4th Quarter Meta Post

What I think this class aims to do is help its students look at America in a new way because of the ideas that we study and discuss.  What I struggled to see at the beginning of the class was how the blog that we were continuously writing played into that goal.  However, I learned as the year went on was that the blog was a way to show that because of what we have done in class, you look at situations in a critical, informed and new way.

I think the post that best fits the purpose of the blog that I have written thus far is my latest post entitled College Movies.  I am pleased with this post because it is a great example of me looking at media in a new way because of an idea we drew out in class throughout the entire year.  The post was about a skit that I saw on television that I first thought was just an observation about the plots of movies.  Without the skill I acquired in American Studies this year, that would have been the length to which I understood and thought about the skit.  But this year I have learned to think critically about media through projects like the TV Tokenism presentation and class discussions.  Thus when I saw this skit, I took the time to think about what message it was really trying to convey and because I did that, I was able to understand that the skit was really much more meaningful than it seemed at first glance.


I then understood that the skit was in reality, a commentary on an idea that we continuously discussed this year, the inevitablity  of upperclass whites going to colleger versus the question of lower class minorities going to college.  


While I think my blogging has improved drastically this year, I still understand that I have a long way to go.  I understand that there are still many problems with the post.  For example, I didn't find an article or piece of media to connect my observations to.  Without being grounded in fact, my observations were too general.  I should have looked harder for a study or article to support a statement like "It seems that for many upper class citizens, education comes second to socialization while attending college."  That would have made the article more interesting and increased my credibility as an author.


Overall, blogging this year has helped me not only increase my skills as a writer but has also given me a reason to think more critically and deeply about situations I would normally find mundane and uninteresting.