|
|
Abortion, Where Do We Agree? For this essay, I wanted to write about how if everyone started conversations, especially political conversations, about where there is common ground or where everyone agrees on a topic these type of conversations would go better. I wrote my paper about abortion and I added what both sides thought and where they were coming from. I actually learned a lot about this project, I learned more about where both sides are coming from and why they thought. Before I started this project I actually didn't know exactly how abortions were performed when the fetus is more developed and from learning more about that I know where pro-life people are coming from. I would say the common ground between pro-life and pro-choice people would be that they both value human life, the difference is just where that starts and ends for both sides. For example, pro-life people value the fetus more than the woman that is carrying that unborn child. They think that life starts and conception and they believe that at that point it is someone else's body and a woman shouldn't be able to have that choice to terminate that pregnancy. On the other hand, the pro-choice people value the woman's life and believe that if she doesn't want to have a baby then she shouldn't have to. They value the choice of whether a woman wants to have a baby or not and just overall reproductive freedom. After this project, I learned a lot about both sides and I'm glad I got the chance to make a project about this so that I am more informed about this topic and am able to have a more detailed conversation about abortion.
|
Reflection
The project that I presented at my exhibition was my paper on abortion and how if all conversations, especially abortion, started on where the common ground is on both sides are, then all conversations about this topic would go a lot better. My paper was titled “Abortion, Where do We Agree?” and the response I got back from it on exhibition were all positive and encouraging feedback. I had multiple conversations with people about abortion and I liked all of them and what they had to say. I think the exhibition went pretty well. The seminar for group B went very well and we all had a very civil, professional conversation about multiple topics. Jackson and Ori definitely spoke the most but after a while, Jackson noticed that they had kind of been overpowering the conversation for a while and they invited other people to share their opinions which I really appreciated. The only thing that I wish there was more of was people, I think there could have been a better outcome audience-wise.
Now that I have looked at both sides of abortions more deeply, I can say I learned more about where both sides are coming from and why most of them think the way they think. I wouldn’t say my perspective has shifted, but I would say I have a lot more knowledge about this topic and the next time I have this conversation I will be more informed about it. Something I understand more about my own values that I didn’t before is that I understand more about why a woman wouldn’t want to have a child. I understood this before but now I understand that there could be so many reasons why. For example, it could be financial reasons, it could have been rape, it could have been that the child wasn’t wanted/planned, etc. Something I understand now about the other side is how the actual abortion procedure works. Now I know what the procedure is and how it works and how sometimes it can have emotional side effects to the woman that get them. Before I started this project I didn’t know how what the procedure was and now I know and I can understand where pro-life people are coming from and why it is so intense.
Something I have learned about democracy after this project is that I am glad to be in a country that is a democracy. I am glad that the public gets a say in what happens to us, even though it doesn’t always go as planned, I’m glad we aren’t in a dictatorship or something harsher than that.
My political views have not changed because of this project but I have learned a lot about both sides of the political spectrum over this project that is going to be really useful in the future. Before this I didn’t know what the term “straw man” ment and now I do and I will definitely notice when people do it a lot more from here on out. I learned what it meant to be “Willing to Be Disturbed” and I will probably think about that every time I am having a discussion with someone and we are trying to understand the other person’s point of view. I think a lot more people could benefit from reading that paper. Overall I’m just really happy with everything I learned during this project because it is going to help me in the long run.
I think the role that rogerian rhetoric and “Willingness to be Disturbed” is really useful in a democratic society because people use rhetoric everyday. Politicians use rhetoric to convince people to be on their side or vote for them, literally every part of the government uses this type of speech. The paper “Willingness to be Disturbed” I think would help so many people in their day to day lives. I especially think people in our government should be reading this. It is something that I think has a lot of potential to help people try to have civil discourse with one another. I think this could come in handy when two people who aren’t even in our government are just trying to have a conversation but disagree with each other. This helps people see why it is so important to try to step into someone else’s shoes for a day and try to see where they are coming from. I think this is an important skill for everyone to have.
