Midterm/Final format suggestions

Just a suggestion, but it may be more efficient to conduct midterms/finals in this class if you do everything the same...except give out outlines with all the possible questions for the essays to be hand written for the test.

So on the day before the test, give the students the outlines with the test questions on it. The outline should provide students the theses and citations from Takaki, Bold Words, CRT term/tenets, etc. for the essay. It should be enough to get a good basis on what to write, but not enough to copy the outline word-for-word so that students could finish the whole essay way before the time limit.

This will give the students plenty of time to cite sources and come up with well-structured essays. This should help because when the students walk in, they don't have to worry about collaborating with other students beforehand. They can start right away and finish the test within a reasonable amount of time. And students should still be able to learn and study the material this way. Again, this is just a suggestion that worked pretty well for my English teacher last year.

Overall Class Reflection

I thought that this class was really interesting because a lot of it opened my eyes to how things were in America back then. It enhanced my perspective on other people's cultures and especially mine as a Chinese American. Before this class, I was taught in 5th grade that the only sucky part about being an Asian immigrant was going through Angel Island, but that obviously wasn't even close to half of what they all experienced. This realization also pointed out that US education should not focus solely on white history (with some black, civil rights, abolitionist history), but on one that consists of all the races that contributed to the prosperity of America. If only there were thousands of you teaching at high schools, or even middle schools, would our nation understand other races and how they stand in America today. Hopefully someday that will happen and there would be less racism and more acceptance of all people.

(Untitled)

As Chinese American, I would like to share my experience with double consciousness. First off, I was born in Taiwan and moved to California when I was still a baby. My dad was spent a lot of his youth in southern China and my mom was born in the Bronx and grew up in Miami. Both of them had parents who stuck to traditions pretty well and they are still being practiced today in the family. Our furniture arrangements are somewhat strange and traditional, we have "hot pot" dinners, celebrate Chinese holidays with relatives and have huge family dinners. Although we have family traditions dating way back to our ancestors in China, you can say that my family now is pretty Americanized considering that we are literate in English, eat American food and follow American customs.

I would say that I am technically the third generation of my family in America. My parents speak Chinese and my parents' parents spoke Chinese, but my brother and I speak only English and a little Spanish. Connecting with the reading, my brother and I follow the inevitable trend of Americanization. It's weird when I think about it. But it just happens when you're born in a community dominated by white people and customs and my parents never really were strict on learning Chinese or kept me away from Japanese kids like the mom from "Clay Walls." They didn't say that I had to be a doctor, engineer or some kind of genius scientist. My parents gave me a lot of freedom compared to some of the fictional characters from Bold Words and I am grateful for that and I am also grateful for being in America during a time of greater equality.

Chinese food

The food yesterday was good even though it wasn't exactly authentic Chinese food. The orange chicken was definitely the best dish out of all of them. If only the bbq pork wasn't so dry it would have been the best. Anyway, it was definitely all worth the $6 and I thank you for all of it. Also, I overheard you talking about dim sum and if you want really good dim sum and happen to be in San Francisco, you should definitely drop by a place called Yank Sing in downtown SF. I have been to dim sum restaurants all around California, Hong Kong and Taiwan and I think that Yank Sing is the best out of all the ones that I've been to. If you do go, may I warn you of the unorthodox and crowded parking garage below the restaurant. The spaces are really close together and cramped that it is a guarantee you will have to make multiple corrections. If you're lucky, you can park right outside the building in front of the meters. Besides parking, you should have a good time there.

Last one

I am going to talk about my experience in the class as a whole. I loved it, the information was interesting not always the brightest of topics. But we need to learn from the past, great example is the giver (one of my favorite books, why i wrote about it twice). This class was lively and fun, I can't think of anyone sleeping in the entire class, unheard of. I think the professor is amazing. Yea I think this was just a cool class. It opened my eyes to some ideas that I hadn't even considered before. I have a new appreciation for several of my friends who grew up with parents who were immigrants themselves.

NONE

Is there a difference in racism between the beliefs of ethnic groups and European Americans. I think there is a huge difference between what European Americans believe they did and what the ethnic groups believe happened. I think European Americans believed that what they were doing was OK and right there wasn't any fault to them, the brain doesn't honestly register some experiences like that. It was too normal for them to make any note about their behavior. The ethnic groups were treated so poorly they felt that it was unjust, and it was, so they made notes about it and remembered it. They didn't want to have their children experience the same injustice so they had to remember theirs more.

8

Is a crt pessimistic or optimistic? well I don't think its either, its both and none. I think that because it is a way of describing the problems that we have had in the past and knowledge them it is a pessimistic thing. We were jerks and these are essential classifications of different jerkiness to people. I think this is an optimistic thing because as any AA attendee the first step to fixing the problem is accepting and acknowledged that you have a problem. We have accepted that we have them which means we can now start to work on eliminating them, I think that in time we will have similar situations but for other issues. These are both optimistic and pessimistic all at the same time, I am going against the grain here and saying that.