Reflection

I’ve loved reading and writing from a very young age. I’ve felt at home in every language arts class I have ever been in and looked forward to these classes. I found writing to be a great way of expressing myself and unlike many of my friends who found essay writing to be exhausting, I loved how it felt to dissect stories or investigate a topic and string my own thoughts about it. I liked that there wasn’t a right or wrong way to think about things; you just have to find evidence to prove it. If you were to tell 16 year-old me, taking AP Lit, that I would be doing the same things in that class in a different language, I would have thought you were crazy. I’m so glad that I have though, because it has opened up a whole new world of literature and culture to learn and enjoy.

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I wrote an argumentative paper in a Spanish Literature class that I took last semester about a story called La fuerza del amor written by Maria de Zayas. In that class, a common recurring theme that was in many of the literature works was the theme of “courtly love”. One of the reasons I liked this story so much was because this theme came up but it was in a female perspective when courtly love is typically focused on the man, and the driving love that a man experiences for a woman. This story doesn’t necessarily have the typical fairytale ending but the woman in the story was able to pick herself. And that was my argument-that courtly love for a woman is empowerment and being able to put herself first. It was a theme I felt very passionately about and I was glad that I had the opportunity to write about it and argue a different point that wasn’t really presented to me in class.

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I wrote another paper for a Latin American culture class and I researched Peruvian immigration to the United States. The reason I chose this topic comes from my experience as a missionary in Peru and the amount of people I met there that expressed wanting to leave and specifically wanting to go live in the United States. While I understood that the US has a lot of amazing opportunities and privileges, I wondered what specifically made it so attractive to them when they have the opportunity to go anywhere in the world. My research led me down a path that helped me discover something different that I had anticipated. I was able to interview some people from Peru who now live in the US and learn of their experiences and I made a crucial connection that helped me understand immigration in general. When I would think of the American dream, I would think of people who were the poorest of the poor, coming to the States and doing everything they can to make it in a new country. While this isn’t impossible, I think what is more realistic is the trend that I found with all of the people that I interviewed who all had pretty good lives in Peru. All in all they were successful and had enough money to provide for themselves well in their home country but for that exact reason they wanted something more. It was incredibly interesting to learn this during my research–that you have to believe it is possible to make a change for the better.

 

These papers helped me come to important conclusions that I think have helped me grow as a person. For this reason, I really do think there is power in critical thinking while learning about a new culture and practicing a new language, and being able to express this helps us to synthesize these new findings.