Author: awallman

I knew that there were multiple times Muslims prayed a day. I knew there was a certain kind of cloth they put down to kneel on, but I didn’t realize not all muslims so that. I guess it depends on how religious you are or where you are in the world. In the United States,… Continue reading 10/28 Notes Qur’an II

I really don’t know much about the Qur’an, so I’m really excited and eager to learn about it. For a long time, I didn’t know that the Muslim God and Christian/Jewish God were the same. I am still a little confused about that, but now I know there are the same people in the Bible… Continue reading 10/26 Notes Qur’an

I didn’t realize that Mohammed was a messenger of God. I thought he was an Islamic God. The fact that he was a real person who didn’t want to be a religious figure is very interesting to me because I thought he was equivalent to the Christian/Judaism God. I also liked learning about his relation… Continue reading The Life of Mohammed 10/21 Notes

The most interesting part of this whole lecture was the fact that the largest Muslim popularity is in Indonesia and in 2060, is going to be in India. I’ve never associated Indonesia or India with being heavily Islamic. I thought that would be a Middle Eastern country like Iran or something. I’m not really sure… Continue reading Islamic Unit 10/19 Notes

I really enjoyed learning about China and Chinese culture. I haven’t really had much education on that part of the world before, and so almost everything we talked/read about was new information. My favorite part of the semester was reading the stories because the culture is so different in China compared to America, but also,… Continue reading China Review

I liked learning about how there’s always a balance between tradition and new concepts/ideas because change happens slowly and nothing ever truly stays the same. This makes sense because there are lots of traditions we’ve read about in the stories in Ha Jin “The Bridegroom” that are still relevant today, but maybe with a modern… Continue reading 10/5 Notes

I enjoyed this story because it showed the differences between the United States (New York) and China. The way the author described how Chen Jinli changed once she came back to China from New York was really interesting. Her hair, the way she composed herself, her shoes, her make up, and even her teeth were… Continue reading “Woman from New York”

I liked reading these stories and deciphering the differences between the culture here in the United States and the culture within the story. In one of them, I think it was “Alive,” there was a part that said the husband was well respected by his neighbors because he didn’t beat his wife. I found this… Continue reading Ha Jin “Alive”; “Broken;” “Bridegroom”

I was able to take a lot of notes this class, which was nice and helped me stay more engaged with what we were learning. I liked how the reading from Chuang Tzu started a conversation about how we can never learn too much–there’s nothing we can know 100% about, but we can try our… Continue reading 9/23 Notes

I think the two readings were super interesting. In my high school history class, we talked a lot about whether humans were inherently evil or good. Then we looked at a bunch of different philosophers like Hobbes and Locke who had vastly different opinions. So, these readings reminded me a lot of past high school… Continue reading Good vs Evil