Self-Analysis of Me!

I have started this blog because of my English 101 class, and I am now finishing it because of the different views I have established. I have learned so much from doing this project, and it has really helped me grow and learn as a student and become a better thinker.

I have learned about different ways to do internet research. When students have to do a research paper in class, doing the works cited page is strenuous and hard because you have to worry about every little period and colon on each line. In this project, all you have to do it put in the link and your done. It is a lot less stressful than a regular research paper. I have also learned by doing this assigment that the resources don't necessarily have to from .edu or .org domains in order to use them. We could use sites that quoted other credible sites, or that had statistics and looked professional. On the other hand, we could also use biased sites to prove an emotion or feeling in the post we were creating. It was a great experience.

I have also learned that my topic is not just plain black and white. There is definitely a grey area. You can't just have a group of people who think smoking is good for you and a group of people who think secondhand smoke is horrible. There are also people who believe that citizens have the right to chose what they want to do according to certain laws. I thought there would be a lot of nonsmokers who believed that secondhand smoke was harmful and should therefore outlaw smoking, or at least ban smoking in public areas. However, there was a significant number of sites online that I found people who didn't smoke believed in the rights of individuals to be able to do what they want to without having to take into account the health risks. New ideas are sprung out into the public eye everyday and must be taken into consideration for this issue. Every statistic must be viewed. Every person must be accounted for. It is so hard to tell whether or not smoking should be banned because it is really debatable on whether or not secondhand smoke causes lung cancer or heart risks. There are so many different factors to take into consideration because there are so many things that do cause cancer and health risks in general. This topic has really made me think about different new ideas that are being aroused every day.

I believe I have changed as a thinker for the better. At the beginning of this project I was kind of biased toward this topic, and I only concentrated on finding statistics supporting the fact that secondhand smoke was wrong and harmful and should be banned. However, I found myself learning more and more about the topic as a binary issue instead of just voicing my opinion. I began to state the other sides views and why smokers think it is okay to blow their smoke into someone else's face. I came to believe that we all breathe the same air, but some is just more polluted than elsewhere. I think I became more aware of why others thought the way they did rather than just what they thought. Sometimes I just thought people wanted to debate this issue because of addiction: a smoker can't give up cigarettes because they are addicted. But what was really the case was a lot more complex.

Through interactions with classmates, I have improved my communication skills. I am very shy in class, and this project has made me question, literally, all of the assumptions made in each classmate's blog. I enjoyed reading through certain blogs and commenting on what I thought was the right way to solve or address the issue. Also, I have found many of my classmates to be helpful in commenting on my own blog because it shows what I have missed in the explanation of certain topics concerning public smoking. I thought I would have to beg my parents and friends to leave comments to my site because I didn't think anyone in the class would be able to find something to comment on. I was definitely wrong in that assumption. Through reading the posts I had made, many classmates, I believe, changed their own minds about public smoking. This is really moving to me and I believe that has made this project worth it.

Different perspectives on an issue change as different resources become available. I have found that people change their minds about an issue more than one time as more and more evidence is presented. I have found myself questioning my own point of view on this smoking debate. Pretty much, there are many views on all different issues, and I have found that one view may change your identity in a totally new way that you never knew existed.