In this class we learned a lot about socialization, the silk road, research, writing, and more. We did this by completing three projects. One was the socialization and mask project. One was the anthology writing project and the last was the Echoes of the past silk road project. 

I was challenged when making my mask and overcoming things that I didn’t like that I did to my mask. I also encountered challenges when I was writing my essay, when writing it sometimes it was hard to think of ideas, make changes, and come up with what to write about. I learned from these experiences by overcoming them and preparing myself for the next time a challenge comes. I felt stuck when writing my essay because I redid parts multiple times and ran out of ideas and evidence to include. I overcame that feeling by stepping back and really taking time to think about what I needed to include in my essay. I learned that perseverance is super important to have motivation to keep going on with my essay and be passionate about what I am writing about. I think that the most challenging part of writing my essay was finding the evidence and then revising on the explanation of the evidence was the most difficult. I pushed through this challenge by reading through it, getting peer feedback and taking time to implement the feedback I received. I think this experience will help me when writing in the future because I will have the experience of writing in a more professional way. I think that I grew as a writer in this project because I was able to use the TEA format in my writing and explain my evidence with it properly formatted. I grew through this because this way of writing helped me really connect the reader and myself to my essay. A place where I really saw this was when I was using the time I was in school with my friends and we had an issue with the teacher. I think that this evidence was hard to explain but I was able to do so. I think that deciding whether or not I wanted to use the photos on my mask or not was hard as well as what else to put besides the photos was also a challenge. This process taught me about the way I present myself to others by learning to show things without words only and that we can show things without explaining them completely. My understanding of socialization and identity changed throughout this project by me learning what it really means to be socialized and the way it is a huge part of my identity. I learned that I as a person am more impacted by socialization than I thought and that being surrounded by people all the time has impacted me a lot. I learned that I have experienced a lot of things that have shaped the way that I am now. This affects the way I view myself and others in my community because these are things that not everyone knows about, and this shaped the way I see others because we don’t always know the way that people have been shaped by their past experiences. My biggest takeaway from this project was that socialization is all around us, shaping our identities, all the time even if we don’t know it. This changed the way I see the world because what is happening in our world is shaping us. Like in the outsiders when the kids are seeing a whole different side of the place we are living in with the violence that we don’t see they are affected by directly. My advice would be to have a more open mind to the content we are learning and try my hardest to be invested in the things we are learning even if I can’t really see myself being able to relate to the stories etc. I think this would help me be able to enjoy the whole unit instead of just waiting for the fun parts. I hope people see the ways that I personally have been socialized and that the simple things in our life are big parts of our socialization stories. I think that I did succeed in this because I feel that my mask shows that almost directly and then my essay goes in depth in explaining each part of the ways that I am socialized the most.