Seminar Reflection

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It is not everyday when you can say the majority of your college class is you talking and the teacher listening, this is seminar. Coming from a family where heated debates were present almost daily, I already know if I were passionate about a topic I would never pass up an opportunity to express my opinions. For me, seminar has allowed me to grow in this confidence of expressing my thoughts as well as learning from others opinions. Having come from a high school that stressed the importance of student participation, I was not surprised by the amount I would actually have to speak in this class, however I was surprised by the importance of disagreements and the proper way to analyze text through underlining, highlighting and questioning and how it could aid my overall understanding of a text. Being a psychology major and extremely interested in social justice issues, seminar also opened my eyes up to the interesting perspectives of the strength of human nature.
We were asked to specify our personalized outcomes in the beginning of the year, one of the most important parts of this for me was critical thinking. Critical thinking is an easy phrase to understand however is a more difficult process to actually follow through with. I wanted to find multiple senses of the text. Seminar taught me skills in which I have become more comfortable with analyzing a text. For example, through asking questions and annotating my book I have been able to understand more of the author’s intentions. In class when discussing Virginia Woolf’s “ How to read a book” I added more than twenty annotations to my book during the discussion. Along, with many of my peers I was at first dreading to read this essay because I thought this was going to be a borin...

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...urface. To really appreciate the intentions of the author while also realizing that I am allowed to have my own interpretation. I can’t say yet that I am 100% confident with expressing opinions orally and through writing, however now I feel better prepared with the skills and will to approach these situations when they arrive. Reflecting on what seminar has taught me reminded me of a favorite saying that my High School English teacher would always repeat throughout my senior year. “ Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn” (Benjamin Franklin). After being a part of seminar class I realize how important “involving myself” actually is because it allowed me to truly learn for myself rather than for others. To never be ashamed to disagree with someone or to ask questions; because sometimes the best uncovering of truth are revealed that way.

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