Self Portrait Journal,
“Who Do You Think You Are”?
You will write a “Self Portrait” journal that describes your background, including ethnicity, family, birthplace, education, and current profession(s). ex. School assignments. Also, ideas on who you are including our beliefs, and values. You will begin journaling on your feelings about this and if you find your beliefs and value systems have changed as the course progresses then this change should be wrote about, along with newly discovered ideas and thoughts. Throughout this course you will reflect on your own personal growth, feelings, and beliefs.
“Continue looking inward as you journey through our course. Change is a process, not an event.”
Your journal is continued throughout the course and ending in a “Final Reflection”. You will rethink, reframe and reflect how your interactions in our community of diverse individuals play roles in building positive relationships.
Self Portrait
我是中国人，我出生在北京。来美国之前，我和我的父母住在一起。就像大多数传统的中国家庭一样，我的父母深受中国传统文化的影响。他们非常重视教育，当我年轻的时候，我被告知要努力学习，我也非常努力学习。我花了很多时间学习，因此，我成功地完成了在中国的本科教育，有机会来美国攻读硕士学位。经过一段时间在美国学习，我发现那里是中国和美国之间的教育差异很大，中国的教育更重视学生的学业成绩，中国学生也把大部分时间花在学习，很少参加社会活动和社会活动。在中国这样的传统教育使中国学生高分但缺乏创造性思维，他们也缺乏书本以外的知识，他们通常有能力相对较差。
I am a Chinese and I was born in Beijing. Before coming to America, I lived with my parents. Just like the majority of traditional Chinese families, my parents are deeply influenced by traditional Chinese culture. They attach great importance to education, when I was young, I was told to work hard, and I was also really hard in learning. I spent a lot of time on learning, thus I successfully completed my undergraduate education in China and had the opportunity to come to America to pursue a master's degree. After learning in the United States for a period of time, I found that there is lots of differences between China and the U.S. in education, Chinese education attaches more importance to students’ academic record, Chinese students also spend most of time on learning and rarely participate in community and social activities. Such traditional education in China causes Chinese students’ high scores but lack creative thinking, they also lack knowledge outside books, they generally have relatively poor ability. The advantage of American education lies in the respect for what children are interested in, it creates opportunities for children to discover and explore their favorite things, focusing on overall development of students and encouraging students to actively participate in a variety of innovative and practical activities. Students trained by American education may have less good grades than Chinese students have, but they are more excellent than Chinese students in their overall quality, innovation, hands-on ability. I personally believe that China's education has certain advantages in terms of basic education, but the disadvantages are also very obvious. American education can compensate for the weaknesses in education in China largely. It is noteworthy that China's education is passed down for thousands of years, which is closely related to China's unique social, family cultures. If Chinese education wants to learn from the education in the U.S., it is not just schools and students but students, families and communities that need
