Latoya Brown
HUC 109
Professor, Sokolski
November 3, 2009
Reflection of Classes
Throughout my educational career, there has never been an instance where all my classes
connected or that I recognized their connection, until now. At LaGuardia I am being introduced
to a new concept, a cluster. A cluster is essentially a group of classes that share common
individuals, along with a common theme. My cluster contains Persuasion and Debate,
Philosophy, English 101, and Research paper 103; the common theme in these classes is
constructing identity. Constructing identity means figuring out who you are as a person or
Isimply self identification. The cluster allows me to not only experience the greatness within
myself but it allows me to recognize the flaws. That at times can be nonexistent in my mind. In
this cluster, I learn about myself through others.
In the first class of my cluster, Persuasion and Debate, I learn how to become a fair and
open minded arguer. The class discusses the basic of an argument, or a claim. Then we learn how
we can back up claims with evidence so that our argumentation can be thought out logically. The
second class of the cluster Philosophy I am faced with questions such as, what is self? Am I free?
How do I know that I exist? These questions cause my mind to spin. At times I struggle to come
up with answers because I have never truly taken the time to examine my life and who I am in
my daily life. When I do manage to put an answer together, I begin to ask myself more
questions. What will I become? Is my life truly worth something, or will I disappear when I die?
Is there an afterlife? These questions scare me but at the same time they motivate me because I
am left to feel like I want the greatest possible outcome for my life. My third class is English 101
I love this class because it challenges my writing skills, and it allows me to grow as a writer.
When I get assignments in this class, I feel at ease because I know that my teacher understands
that writing is a process, and she allows each and every student to rewrite their papers after they
have been graded and critiqued. My final class of the cluster is Research Paper. My initial
response when I first entered this class was hate .I was use to being a writer who just wrote. I
seldom depended on research of a specific subject to complete a paper. I would mainly use prior
experience and my opinions and this would be sufficient when I was completing high school
level work, but I would soon learn that it was not the case when doing college level work.
Research Paper showed me that I had to cite information, and I had to organize my thoughts, so
that I could flush out a valid essay. My habits and style were being challenged. “I’m definitely
not in Kansas anymore.”
All these classes were not difficult. They were just different. I had to take a different
approach to how I would accomplish my goals in them. I was being told repetitively that these
classes shared a common theme, and that any one of them could help me to better understand the
other. So I started looking for correlations. I would notice that when we would discuss a topic
like using evidence to support a claim in Persuasion and Debate, the other classes would speak
about a topic that you would need to do exactly that. Take for example Philosophy and English.
In Philosophy, we discussed a copious amount of philosophers. They all had ideas on different
aspects of the world such as, the earth revolves around the sun. Today we know this to be true
due to advanced technology, but in the past it was not so. Galileo the philosopher who proved the
earth revolved around the sun, could not conclusively say, “I know this because I feel like it.” He
had to do research, study and create claims, then find evidence that supported it. The same idea
holds true with English when we discussed a topic, we had to learn to support what we said again
following the idea of claim and evidence. These are simple correlations and there have been so
many more ways that my classes connect. When we discuss a topic in a class, I notice that the
other classes help me to better develop ideas on the topic and vice versa. In all my classes, we
talk about topics that relate to human identity such as, what is right? What is wrong? How can
we learn to believe in something if we don’t know why we believe something is so? It occurred
to me that although we were learning to understand ourselves we being the class of 26
individuals, the main idea had been that you need to support your beliefs and self perception with
evidence. Evidence is the key. It makes the things that you say more valuable, because you are
able to support them with not just your ideas, but the ideas of others who may or may not have
more experience in a specific subject matter than you.
A year ago I would have never thought that when I say something, I need to back it up,
and I wouldn’t be writing complete essays of over seven hundred words, because I was in a state
of fear, fear that my work was not good enough and fear of being judged. Nothing about this
cluster should change. I believe that studying and constructing identity is the perfect topic for
freshmen. After all, we are in college to discover ourselves. Being able to come to school every
day knowing that the classes you take are helping you to do just that is an amazing feeling. This
cluster in so many ways has taken that fear out of me. I am learning about myself, through the
ideas and question of philosophers. I learn to understand who I am,through the process of
argumentation. I learn to defend who I am, and through the process of writing I learn to express
who I am.