Now that I have looked at both sides of abortions more deeply, I can say I learned more about where both sides are coming from and why most of them think the way they think. I wouldn’t say my perspective has shifted, but I would say I have a lot more knowledge about this topic and the next time I have this conversation I will be more informed about it. Something I understand more about my own values that I didn’t before is that I understand more about why a woman wouldn’t want to have a child. I understood this before but now I understand that there could be so many reasons why. For example, it could be financial reasons, it could have been rape, it could have been that the child wasn’t wanted/planned, etc. Something I understand now about the other side is how the actual abortion procedure works. Now I know what the procedure is and how it works and how sometimes it can have emotional side effects to the woman that get them. Before I started this project I didn’t know how what the procedure was and now I know and I can understand where pro-life people are coming from and why it is so intense.
Something I have learned about democracy after this project is that I am glad to be in a country that is a democracy. I am glad that the public gets a say in what happens to us, even though it doesn’t always go as planned, I’m glad we aren’t in a dictatorship or something harsher than that.
My political views have not changed because of this project but I have learned a lot about both sides of the political spectrum over this project that is going to be really useful in the future. Before this I didn’t know what the term “straw man” ment and now I do and I will definitely notice when people do it a lot more from here on out. I learned what it meant to be “Willing to Be Disturbed” and I will probably think about that every time I am having a discussion with someone and we are trying to understand the other person’s point of view. I think a lot more people could benefit from reading that paper. Overall I’m just really happy with everything I learned during this project because it is going to help me in the long run.
I think the role that rogerian rhetoric and “Willingness to be Disturbed” is really useful in a democratic society because people use rhetoric everyday. Politicians use rhetoric to convince people to be on their side or vote for them, literally every part of the government uses this type of speech. The paper “Willingness to be Disturbed” I think would help so many people in their day to day lives. I especially think people in our government should be reading this. It is something that I think has a lot of potential to help people try to have civil discourse with one another. I think this could come in handy when two people who aren’t even in our government are just trying to have a conversation but disagree with each other. This helps people see why it is so important to try to step into someone else’s shoes for a day and try to see where they are coming from. I think this is an important skill for everyone to have.
My Musical Philosophical Project Reflection
|
|
Description of Project and Reflection: For this project, we were supposed to create a project that explains our personal philosophy. For me, I said "My personal philosophy of our purpose on Earth is that everyone tries to do their best to do good, and sometimes that doesn’t always work out and/or people have their low points where things don’t feel like they are going to get better and they’re stuck. This is what I wrote my songs about, those low points where you feel like you have to look up to see rock bottom or you’re stuck and you’re sinking and nothing is getting better. I want to say to people who feel like they are in that situation that nothing is permanent and everything gets better. Even though you might feel like you’re in that dark place forever, you’re not." I focused on existentialism and what I thought it would feel like to go through an existential crisis. At first, I wanted to write about what it's like to have these existential thoughts as a teenager because that's usually when those thoughts start to form. My project had to do with these three essential questions:
|
- What is the purpose of (your/human) existence?
- What does it mean to live a meaningful life? AND What gives your life meaning?
There were new insights I developed over the course of this project about myself like how hard it is to figure out how to perfectly capture exact feelings with certain notes on a certain instrument. Music can be translated in many different ways. Especially with teenagers because at this point in life you are figuring out who you are and everything might seem new and different. So making a song that might be able to capture those feelings could possibly help other teenagers feel like they aren't alone. I know this song won't reach a popularity point to where thousands of teenagers will hear it, so it just makes me wonder. If I practice more songwriting and lyric writing I know I could become a much better musician. My thinking has been influenced by my student of philosophy and ethics by simply remembering our discussion of existentialism and how it applies to many different conversations. More specifically my little brother who is a freshman has started going through that thought process. He explains to me how he thinks nothing matters and we're only tiny little beings in the universe. He sometimes thinks that it's all too overwhelming to talk because there are no answers to any of his questions. It's the same thought process I used to experience and still do sometimes, and many other young adults experience as well.
When I have more intellectual quandaries from this point on, I will know the normalcy of them and how much research there is on these existentialist thoughts. Things that I wonder about now that I haven't thought of before is how many songs are there out there are written about existentialism and how many of them do I know? Do I listen to songs about existentialism and I don't even know it? Tyler, The Creator's song "Boredom" is about being alone in his room and wishing his friends would finally ask him up to hang out. It's not about having an existential crisis but it seems like the type of thoughts that you start to have before you have a crisis. Like when you're feeling alone and you have a lot of time to yourself and you start thinking about things. You might start to question life and start asking the basic existentialist questions. Questions I still need to answer for myself are bigger questions like "Who am I?", "Why does everything exist?", and "What happens after death?" or slightly less intense questions like "What am I going to do in college and after college?", "What am I going to pursue as a career?", and "Am I going to keep singing/playing/writing music as I grow up?".
