The first day of English class we did something that I had never seen, or done before. We looked at pictures of Picasso’s series of bulls and wrote and explanation describing what we think of them. Picasso is a very well known artist across the world for his…interesting style, and it’s intriguing to see these bulls in this particular way. When the collection of these eleven bulls began, these bulls were very well drawn—they resembled bulls. After about four great looking bulls, he made it the Picasso style of art. Using lines and shapes to make a very strange picture—in this case, a bull. As the collection grew, I think he started to spend less time on these bulls; they were made less in depth. The eleventh bull is just six or seven lines that resemble nothing of what his first few bulls were. It’s strange to think how different his art was from the first bull to the last.
On then next day we watched a video from TED Talks—which is a great way to show many presentations from people with great ideas. We watched a video from an Nigerian woman; it was about the “single story”. Single stories are pretty straightforward: people box in a race, group, religion, etc. because of one person’s perspective—which in most cases is false. A great example she gave is when she came to the United States to go to college. When she first moved in, her roommate tried to teach her how to use a stove, thinking that people from Africa had never used a stove before. Her roommate was also surprised that this woman from Africa could speak English so well, and that she was educated. We do this all the time on a daily basis, thinking that one group is less than us just because you access a single story about this group.
After the TED Talks presentation, we did a learning style test. I tend to think these test are silly, but this one was dead on. It said that I am an interpersonal learner; this means that I like leading projects, or sharing my thoughts. I find myself enjoying taking leadership roles in projects, and I also tend to talk a lot in classes when we are reflecting on topics (sometimes too much). I hope that my enjoyment of being a leader will help me out in school, and when I’m in the workplace. GCE has taught me a lot about real life circumstances that will definitely help me out in the future to succeed.
