Week 14

Doing this big project really helped me a lot with my critical thinking. Before this project I would have given myself a 2 or 3 in critical thinking because I was really struggling with it. Now I would give myself a 5 because I have worked very hard at thinking critically and now I have a deeper understanding of it. The research paper helped me a lot with critical thinking because I was able to match up events with each other. For example I realized that crop failures and military service caused farmers to move to America. They did not just do it on their own. With doing all that research for the research paper I was able to understand it and interpret my information instead of just felling like I was giving a summary of what happened.
Doing all this research helped me with my thesis statement. When you don’t do a lot of research its hard to create a thesis, but with all the research that we did for this project I got a sense of how life was for farmers and the thesis statement came naturally to me. Before this project I did not think anything of industrialism. I knew that it gave us technology but other than that I didn’t care. From this project I learned so much more. I realized the huge effect that industrialism had on farmers and workers. I will take that with me and now when someone talks about industrialism I won’t just go yeah whatever, ill now go wow was a big event. I can also teach other people who have no clue about industrialism what I learned.

This project has helped me take more of a facilitating role. Before this project I used to be shy about telling people to do things when they weren’t working. From this project I learned that making people do work when their not really doing anything helps your group out a lot. Our group got a lot more done when I asked people to work when they were just sitting there.
For the future I will bring more stuff to the group and continue to ask people to do work when there not. I am happy because I did a lot more work for this project than I did for others. I helped with the power point and a lot of other steps for the project. Like I talked about earlier there were a lot of people in our group that were playing around and not doing work. They were also taking when they were suppose to be working. I handled this by putting them to work when they were just sitting there. If that did not work I talked to Josh or who’s other class I was in.

I have always been good at managing projects effectively. I am always turning in my homework on time. So handling all these steps was not hard for me. There’s was points like when I was working on my map that I was afraid I would not get my map in on time but, I was able to turn my map in on time. I did turn in my research paper one day late, but other than that I got all my other steps done on time.
I never really fell behind but as a group we fell behind because we did not get out profile map signed off right away. We then just started working really hard and we were able to catch up with everyone else. Through this project I noticed no matter how bored with this project I got I just kept working and getting the steps done. For the future I will continue to facilitate my group more and try to help out a little bit more. I still did a lot of work, but I would like to try to do more for the future.