Day 30

Student contribution by Victoria Labno

Overview of the Period

This week, Mr.Heintz has been trying to influence us to extend our knowledge about the topics we chose about 1 or 2 weeks ago. We have been attempting to make a claim and gathering information to support it. All of this is in order to dig deeper and find personal meaning about why I should care about my topic.

We’ve been reading these short paragraphs at the beginning of the period that are about the 1200s-1450s. When we read these paragraphs we have to find the author’s purpose and their perspective. Afterwards, we try to incorporate the process of claims, evidence, and perspective into our projects.

My topic is foot binding. For the past few weeks, I’ve been struggling to gather a specific claim. This is because each day I learn something I shift my  perspective on the topic. My claim was originally based off of what I had learned before this week. And as I keep doing my checklists, reading these short stories, and listening to the group discussion in class, it changes my mind completely; it opens my eyes to a different perspective.

On Monday, I was so sure of my claim about women. I went home to learn more about what women’s roles were in the 1200-1450. Miraculously, overnight my opinion changed because I saw the changes that women were getting and how their rights were evolving. This made it hard for me to grasp and stay situated on one claim.

So, I went to talk with Mr.Heintz. I was so confused about how my opinion had just changed drastically within a span of a day. He said something along the lines of how I won’t be getting right or wrong answers, and that most likely by the end of this month I probably will have a completely different perspective on my topic because I would keep learning, and finding more facts about the way women are looked at.

For me, this is really challenging because I don’t have many answers to my questions, I have suggestions. There’s no right way to do it, and that makes it much harder for me to be situated when I have multiple views about my topic. The one thing I learned though, is that as I keep on learning and think I’ve got an understanding that the more I come to a sense that I know nothing at all, and it’s like I’ve just brushed the surface.