JP Aquino
Immigration Project Reflection
In this whole immigration project we had to do three things. We had to read a book about immigration and post what we think on our blogs. Then we respond to our group members blog and say what we think about the quote they chose. The second thing we have to do is was to paint an art piece that relates to our book. The last thing we have to do is interview an immigrant. I think this was a long project because we did a lot of things that helped us learn more about immigrants and immigration.
It was very hard because it's hard to tell when the book is a past or present, because Valentino is always telling stories about him when he was in Africa. It's hard because it doesn't say when its about to be a story about the past when it transitions from present to the past. I wasn't really happy about my choice, because my book was gigantic and everyone else's was smaller than ours. I was really upset that I had to read 90 pages per meeting. I could have lessened our pages that we have to read by increasing the pages we had to read by the first meeting because we had a day off before we get back to school, so we had more to read and the rest of the pages would be less. But my group members didn't listen so we ended up reading 90 pages per meeting and I wasn't happy about that. It was okay having to read the book though. It was a very good book about someone's life. I liked how detailed the story was so I can see what the author is thinking in his head when he is writing the book. I also saw how difficult it was for Valentino in Africa and Atlanta.
I learned how hard it was to survive in Africa when your village is being raided by murahaleens and when you are in the night in the forest with hungry lions. I also learned how differently my literature group interpreted the way Dave Eggers wrote the book. I saw how my group saw a lot about the book in a small quote. I couldn't think of anything for the question when one of my group members chose a small quote because I didn't interpret the quote they way they interpreted the quote. I think that this book had a lot of things happening in it. There is no part in this book where there is something boring happening. There is always something interesting happening in this book.
I think that the current literature process is good as is. But the only thing I would add is predictions. I think we should add predictions to our posts, so then when we comment we can either agree or disagree about our group members prediction and we would give an explanation to why we think that way. I think that adding predictions will really improve this activity and will start more conversations about who's predictions are right and wrong.
I think that blogging for our literature circle book is a good idea. Compared to talking face to face with our literature circle book, blogging is a lot easier. I think it is easier because if you talk face to face with your group you would have less time to think and answer someone's question because someone people need more time to think than other people and we don't get pressured on answering the quote or question faster because if you talk face to face with your group you are using class time, so you are limited with time to answer.
Sometimes I would have trouble commenting because my group members didn't post yet, or they could have mistyped something and I wouldn't know that they are asking or saying. I learned that they interpreted the book differently than I did. I also learned a lot about the book while reading my groups posts, because I could have misread something in the book while reading and that made me think differently about the story.
The second thing that we have to do for this project is make an art piece that relates to our book. What I chose to do is to recreate the book cover because the current book cover is plain. That it doesn't really explain much. We had to do make two different book covers and then choose one of them for our final piece. My first idea was to make a cover based on what happened and what is in the book. To show what he has experienced and thought about during the book. My second idea was just two continents, America and Africa, with an arrow in between so at least people would think that this book is about someone going from Africa to America. In the end I chose to do my first idea because my peers thought it looked good.
I think that there isn't an easy connection made between my art piece and the book I read because I think that you would get what is going on in my art piece after you have read the book. In the end I thought that I should have done the second idea instead because two continents and an arrow in between easily makes people think about immigration from Africa to America.
I think that it turned better than what I thought it would turn out. I'm not really good at painting so I thought my art piece would have ended up a mess. There were also a lot of detailed images I included in my piece, so I had to be very careful.
A lot of things would have enhanced the quality for my final piece. One thing is that I should have painted with a smaller brush for the more detailed images so I can make the image look better. I also think that if I out lined my images before painting the insides would have helped a lot because then I could see where I'm not suppose to paint with the out line.
I learned that you shouldn't make your art piece about whats in the book because most of the people going to look at it will know because they didn't read the book yet. You should have made an image about what the whole book was about and not what is in it.
The last thing we have to do for this project it to interview an immigrant. My interview process was very smooth because my immigrant answered the questions I asked very thoughtfully so I had a lot of info about her. If she gave me one word or one sentence answers it would be very difficult to understand how hard or easy it was for them to adapt to a new country.
I didn't really understand why we had to do a total of three interviews until Mrs. G told us. But, I thought it was going to be hard, because I worried if I would have ran out of questions to ask. I thought that emailing was the easiest because when they reply you won't have to write their answers down unlike using the phone or a face to face interview. For email if you forget one of their answers you can just look at the email they sent to you.
I learned that Canada is not that different from the United States because she really made it clear that Canada is very similar to the United States besides all the states and the different flags. In the first two interviews that I did by email I mostly learned about Canada's culture. I learned the different foods, languages, and religions. In the last interview I learned more about my interviewee's personal life, hobbies, likes, and dislikes. All the interviews helped me understand about immigration and more reasons for immigration other than disliking your home country.
I learned that there are many reasons for immigrating. I learned that most of people's reasons for immigrating is because they do not like their home country. I learned that there are more reasons for immigrating. Some just want to go to another country and experience what the new country has to offer. I learned that immigrating in this present time is easier than immigrating back then during the huge immigration waves because back then you either had to go through Angel Island or Ellis Island. The waiting time from getting from one country to another was longer back then than it is now, because it would take months to get there. Now it will just take a couple hours to go from one country to another.
