Note to self

Dear Jorina,
in the course of this semester you have published six posts on Medium and I decided to scan them all and put them into a word cloud in order to detect trends and the most occuring themes in your reflections.
Besides the knowledge that you gained from the readings and discussions in class, you have also learned how to find an interesting topic to write about in your posts. At first this task seemed almost insurmountable for you as you were always almost trying too hard to find a topic- that process clearly created a lot of frustration and stress at first. But as the semester continued and time passed, it became a lot easier for you to link topics discussed in class to your personal opinion and reflect upon them. As you were no longer desperately looking for a topic, your research became a lot easier and thus more focussed and productive.

Your personal word cloud shows a lot of interest in languages as an obvious trace of the British Empire. You discussed the role of the English language in India but also wrote about your own experiences with the French people’s attitude towards English. Another conclusion one can draw from your word cloud is your fascination for important figures such as Gandhi or Nkrumah- both clearly relevant in their country’s struggle for independence.

At the end of your posts you always offered your personal opinion on the topics you chose to write about. Here one can see that you learned to position yourself but are still able to keep in mind that everything is a question of perspective and (necessary) distance. Key words to be named here are: perspectives, role, generalize…

To summarize these past weeks I would like to say: Good job, but you could have contributed to the discussions in class as well in order to share your personal opinions and views — still you clearly learned a lot and you had fun writing, choosing topics and commenting on other interesting posts here on Medium! ;-)