my parents became emotionally distant early on and I only saw my friends at school, this solitude is what caused a false sense of maturity because I had no one to influence my energy. It is the group that determines your current maturity. You can see this best in a day I spent with my friends not two weeks ago, where we almost pulled a Benjamin Button and, in a way, aged backwards.

Could you imagine a world where everyone was the exact same? “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way” (Vonnegut, 38). The 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments have been passed, and everyone is officially equal. Everyone is absolutely average and we all have similar lives. It is quite boring if you ask me. I am sure if you had the same old routine every day, you would get sick of it too. There isn’t any diversity and I can’t do anything about it or else it is “two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine”(Vonnegut, 40).

My time within the American public education system has been a relatively interesting experience. The system is not as bad as everyone seems to make it out to be. Maybe I’m blind but bullying has pretty much died altogether within the social setting of school. There could be a case or two for verbal harassment but physical bullying doesn’t exist in suburban public schools. Teachers are very kind and respectful yet still are able to educate with authority. The classes I have taken seem to all have been enjooyable to some degree or another. Despite what many claim, I think the education has system has gotten better on a macro scale. Sure there are yearly department changes and budget constraints teachers have to face (maximum to amount of printing paper allowed per teacher) but those things seem to have no effect on my personal learning. The curriculum both challenging and interesting granted I like the subject matter. All of the teachers I have had have been good and I don’t have any criticisms on how course work is administered within my high school.

How did you demonstrate mutual respect for, rapport with, and responsiveness to students with varied needs and backgrounds, and challenge students to engage in learning?

Following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the IMF bailout provided desperately needed funds to revive South Korea’s economy but came with a caveat of strict mandates. The aftermath left sectors of its economy eviscerated, patches of its society dissolved and sent my family on a plane to the United States. What could have been a typical American dream narrative, however, not only molded my character but also evolved into a lifelong aspiration in global affairs.

It happened two years ago as I lay sprawled out on the floor of the library lounge at the Universite de Grenoble in Grenoble,

As the end of the semester is approaching I have come to realize that this class has played a big impact on how I view the world today. Throughout the semester I have gained knowledge on different topics and I plan on using them to make better decisions in the future. I feel that discussing all the different topics in class has made learn how to communicate and understand others better. One of the many topics discussed was that men should be able to express feminine characteristics without being judged or labeled. Another topic was how sex has been viewed throughout families as negative therefore, many children are having babies at a young age or are developing STDs and how the lack of Prenatal care can affect an infant’s health.

I believe the goal of education should be teaching students to work individually and with other people to be able to apply their knowledge to function in the real world. By this I mean students should be able to use everything they have learned, both from text books and from teachers being personal with them and teaching them real life applications, to be a successful person after school. I base these assumptions on the realist, pragmatism, and existentialism philosophies. In the realist philosophy, Plato and Aristotle believed that life’s questions “could be answered through the study of ideas” (Sadovnik et al, 2013, p. 185). In the pragmatism philosophy, “Dewey proposed that children learn both individually and in groups” (Sadovnik et al, 2013, p. 189). In existentialism, “education as an activity liberating the individual from a chaotic, absurd world” (Sadovnik et al, 2013, p.191). By combining these ideas, the student should be able to make decisions independently and also contribute ideas in a group, to help become a successful person in this world.