Student 6

My hoodie is one object that demonstrates how personal experience changed my perception of knowledge. My hoodie is an object that I treasure deeply. The reasoning behind why I cherish the hoodie is due to the personal experience I had with the hoodie and how it impacted the knowledge that I carry to this day. My personal experience with the hoodie is one of comfort as whenever I felt judged, I resorted to wearing the hoodie to cover myself so that I felt more comfortable presenting myself to other people.

After a while of experiencing the comfort the hoodie brought me, I had started to fall into a habit where I would constantly wear hoodies to most public places. This personal experience with my hoodie exemplifies the perception of knowledge that I carry as it impacted how I viewed myself compared to how other people view me. Even though I’ve since learned that people don’t view me for how I thought they may have, the knowledge still lingers and I view hoodies as a source of reassurance to me. This event can be translated to almost any event as personal experiences that resonate within us tend to change how we view our already preconceived knowledge and thus, our knowledge is influenced and adapts to our personal experiences.

The personal experiences that we all experience may influence our knowledge to either broaden the perspectives we have as a thinker or it may reduce and narrow our perspectives depending on the experience and its lasting impact on ourselves. In my case, the personal experience with my hoodie narrowed my knowledge of myself as it caused me to think of myself in a single view, locking me into a single-sided story that caused me to define myself under one view alone.

My boy scouts handbook is a symbol of how personal experience can change the value of knowledge. Although the handbook contains general information on how scouting works as well as the values and knowledge that a typical boy scout carries, it is through experiencing scouting that true values of scouting are constructed and knowledge is created about boy scouts. The book symbolizes this form of knowledge as it visualizes the spectrum of face value knowledge and first-hand knowledge. With face value knowledge, almost anyone can understand and process it without the need to take any additional steps, however, the more experience someone gains on the knowledge, the more it becomes first-hand and it grows the understanding to a new level.

The development and growth of knowledge ultimately change the value of knowledge and how relative it is to the topic it pertains to. With boy scouts, the personal experience of being able to undergo and take an active role in scouting allowed me to grow my knowledge of scouting and values relating to scouts and later allowed me to become a junior leader, allowing me to pass down knowledge for younger scouts for them to later embark on their journey with their own experiences to define what scouting means to them.

The boy scout handbook truly describes how knowledge develops within oneself and how different forms and perspectives are created as the personal experiences build upon the face value knowledge. Once the original knowledge has been built upon, it begins to diverge from other people’s views of the same knowledge, even though it all originated from the same source, in this case, the boy scouts handbook. Even though the knowledge is unique from one another, the source which the knowledge is derived from is still valuable in itself as it provides the base level that allows others to have a starting point to grow from.

The cage that my bunnies live in symbolizes the growth of knowledge and how knowledge is originally conceived and acquired. The cage that my two bunnies live in is fairly simple as it only serves as a place where my bunnies eat and sleep in. Despite the limited usage of the cage, it still represents how my knowledge concerning bunnies was acquired initially.

The concept of knowledge has it so that knowledge can be regarded without having any prior familiarity surrounding a topic, but personal experience allows for further insight into the topic. The bunnies cage served encapsulates how I acquired new knowledge surrounding bunnies and how personal experience developed how I acquired the knowledge. Before purchasing my bunnies, the knowledge surrounding bunnies and the responsibilities needed to provide for them was abysmal. It wasn’t until I purchased the bunnies that I invested a majority of my time to learn more about not only how to properly raise a bunny, but also the intricacies and why certain aspects of bunny care were needed. My first purchase regarding the bunnies was the cage for them. This marked a significant moment in my journey of animal raising and it symbolizes the personal experience I had with my bunnies and how it led me to raise and take care of them.

The acquisition of knowledge is deeply integrated with personal experience as the experience allows for a person to grow and acquire a certain area of knowledge, whether it pertains to history, arts, or mathematics, a person’s experience with a specific concept is what allows for the knowledge to initially be attained and eventually amass into a deeper understanding of that specific topic.