A Look Back...

This has been a very educational term for me. I think I have learned some very valuable things during this course that I plan to apply to my life. Other things, I have to admit; unfortunately will probably be ignored for that ever present issue of time and convenience. The readings were some of the most interesting ones assigned to me since freshman English where we read Dante’s Inferno (how can a trip through the circles of Hell not be interesting!?). The books provided me with some very eye opening moments, as well as some new insights into food which is something that all of us can relate to. Everyone eats! It’s our “common ground” as Sophie’s blog is so accurately titled. I plan on giving my mom Omnivore’s Dilemma for her birthday/mother’s day (yes, I combine the two… the days are only 3ish apart for her). I think she would really find this interesting and my dad too for that matter since his health is not the greatest. When a person comes into some very important knowledge, they want to share it, and that’s how I feel about the things that I have learned in this class. The readings were definitely my favorite part of the class. It would have probably been the group project, because I was very happy with how our poster came out, but group work proved rather stressful as usual. My group people were all involved; however, I was the only person in my group who made every meeting we scheduled outside of class making me the constant. This meant that at the next group meeting, part of it was spent recapping what went on at the last meeting for the “new” group who could make this one, while knowing that the same thing would take place at the next one because someone else was missing from this one. I understand that scheduling conflicts are a problem; we all have lives outside of school, which makes coordinating group work very difficult. But we did the best we could with the time we had and I think our final product turned out really good. I was not able to make it to the actual farm tour, but I was very involved in everything leading up to that such as generating questions to take to the farmer, and everything after: typing up farmer responses from Casimira’s notes, and writing the text for the poster with the help of Casimira and Iana. I think one of the most challenging aspects of the group work after the group members’ absences and scheduling conflicts, was communicating with farmers, and People’s staff. I tried to set up a tour with 47^th St farms and my calls were not returned, which was a bummer because, as fore mentioned, I REALLY want to be able to go out to at least one farm.

Overall, I feel like I contributed greatly to my group’s project. I was a stable, consistent, member of our group and helped a lot with the poster and the process, and the research into the benefits of local organics and how our poster can help increase interest in locally grown produce.

I roughly documented my hours for this class weekly and was averaging around 12 hours a week for this class. I don’t want to put a whole log of hours, because I feel like it would be redundant and unnecessary to list the hours and things done during those hours because the majority of that time is tied up in reading (I’m a slow reader). I did go to the immigration forum, and would like to point out that I was the only person from our class to go, and spent lots of time meeting outside class with my group members. If I had to give myself a grade, it would be a “B”. I admittedly don’t think I put in the amount of work required for an “A” but do feel like I accomplished a “B” level of work for this class. Thank you for a great term Pedro, I learned a lot!