How I've Changed

This year's history class has been a lot of fun.  To go with the plethora of historic dates and names that we have been forced to mindlessly memorized, I have taken some important lessons about the subject of history and myself.

I heard recently that "History is not the old stuff in textbooks, but how we look at it."  This has taken on a huge meaning in our class this year.  On a very annoyingly ironic note, we studied old civilizations with a blog, something completely foreign, if not unimaginable, to the people we're talking about.  But more seriously, our class has taken some creative ways of looking at the past.  We played a weird version of Risk to explain the Cold War.  We made a movie to look at the Muslim Empires, China, and Europe.  We did a ton of cool stuff that probably makes no sense, but it helped us learn.  That was an amazing realization to me, because as well as being more effective at interacting with the material, it helped me learn to love history more than I did at the beginning of the year.

To go with this bountiful enjoyment, I believe that my writing style has improved and I have learned more about research papers (e.g. don't procrastinate!!!!!)  I'm sure these will be useful in RUSH next year.

Most importantly, I learned a lot about my classmates and myself.  For example, I make a lot of annoying, smart-ass comments.  Like a LOT.  But I also found that some teachers aren't totally against that, as long as it's relevant, and I can let my sarcastic side contribute to a discussion instead of taking away from it.