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kcofrinsha's picture

Week 13

I took the advice to go back to earlier posts and read my first 3 posts of the semester. A couple things struck me about them. The first is the way my view of this class has changed. In one of my early posts I said that understanding what this class is about was like trying to put together a puzzle with missing pieces. In most classes there is something the professor wants the students to learn about and then they learn about that topic.  It took me a while, but I have stopped viewing this class in that way. We certainly read and talked about evolution a lot, but unlike most classes I don't feel like the professors have certain things they want us to learn. Instead, I feel like I am able to decide what I want to think about and learn.  This has become really exciting for me because I have gotten to think about the things that I am most interested in.  I love Bryn Mawr's education classes (to the point where I only want to take education classes, unfortunately Bryn Mawr doesn't have an education major) and the freedom this class has given me to think about educational theories in relation to evolution has been really nice.  

I also realized the large number of things we have discussed over the weeks. I wrote about the difference between fiction and non-fiction in one of my early posts. What I wrote is very interesting, but I don't remember the discussion that inspired it. I don't remember every discussion we have had during class, but I am amazed at the number of different topics we have been able to discuss.

The third thing that struck me was the fact that I said I didn't think my high school Biology teacher would approve of my new thoughts about Darwin. I disagree with myself now.  I think that she would be impressed at the complexities my knowledge about Darwin has taken on. She did tell us that natural selection happens, but I don't think she meant to imply that everything Darwin thought was right.  I think that she just told us what she could in our extremely short study of evolution (it couldn't have been more than a week in our biology curriculum).  

I'm sure I would have more to say if I went back and read all my previous posts, but what surprises me about the first three posts is how much my thinking about our class and evolution has changed. 

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