Reflecting on the Course

 Reflecting on the last two quarters of this Literatures of the World course, I think that the biggest thing that changed me in this course was learning how to annotate. Before this course, I hated annotating because I never knew if I was doing it right, and I just thought it was a waste of time. Now, after reading multiple texts and annotating all of them, I have learned the value of annotating. Annotating has really helped me understand texts a lot better because I think I notice smaller details now that I have learned how to annotate. I didn’t expect annotating to be so helpful, and I think that this skill of annotating will help me in other classes in the future as well.

I also think that doing research excursions changed my perspective on analyzing literature. In high school, I always just wrote essays that analyzed only the actual text from a book. I never really branched out and did research on the history of the time period or small things that were mentioned in the book. I think that it has showed me that doing research allows for a deeper understanding of the text. I was surprised to enjoy being able to almost “connect the dots” after doing research excursions in the sense that I was able to do research on a topic and then see how that research explains why the characters may act the way that they do. For me, it helped me make more sense of the texts. I also noticed that in many of my research excursions, I’ve chosen to research gender roles or women during the time period of the book (not for all of my research excursions, but for a few of them), so I feel like I’m more knowledgeable about gender roles in multiple different countries and time periods now.