Socialization and Mask Project
In our first freshman humanities project, we learned about a very broad concept called "socialization". There were many aspects to this idea, but a main one included how society has affected our personal values and views. We were assigned to write a five (or more) paragraph essay describing what parts of our identities have been altered the most through this socialization. Around completion of the essay, we were then told to design a mask conveying this socialization in symbols and terms that are associated with our socialization. The end piece was, in a few words, beautiful work.
Mask and Essay Reflections.
Prompt I: How have I grown as a writer?
As a writer I feel like I have grown strongly in the art of refinement. While I was transitioning from “essay” to “essay: final draft” I found myself altering sentence structures, vocabulary, conjunctions and many other literary concepts. For example, my topic sentence of paragraph three (which discussed religion’s direct play in society) in my essay draft originally read “Whether people accept it or deny it, religion has affected us all in one way or another. Whether one is a non-believer, a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu or belongs to any other form of belief; it had persuaded their life in some way.”. But when I refined this draft into a final product, the sentence then read “As a teenager who was raised by a Christian family, and later on introduced into Catholicism, my life has been greatly affected by my religious background,”. I feel as though shortening the sentence has made the topic clearer, as well as bringing the fact that religion has affected me personally. This makes it obvious that I have been socialized and what the following paragraph will be focusing on. After much more of clarifying ideas and using different words I have thus realized that refinement should always be done to a piece, and is arguably one of the most important steps in completion.
Prompt II: What is my largest take away from this project?
Before we began this unit, through the majority of my life I felt, in a word, pathetic. When I was creating my mask I wanted to convey how greatly religion has given me self doubt. Using biblical terms and symbols on both, I did just that. Throughout my life my heart knew that somehow my views were being swayed because of my religious background, but my thoughts argued that I was simply being pitiful of my own self dilemmas. Because I had no idea what socialization was at this time, I believed myself; that I was being stupid over something that didn’t exist. It was always in the back of my mind, looming over me like an ominous black cloud. From the moment Sarah listed the six identity categories for myself and my peers, it slowly began to dawn upon me that my heart had been right all along. I knew that I needed to create both my mask and essay revolved around just how much religion has socialized me. Now I take away from this project that even though I will keep my religion in my life, I will always be more than what it wants for me; and know that it has always been there being the puppeteer of my life. But now no longer.
Prompt III: What were my goals as a group member? What was challenges/successes did I have?
I’ve always been an easily distractible person, so in this project my goal was to really be a useful asset to my team and help get the hallway ready in time for the exhibition. I was quite nervous about approaching this goal because I was assigned to prepare the hallway. This had granted me much easily abused freedom. I did get sidetracked on occasion, but not nearly as often as I had feared. Whenever I was not assisting in the writing part of this preparation, I was asking my teammates what else I could be doing to help. Although sometimes instead of helping I’d wander around the hallways viewing other rooms and speaking to other students; and once or twice I had actually left the building. I believe that I was still able to help my group though, perhaps not as much as I could have, but I was still an asset nonetheless.
Prompt IV: What did I do as a group member?
As I’ve claimed before, there was likely much more that I could have achieved for my group if I had not gotten sidetracked occasionally. However, there was still many vital aspects of the exhibition that I accomplished for my team. An example of this is shown when another team member and I had put together multiple scripts for the hallway performers. Once we had completed the scripts, we handed them over to their assigned performer and allowed them to alter them if there had to be any. Although if I had not done this it would have likely still had gotten done, but that would mean that my group would lose a set of hands that could be helping the team with physical components. As soon as we completed the scripts, we were assisting the rest of the team in setting up the hallways. The end product may have been refined again before the exhibition, but it wa obvious we did not have the time or budget to do that. So we decided that the team had (for the most part) equally shared the workload and that the product was quite impressive for the given time. It sound selfish, but I think I did manage to help work us towards success in this exhibition.
As a writer I feel like I have grown strongly in the art of refinement. While I was transitioning from “essay” to “essay: final draft” I found myself altering sentence structures, vocabulary, conjunctions and many other literary concepts. For example, my topic sentence of paragraph three (which discussed religion’s direct play in society) in my essay draft originally read “Whether people accept it or deny it, religion has affected us all in one way or another. Whether one is a non-believer, a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu or belongs to any other form of belief; it had persuaded their life in some way.”. But when I refined this draft into a final product, the sentence then read “As a teenager who was raised by a Christian family, and later on introduced into Catholicism, my life has been greatly affected by my religious background,”. I feel as though shortening the sentence has made the topic clearer, as well as bringing the fact that religion has affected me personally. This makes it obvious that I have been socialized and what the following paragraph will be focusing on. After much more of clarifying ideas and using different words I have thus realized that refinement should always be done to a piece, and is arguably one of the most important steps in completion.
Prompt II: What is my largest take away from this project?
Before we began this unit, through the majority of my life I felt, in a word, pathetic. When I was creating my mask I wanted to convey how greatly religion has given me self doubt. Using biblical terms and symbols on both, I did just that. Throughout my life my heart knew that somehow my views were being swayed because of my religious background, but my thoughts argued that I was simply being pitiful of my own self dilemmas. Because I had no idea what socialization was at this time, I believed myself; that I was being stupid over something that didn’t exist. It was always in the back of my mind, looming over me like an ominous black cloud. From the moment Sarah listed the six identity categories for myself and my peers, it slowly began to dawn upon me that my heart had been right all along. I knew that I needed to create both my mask and essay revolved around just how much religion has socialized me. Now I take away from this project that even though I will keep my religion in my life, I will always be more than what it wants for me; and know that it has always been there being the puppeteer of my life. But now no longer.
Prompt III: What were my goals as a group member? What was challenges/successes did I have?
I’ve always been an easily distractible person, so in this project my goal was to really be a useful asset to my team and help get the hallway ready in time for the exhibition. I was quite nervous about approaching this goal because I was assigned to prepare the hallway. This had granted me much easily abused freedom. I did get sidetracked on occasion, but not nearly as often as I had feared. Whenever I was not assisting in the writing part of this preparation, I was asking my teammates what else I could be doing to help. Although sometimes instead of helping I’d wander around the hallways viewing other rooms and speaking to other students; and once or twice I had actually left the building. I believe that I was still able to help my group though, perhaps not as much as I could have, but I was still an asset nonetheless.
Prompt IV: What did I do as a group member?
As I’ve claimed before, there was likely much more that I could have achieved for my group if I had not gotten sidetracked occasionally. However, there was still many vital aspects of the exhibition that I accomplished for my team. An example of this is shown when another team member and I had put together multiple scripts for the hallway performers. Once we had completed the scripts, we handed them over to their assigned performer and allowed them to alter them if there had to be any. Although if I had not done this it would have likely still had gotten done, but that would mean that my group would lose a set of hands that could be helping the team with physical components. As soon as we completed the scripts, we were assisting the rest of the team in setting up the hallways. The end product may have been refined again before the exhibition, but it wa obvious we did not have the time or budget to do that. So we decided that the team had (for the most part) equally shared the workload and that the product was quite impressive for the given time. It sound selfish, but I think I did manage to help work us towards success in this exhibition.