During this semester I learned about multiple things that have enriched the way I think in several ways. I learned that through listening to my colleagues’ opinions and past experiences, listening to recorded videos, ted talks and readings. This has resulted in the change of the way I think and my perception have changed towards several things. 

One of the things that have changed the way I feel towards myself as a student is that I started caring more about my mental health as a student and trying to be more transparent with myself about things that hurt me and have a huge effect on my feelings. This is something that i learned about from Mays Emad’s video https://onehe.org/resources/trauma-informed-pedagogy/

In this video I learned that trauma can affect everything in your life and while it does a person can even not see that he is hurt. Another thing i learned during this semester is that don’t build my mind about something just by hearing about it and this is something that i got from the talk “the danger of a single  story” https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?subtitle=en 

This talk showed how people may perceive information and how they build stories from hearing about a place or a person. For example: a person may hear rumors about someone and build in his imaginations stories about how this person really is. Also, the know yourself game was a tool that made me understand how much I judge. In my opinion, i once thought that i was the least judging person in my friend group, but after playing this game i understood how much i judge in situations that require choices. These choices may be about anything such as seeing if a person talking makes sense or not or even if I want to make a certain decision in my life I judge everything. 

An important thing that I have concluded about myself is how useful my judgment is. As I stated, the game showed me how much I judge everything in situations, but what I perceive about myself is that this judgment helps me daily. For example, if i am hearing something from a person that is not close to me i’ll judge the thing he is saying in order to try to understand if he is saying a truthful statement or not.  Another thing that this course helped me know about myself is how I perceive various things in life. In this course we talked about several things for example, religion, disabilities, judgment and biases. All these topics helped me in structuring my identity and how I see these things as a person. This resulted in me knowing myself much more than before the course. 

By interacting with my colleagues i started to be more open about certain ideas and mindsets, although they may be different from me but they are not that far from my mindset and person but i want to interact more with other cultures and people with much more different backgrounds to see how i will react and perceive their thoughts and actions. And I would like to assess myself on how I will talk to them and try to get used to their mindsets in the form of a discussion about Palistien. If this topic comes up in the future I would like to hear everybody’s opinion about the matter as everyone hears things from different points of views and that is why I will be interested in hearing what they will say and even share my thought’s with them.