Reflection

A year has gone by. It still feels fake to say that statement. The school year seems to have rushed by in a blur. Yet at certain moments during the year, time seemed to stand still and when I add up all those moments, it seems like an eternity has passed since humanities core began. High school and the past summer are but a hazy dream. Time is funny that way- distorting one's perception of it into meaningful moments. In humanities core, I’d say I’ve had plenty of those.

I came into humanities core from four years of memorizing vocab words and writing essays. To me at the time, that is what history and English was. I certainly did not think of it as discussing current events or debating different arguments. Granted, I didn’t expect humanities core to be a carbon copy of my high school classes. I’m not sure I was really expecting anything. College was a new school, a new start, a new chapter of my life. I had no idea what to expect. All I could hope for was to learn from my classes, to find them interesting, and maybe to even have fun in them. Humanities core lived up to those expectations.

From purely a knowledge standpoint, I learned quite a lot in humanities core. The class covered a lot of history (especially non-European and non-American history) that high school classes neglected to cover. (It even helped with a few Jeopardy questions.) From the Inca to paintings to sexuality, each lecture was new and interesting.

However, humanities core wasn’t just about memorizing facts. Through the theme of Empire and its Ruins, humanities core taught me that everything is inherently biased- even history- and therefore to look at events from different perspectives. Before taking the class, I knew that there were biases, but I didn’t realize how inherent they were, how, simply by living in a certain place or being a certain age or a certain gender created them. I realized that it was impossible to avoid them, so I had to acknowledge them and take them into account in my writing. In that way, by recognizing where the source was coming from, I could unearth much deeper meanings.

This blog itself has allowed me to talk about topics that I find interesting and through relating them to ideas discussed in humanities core, take a step back and think about them in a new light. Before taking humanities core, I never imagined that I would be talking about subjects like dinosaurs or Beauty and the Beast academically. However, it is through talking about typically non-academically skewed subjects that I came to relate the weighty topics talked about in class with my everyday life. It made me realize that questions of agency, self fashioning, biases, public belief, and different histories are not subjects to be only talked about in a history or philosophy classroom or when discussing politics. Rather, they are happening around me as I write, engraved in everyday encounters and events, hidden in plain sight. Humanities core opened my eyes and connected subjects learned in the classroom with my everyday life. Now, all I have to do is look.

I just want to say thank you to all of my humanities core lecture and seminar professors. I will carry this new knowledge throughout next year, college, and beyond.

Credit for photos: Amanda