What A Year

Mama Pugs made this a really memorable year. History became an extremely fun class to go to as the year progressed and I thought that this year taught me some new, valuable skills that I don't think the rest of the other classes had access to. I felt like this class was very much more based around learning how to take information and create your own, original ideas around that information, instead of just getting tested on it and forgetting it once we return from summer, or even before that. Instead of doing that, there were fun ways to apply that to our own work: whether it was through the blog, or any other kind of writing expressive assignment that we had throughout the year. Because of activities like these, I think I learned to make history a much more creative class than I always perceived it to be. Most importantly, I think that I learned two extremely relevant, connected things. The first is that the two major research papers that we did taught me how to find good information. The second thing that I learned was how to take that information and instead of just spitting that back out again in my own words, I got really good at picking out specific research to go with an argument that I was trying to prove, using my research more as evidence to support my claim rather than just write about what others have researched as well. All in all, I think that the most important thing that I can take out of this class is how to take factual history and get more creative to turn it something interesting and original that I could call my own work.