World History Final Portfolio

“I think it's acceptable to criticize another culture when you also look at the good things and when the culture is new. I think you should be able to analyze and have your own opinion." - Journal entry #3 (Link for the journal entry)

In the beginning of every class, we started out with a journal entry, and the differences of what I used to think in the beginning of the year compared to what I now believe and think are very drastic. Now we are reflecting of what we have learned throughout the year, and how it's affected us, by what we got out of the material.

Throughout the year in History, the class has stored many overall understandings in how to understand History overall, and how it affects today’s world. And along with many other concepts. One of the main concepts this course has taught me is in order to understand history, you have to understand yourself as a part of today’s modern world.

The reason I now disagree with what I said is because that was one of the first journal entries for History, and I had had no proper idea or knowledge of other cultures. I knew there were different people than me, but I didn’t really take the time to get to understand them. At that time when I wrote that, I was simple an ignorant person, but now as I think about myself in today’s world, I realize that the history beyond that is so much more than my parents meeting.

Bringing up the topic about being ignorant, I learned about the Keystone XL Pipeline. At the time, my natural thoughts were, “Oh, this isn’t important. Who cares?” But then I realized a lot of people do care, and as we wrote monologues, it was interesting to take on different perspectives.

From one of my monologues I wrote, “All these people in the world just think they ought to trash an item on the ground, dig up trees, hurt the environment, and never think twice about this finite world!” - (Link to Keystone XL Pipeline Monologue Project)

And one of the reasons this connects to understanding myself is that, I realized I wasn’t always the best at making the world a better place, and there are other people like me. For years, people having been using the the Earth’s non-renewable resources, and/or trashing where we live, and this connects to a lot of history about greed from different countries.

Another way in which I had to understand myself to understand history is when we were learning about our religion unit, and the effects each religion had. We were prompted a questions on what ways we personally respond to challenges in our lives.

"I respond to different challenges in my life by worrying a lot and thinking out solutions to them. I try to work through it and try to gain from it." - Journal entry #16 (Link for Journal Entry)

I think that this is still true because I haven’t had a huge amount of impact of religion in my life, while compared to others, they are constantly surrounded by it. This entry taught me that segregation back then and even today has to do a lot with religion, and everyone has their own method for learning or expressing themselves. Which brings me up to my next point about understanding ourselves today to understand history.

In one unit we learned about the history of Galileo, which lead to the history of how women gained rights for education especially in math and science. There was a lot of segregation between women and men, and which I wrote,

“Segregation happens because many men still believe women should take care of the house, the children, the food, the clothes, things that aren't "men's work." - (Link to Women in Science Discussion - second entry)

And I believe that learning about the history of womens’ fights for right helped me to understand that where I am today in school, was all affected by actions by women back then. It all correlates, and I had to understand myself as a girl, to fully grasp that it wasn’t all that easy for women back then.

My final explanation of my general understanding of this course, appeared when we were learning about revolutions. And at the end of the unit we created a digital story.

One of my explanations about the topic I was producing was, ““I became more aware of today's revolutions, and how the world isn't as "perfect" on other's people's end, as it seems to me, in my own country and government.” - (Link to Revolution Guidebook Project)

I realized that today’s revolutions, even though they aren’t the same as the one’s in history, the ones today have evolved off of those back then. I understand that, people in today’s world, take techniques that have already been used, and I think that connects to how people in today’s world have to understand their role, to understand history.

So it all ties up to, history has had an impact on today’s world, and to fully understand that, we must understand ourselves.