Final Reflections

Hello readers, this is my last entry here for this class as it is finally time to do my reflection posts on this class. It has been a long and hard semester, but we have all finally made it and now get to enjoy a month off.

 First, I want to reflect upon my presentation and paper. I think what I had struggled with most was how to translate the research I was doing into a presentation that would be easy to comprehend. I spent a lot of time  contemplating this, and so what I ended up doing was just making the slides that I needed to put down of information that I knew was important, and then moving them around to put them in a cohesive order. I believe that this was the best method for me I’m glad that I’ve done this, because now I will know that this is the best route in the future.I felt that this made the process of creating a presentation much easier for me because I was just thinking about what needed to be said about Nina Simone instead of how to say it. 

The difficulty in my paper was that I had learned so much about Nina Simone I didn’t know what was most important to include. I still after completing the paper wonder if I included the most important things and wonder if I had left out anything.  what’s that said I want to include some information that I learned about Nina Simone that I didn’t write about. Something I didn’t include much about was the relationship that Simone had with Lorraine Hansberry. I thought this was interesting it was originally the topic that I had wanted to discuss, but I decided against it are they didn’t blend well with the rest of my paper. Simone was heartbroken by the loss of Hansberry and a lot of her goals in life were in inspired by Hansberry. For example, before her death, Hansberry was the god daughter to Nina Simone’s child.

 Outside of the material and information that I learned from my research paper and presentation, I also feel that this class has provided me with a lot of information that is still relevant today. Seeing the way that black people were treated during this era, which really was not very long ago, and learning about how this time has affected the mainstream culture has made me view the world in a different way. Also, learning about this era at a time that is also very turbulent and seeing similar messages being used by the Black Lives Matter movement will lead me to think differently about race relations in my country for the rest of my life.