Final Reflection Blog

Transformative Learning

There are a lot of takeaways from this class, including reading, writing skills, experience of collaboration, and a lot of knowledge about gender roles. Among all of them, the two most important things I learned is about how to become a healthy man(avoiding toxic masculinity traits) and finding social constructions in my life. Although this is a writing class, I think the things I learned this quarter are mostly above writing and they have most impact on me.

I first learned about toxic masculinity through Salam's article and begin to realize the importance of this issue when I was analyzing the real tweets online. I felt very relatable to a lot of the information mentioned in that article based on my experience with not only myself, but also other people around me. And I started to focus on how to become a more healthy man, how to avoid toxic masculinity traits. While these knowledge is used as a part of my essay, I personally wants to know about them as well. In the end, with the completion of my essay, I see it as a sign of my growth, and it means that I now understand this knowledge.

Another thing I have learned and is also impactful is the idea of social construction. I first learned the term through the annotation of a YouTube video. Although there were some examples in it, it was still an abstract concept for me to understand. After annotating and watch several Disney movies, my understanding towards the term has gone a lot better that I was able to talked about it in the Podcast and write about it in my essay. Although after this quarter, I might no longer need to think about this topic, I now am able to notice real world examples of social construction of gender roles, whether it is in a video, a song or even the video games I played.

Past Problems and Future

One of the kinds of assignments I underperformed a lot is the annotations on videos and movies. I remember it took me a huge amount of time to finish it, and the final quality was lower than I expected. Things will only get worse if we are watching the movie as a class instead of by ourselves because of quarantine. The major reason is that I had a hard time only focusing on what I need, since a movie wouldn't have a scene just for showing gender roles. Now I have become a lot better after doing all the assignments. And this type of homework really shows my weakness, and I know for sure that I still have a lot to improve.

Another weakness I realized that I have is writing skills. I did have a lot of improvement by taking this class, but still far more to go. By doing all the writing assignments in this class, I definitely felt more confident at writing short paragraphs, such as this one I am writing right now. My preparation for an essay also gets a lot more detailed and focused. But when it comes to writing an essay, I still needs to improve the overall organizations as well as my ways of developing an idea. I also need to improve on my word choices. It usually took me a lot of time to write a paragraph, and that forces me to write each paragraph in a sperate time, instead of in a row. And I think it is definitely the reason that sometimes I went off topic. To get better, I will have to write more and more essays :(