As the groups went through their presentations, I was amazed to see the connections to our lives on campus. I learned about the roots of construction and education. I saw connections between our work in tutorial and our other classes. My group used readings from my  political science class and another group used information from their linguistics class. All the connections within our small class got me thinking about the connections between texts that we have read. It was incredible to see how all of our keywords were applicable to the texts we’ve analyzed throughout the semester. The presence of education is in many more texts than I would have thought.  Even within texts there is the differentiation between formal and informal. When Will and Yaz were explaining the definitons, I saw how applicable all these keywords are to our lives. We will certainly be seeing the actions of agency, consequences of time, and results of education along with many other things in our careers here at Grinnell.

These analysis of keywords and autobiographies will help all of us in our future years at Grinnell. I think it is important to understand the discoveries we have made in our course. I continue to think about the reoccurring themes of patriarchy, revelation, family, travel, and much much more. The information that may have been left out by the writers are also a vital part of the story; I will be reading and analyzing in a much different way after this course.

Todays class was spent reviewing the key ideas of academic honesty. We took a quiz that really made the class recognize how some areas that were not as easy to understand. For example, it is alright to use someone’s writing word for word but then it is necessary to give a citation. The citation is the currency of academia so it is essential to give credit where credit is due.  Also, I learned a very important rule that it does not matter whether the plagiarism was purposeful, it will still be directed to the subcommittee for Academic Honesty. I think it was important to know that if there is a case of plagiarism, the instructor and student should not settle it alone. It must be reported to the subcommittee and further action is taken there.

Further on in the class we moved on to practicing the differences between quotations, paraphrasing, and summarizing. It was useful to see the differentiation explicitly on a worksheet and then the ideas were reinforced when we practiced them in our small groups. Each group shared their summaries with others who did not have that reading. In the group that I went to, I learned about the keyword “immigration”. One really captivating point of the argument in that essay was the idea of “social economic checkpoints” . I am compelled to do more research and understand how competition and conflict in particular can affect immigrant families. Does the competition enhance society? What role can conflict give in a positive manner? Negative? I also realized that the discuss of immigrants needs to have not only immigrants involved but those that are surrounding their lives with immigrants or friends of immigrants. I am interested to see what work has developed around that idea.