Album Art Options:
|
|
|
The image on the far left was made by me and the other two were made by Noelle John.
“To Care or Not to Care About Where Your Food Comes From: That is the Question” The Ethics of Food and Eating
This project was about the industrial food system, industrial organic food systems and the beyond organic farms. We read a book called "The Omnivores Dilemma" and we watched documentaries about farms and other ones about child obesity. I learned many things from this project like how industrial, corn-fed, livestock is treated and killed, how corn is connected to everything I eat, and how the industrial and industrial organic food systems work. We also got to go on a field trip to Sunnyside Meats and Turtle Lake. At Sunnyside Meats we got to see how organic cows are slaughtered and how they are butchered, stored, and sold. At Turtle Lake we got to see what weeds are edible and how mushrooms can be used to revive dead and possibly toxic land. At the end of this project we all wrote a paper about our own food ethic and what our opinions are. Mine is below and I talk about what I think, why and other things we learned about throughout this project.
The interdisciplinary nature of this project impacted my learning by connecting to my chemistry class and how we included learning about our impact on Earth with waste and we also learned about the chemistry of food and how things like citric acid and baking soda work. Studying food in both classes (humanities and chemistry) impacted my learning by helping me learn multiple sides of this project like the chemistry behind making pancakes works and also things like where do the ingredients for the pancakes come from.
My main takeaways from studying food academically is that I really get to understand what happens behind the scenes of slaughter houses and giant feedlots where animals are abused. There was so much about our food systems that I didn't know about that's really important. For example how farmers used to grow a variety of crops and now majority of farmers only grow corn or soybeans. Potato farmers use extremely dangerous chemicals to keep away certain bugs, so dangerous that humans aren't allowed to go near the crop for six months until all the chemicals aren't in the crop anymore and are safe to eat. My thinking about food before this project was very minimal because I never knew what the food on my plate went through nor did I ever think about it or cared to know. Now that I know I think about it almost every time I eat meat now. I think about how the cows probably grew up and how they were treated. I think about the cages the chickens were shoved in and were forced to live in. I still think it's important to buy organic/local food but I didn't realize before this project why it was so important. Food that isn't grown locally is flown from all over the world and contributed to global warming because of all the energy that is put into bringing that food everywhere in cars and planes. I believe that this should be common knowledge among all the people that contribute to eating food that isn't bought/grown locally.
The interdisciplinary nature of this project impacted my learning by connecting to my chemistry class and how we included learning about our impact on Earth with waste and we also learned about the chemistry of food and how things like citric acid and baking soda work. Studying food in both classes (humanities and chemistry) impacted my learning by helping me learn multiple sides of this project like the chemistry behind making pancakes works and also things like where do the ingredients for the pancakes come from.
My main takeaways from studying food academically is that I really get to understand what happens behind the scenes of slaughter houses and giant feedlots where animals are abused. There was so much about our food systems that I didn't know about that's really important. For example how farmers used to grow a variety of crops and now majority of farmers only grow corn or soybeans. Potato farmers use extremely dangerous chemicals to keep away certain bugs, so dangerous that humans aren't allowed to go near the crop for six months until all the chemicals aren't in the crop anymore and are safe to eat. My thinking about food before this project was very minimal because I never knew what the food on my plate went through nor did I ever think about it or cared to know. Now that I know I think about it almost every time I eat meat now. I think about how the cows probably grew up and how they were treated. I think about the cages the chickens were shoved in and were forced to live in. I still think it's important to buy organic/local food but I didn't realize before this project why it was so important. Food that isn't grown locally is flown from all over the world and contributed to global warming because of all the energy that is put into bringing that food everywhere in cars and planes. I believe that this should be common knowledge among all the people that contribute to eating food that isn't bought/grown locally.
|
The the left is the book we read, "The Omnivore's Dilemma".
|
