Day 108

Student contribution by Gizelle 

I think our class is doing well at learning how to apply the material into our written response questions in an elaborate and efficient way. We have gradually learned how to better incorporate our background knowledge to certain documents and have found reoccurring patterns through certain historic events. Instead of having to know what to write for our answers, it is more of a process of better understanding how to write them out and how we can utilize what we already know to make it easier for us. Since we practice writing and analyzing documents every day, it has helped us develop these writing habits.

Armed with a purpose, their opinion backed by historical knowledge allowed the students to start the writing process. I’m finding that starting is one of the hardest parts of writing. The task seems too challenging for them to start. Therefore, most don’t or spend most of their time thinking about how they could be wrong.

I personally sometimes struggle in having to be able to retain all the information and material we learn since things that I’ve learned in the beginning in the year are not as fresh in my mind as it used to be. I feel as we go through each time period I won’t be able to remember what I used to know except for what I currently learned. It’s not that the pace we are going in class is too fast, but it’s more of a matter of how well I think I understand the topics so I won’t forget it.

For the most part, there is not much that I would change about our class. The only minor thing I would suggest is to do more review on previous time periods as a refresher in case we may have forgotten about some things. I think this gives us a reflection for ourselves to see where we stand in terms of remembering past topics. A lot of the time I feel like we all know the material that we’ve learned last semester, but when it comes to mini-reviews we often freeze up and forget at the moment.