Semester Reflection Blog/Final Review

One thing that I have learned over the course of the semester that I have gotten significantly better at is eliminating clutter. For example, if you were to compare my first day of school blog to the writing I did on Walkabout you would see substantial improvement. And if you were to compare those two to the Paul R. letter you would again see significant improvement and what is, what I think is, a fine piece of writing.

Before I came to Mr. Fielder's English class I didn't even know what margin notes were! But now I can take a chunky, chewy article and break it down into something readable and understandable. This way I can not only read the article, but write an intelligent response to it. Another thing that makes margin noting so handy is that, in the article responses, I often use the thoughts I wrote down during margin noting! I did this in the China article. As I was reading the article I wrote down the thoughts that came into my head. This made it easy when it came time to write the response to organize my thoughts and create a structured article response.

The Rwandan genocide debate was extremely fun. We were the Red Cross so basically we got to blame and point fingers on whoever we want and did nothing wrong at all. Because of the fact that we were the Red Cross, however, we did not get to know much about the other groups in depth prior to the debate. This made the debate a great learning experience as well, as we were able to find out things about other groups that we wouldn't have known, of course, because we didn't study the other groups that well. One really interesting thing that I found out was that Romeo Dellaire actually wanted to fight and end the genocide, but he just didn’t have the support of his country’s leaders or the UN.

We also had to research our group for the debate. We had to choose articles about the Red Cross that would let us know what exactly the Red Cross was doing in Rwanda so we could prepare our opening statement. I found some really significant things, including an actual diary of a Red Cross doctor and an Interview with the leader of the Red Cross at the time, who is now the head of PBS. In the article, he discussed how he had spoken with the Hutu leader in person, and then he continued to describe the hate he had towards them because of what he saw being done to Tutsi’s.

The Rwandan genocide debate also gave me tremendous experience with finding a credible source. Finding a credible source for the Rwandan genocide was also a struggle. My group first had to represent a leader by the name of Greg Kayibanda whose name I cannot remember. He was pretty much a nobody in terms of the genocide. Or, at least, that’s what the lack of information showed. We searched left and right, up and down, north and south for some information on this guy but it was nowhere to be found. We searched BBC and InfoTrak and anything else we could think of, but had no luck. We were able to find only one article, so finally we were able to switch our group to the Red Cross. Finding Red Cross info was easy after I had spent so much time looking for the other guy. It now only takes me a minute or two to find articles regarding a certain topic via a credible source.