Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Extra credit blog

This year in Modern World History I feel like I learned a ton. I really enjoyed the format of the class and the way we learned things. I liked making presentations and doing blogs, because it was more refreshing than just memorizing dates and names for tests. This was a better way to learn in my opinion and I will remember the concepts much more. We learned a really wide variety of things about different countries and time periods, which made the class surprisingly interesting. Two main things that I learned that I thought were really fun to learn were the two things I studied in my research papers: German U boats, and nuclear power. I really liked looking deeper into both topics because they were both really fascinating to learn about because they both played larger roles in history than one would think. After a few weeks of deep research I felt like i truly understood each topic deeply which was a really cool feeling to have.

5 comments:

  1. I completely agree with you about the whole blog and presentation way of learning. Last year was more of a read the book and memorize sort of class.

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  2. I think that the different ways we learned information worked a lot better for me because I am not very good at reading something and then immediately memorizing all the information it provided. I really liked the interactive games like some of the ones with trying to get jobs and get your family hired so that you could provide for them and buy them enough to live but also be happy. I learn a lot from those games because they were easy to remember and connect to and then relate my situation to the people's situation at the time. Like if I couldn't buy a house because I had three daughters and no sons then I could be able to reflect on what it was like to have daughters and how they consumed more than they could provide for the family.

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  3. Maybe further research into other topics would have made everything as enjoyable as the U boats and the Nuclear power. These research papers got us to really dive deep into a certain topic, and therefore we were able to fully understand the topic we researched. I also enjoyed my final project, because I learned all about the Opium problem in Afghanistan instead of just skimming over it in a text book.

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  4. I feel like this year we studied actual history, but it was up to us to make the actual implications of the history. I'm not very good at this so I suffered a bit this year in terms of understanding the material, so next year hopefully we have a bit of help understanding the implications of what we study.

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  5. I wonder how much of the information we will really retain though throughout our lives. How many of us will be able to even explain to someone what the Meiji Restoration is five years from now? I sometimes question whether or not what we learn in school is valuable or memorable enough to stay with us for the years to come. Also, its interesting how the availability of information on the internet could make the role of instructor less valuable, or perhaps it could just reshape it.

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