Penn Charter Reflection

I wanted to take American Studies at Penn Charter even before my time here started. I looked at Penn Charter in 8th grade looking to come here for high school and while looking through the course offerings, I was immediately drawn to American Studies. History and English have always been my two favorite subjects so I thought this class would be the perfect opportunity to merge both of my interests into one. American Studies is a course that none of the other high schools that I was looking at had and I think that was definitely one of the deciding factors for me. I knew I wouldn’t have another opportunity to take a class like this in my high school career if I went somewhere else. I chose Penn Charter and every year, my heart was still set …show more content…
We met as a class during a lunch period towards the end of sophomore year just to get to know each other a little bit and to learn about the dynamics of the class a little bit also. This is when I realized this class was going to be different than any other I’d taken before. I was going to experience being a minority for the first time. I am a white, Catholic, upper-middle class girl who has lived in the suburbs her entire life. Nothing about me has ever screamed ‘minority’. I was one of five students who aren’t black and one of three white students. I have to say, at first it was a little intimidating; being a minority is scary and unpredictable. Nonetheless, I was still excited for the class because I knew it was going to provide me with life-long …show more content…
Despite being a minority, I didn’t really feel like one. I think I fit in pretty well with everyone in the class despite the fact that I’m white and most other people in the class are black. Being in a class with the majority being people of color, I learned about social issues from a perspective I never thought of indepthly before. We would often stray from the lesson plans of the day because we would get caught up in a discussion and I really didn’t mind. In fact, I loved it when we got off track. Not because I didn’t want to learn what we were doing in class, but I love discussions and voicing my opinions and hearing from others. I’ve gotten to learn about people I would’ve never knew if it weren’t for American Studies. I will never forget the day we talked about what made us feel invisible before starting Invisible Man. Boy, was that intense. But not intense in a bad way. Maybe powerful is a better word. Here I sat with people whom I talked to and learned with but I never actually knew about them. We learned a lot about each other that day. Everyone shared something personal, including myself. I think that’s really when the class as a whole starting becoming a family of some sort. We respected each other and the things we’ve been through or are stilling going through. What was said that day in the classroom, stayed in the classroom. That’s the day I learned that