At the beginning of this class the goals
I had in mind were to retain a lot of information from a textbook. This was the
goal I had set myself for this class. However very quickly I realized that
memorizing is only one way of learning.
To my surprise this class required
much less memorizing than I would have expected, probably due to the fact that
it is entirely delivered online. Consequently a fair way to assess students
understanding and work is not through a test, a quiz or anything requiring
textbook facts regurgitating but rather asking something unique from the
student, a written composition.
I have to confess that in this
class I fulfilled a goal I didn't know I had at the beginning of the semester. I
learned how studying efficiently is done. I knew that studying well doesn't
mean sitting in front of a textbook passively for the simple reason that the
human mind doesn't assimilate in passive way. If science classes always come
with a hands-on lab component it is because many things, as abstract as they
can be, are learned better when the mind is active.
Being proactive in the learning
process is definitely a great goal I achieved with this class. The course was
fairly writing intensive throughout and this pushed me to have a critical-thinking,
active approach to sociology concepts. To me it is a direct application of Plato’s
didactic questioning.
These skills acquired do not only
apply to this sociology course, they are valuable to the point they can be
apply to any subject. Another thing applicable to life in general are the
sociological concepts and paradigms. Understanding how our society works is
extremely important and valuable not only as a sociologist but also as citizen,
specially in a complex, multicultural society like ours where one often fails
to see the bigger picture. The different paradigms encountered in this course
reminded me that society isn't the sum of its content but the result of many
forces.
In the future I will try to work
more on reviewing my written work to ensure its quality in terms of grammar,
punctuation and syntax.
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