3rd semester end of year reflection

There's never a day when I haven't learned something new in Mr. Patersons' class. For me, the top 3 topics we learned in class were, teamwork activity, the corporation documentary, and the Israel Palestine dispute analysis. 

Firstly the teamwork activity made me realize the level of captivity my brain was in. We first did the marshmallow challenge, and though we did not take too much time talking about what to do, we weren't able to go far as to ask for more ingredients. When thinking about why these kinds of mindsets are created, I thought of the school system to be a large factor in this. When at school, I often try to get assignments done without asking teachers or without seeking help. If I absolutely needed help on something I would try with my friends and make sure that the teacher (who should know the most) were the last people I would approach. I think that this was caused because of the fear of embarrassment or the fear of damaging my image. There is a saying that goes "it never hurts to ask" and doing this activity made me realize how real this saying was. The reality is, even if the teacher declines your request, it won't change what you have to do, but if you do ask and they say yes, it would help you get a lead that nobody would have. The fear of losing won to the greed of wanting more. This connected to the prisoner's dilemma that we learned early on in the year. I felt like this class taught me how small changes mentally could greatly help the direct outcome of certain events. 

Next, is the corporation documentary. We watched this documentary over a course of a few weeks, and we went through what kinds of tricks corporations use to deceive their customers. The thing that really made this stand out is the wide range of examples it showed us. For example, he talks about segregation, fast labor, product placement, and many other problems with corporations in current society. In all of the topics that the documentary talked about, product placement and the measures companies go to get their products to customers surprised me the most. Product placement is not something rare. We see it in movies and videos, ads, and many other kinds of entertainment platforms. But one place we don't see it often, and quite frankly shouldn't see it is in our daily lives. Leaving empty amazon boxes to want people to buy things from amazon, surreptitiously plugging products in life to get real people interested in products really shocked me and made me wonder how much of life is actually happening. 

Lastly, the Israel Palestine problem is the problem that I most vividly remember. Analyzing real-time news is was something that I had never done as we often look at past events when talking about the media. But learning about something the next day it happens, allows us to recognize the idea that we have. For example, there was a day when I was watching the news in the morning before school and heard the news about all the terrible things that Palestinians are doing. But soon after in class, we learned how things aren't always the way they seem on the media. This quick realization allowed me to fully see the deception that I was under and let me understand the need of fixing this problem. 

The coronavirus changed how live our lives every day, but the media is always able to provide people with news. The more we read and get into it the more we believe the things they say. This class allowed me to understand the need to seek truth, the danger of just believing some things just because some big company says so. This class taught me how to be suspicious of things around us and how to figure out what is real and isn't. I think that these skills aren't just something that I'll forget in a few years as finding out what's real is a large part of understanding current politics. I would like to use what I have learned in this class as a way to seek real information on news that may be tainted by the payed rich media.