Personal reflection Kayla Havercome 

Women and Gender Studies 1001 

Personal reflection 

December 21,2021

 

         I don’t know what I expected in women and gender studies 1001. At first all I know is that I wanted to get my pathway classes out the way so I could focus on my major. I think personally I’m not one to really think why this happens to which gender in any topic. But my general thought of this class is that I have come to learn everything that we know that our parents know and even way before that has always come down to gender in what way people are “supposed to treat each other”. I think that because my mindset has always been to not really care what people think of me and I know I’m gonna do what makes me happy even if I end continuing some social stereotypes, then so be it. But after just listening in some of the classes, I know that I should care, not enough to let it hurt me but enough in order to change these stereotypes, and I learned that by hearing the opinions of my fellow classmates in this class and hearing their views on the topics we had talked about. I know that in this class it was a safe space to talk about anything and we were able to hear each other out even when we didn’t have the same viewpoints. Personally, I have always loved history, whether it was geographic or the history of people in any shape and form, so learning about women as a whole and the LGBTQ+ community was a really interesting digest. And i think that on top of all of this having a teacher who you see really cares about hearing others opinions on these topics and just seeing their overall passion has really made me enjoy this class 10x better than i ever expected 

 

   I must admit I did have a hard time reading the readings except for like two of them because imma be honest I don’t read at all so my reading level is low but what helped was doing these hypothesis annotations and blog posts. Reading Angela Davis, the star interview, Stryker some of the one that were difficult to read, but looking at my classmates annotations and she how they decipher that text in front of them has really helped me find my own opinion on the texts because it gave me guidance on what the texts were talking about, and with dimming my point of view of the text i was able to find my own words of what part o father stories meant to me. When it came to writing the blog post, I did find it semi difficult because before this class like I said, I used to keep my opinions to myself and I don’t really like public writing or speaking like that because it does kinda make me uncomfortable. Then trying to figure out what to talk about, I do get in my own head because there are so many problems that I do want to talk about that don’t get enough light shed on them, so it was kind of hard to stick to just one, but I did. I wasn’t able to do the blog post with my classmates due to my situation so I didn’t get feedback on my post, which overall would have been helpful because I do get a little passionate when I’m writing and forget about grammar and other things that make up a proper paper. I wrote about this generation and how I think that everything doesn’t need to be put into a box. I know that the past generation is really specific in a negative way, so it would be how you were treated if you were in a certain category and I think that is wrong and unfair. That’s why I’m also proud to be a part of a generation that is still specific but owns who they are in the best way possible while also  knowing that everyone is human and shouldn’t be treated differently. Overall I did love doing this assignment and reading other points of view in blog posts by my classmates.

 

    I wasn’t able to bring much to the group project because i and some serious things that happened to me within the past weeks of creating the project and i did want to apologise my group which was high heels i know that my absence didn’t really help them because there was some stuff that i needed to contri0 to the group myself and I didn’t have anyway of communicating that I could help because i had to delete everything on my devices so I had no one contact info. But from watching the presentation it looked like they didn’t need me after all, which was cool to see their final project. 

     I definitely wanted to thank you professor for creating a safe space and honestly just letting us vent about the problems we face as women and sadly will face in the future until stereotypes are dismantled. It was a please hearing everyone from the classes I was present in.