Honors Reflection (Semester II)

Throughout Semester II, we read three books for Honors Book Club, Cats
Cradle, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. For
each book, we prepared essential questions to address with key passages
that had in some way moved us. After reading each book, we met as a
seminar to discuss and debate the book, expanding our insights and views in
the process. Once we had discussed the book, we were required to complete
a project of our choosing relating to the book. Our project options were a
creative writing or artistic piece, a literary analysis, or a documentation
binder. I chose to create an artistic piece for both The Monkey Wrench Gang
and Cats Cradle painting reflective pictures for each book. I also wrote a
detailed artist response for each book. For Their Eyes Were Watching God,
we were not required to complete a project . After each of the three seminars
we also wrote a five-paragraph seminar reflection articulating what we had
gained from the reading that included quotes from the book.
Of the three books we read, I was most impacted by Cats Cradle. Before
reading Cats Cradle I had never considered the similarities between religion
and science having always viewed the two as complete opposites. I had
believed that science answered questions with theories and facts, while
religion answered questions with faith. Before reading Vonneguts book I
never fully grasped that both religion and science seek to answer
sometimes-unanswerable questions and that their methods for doing so are
not very different. Science is not as cut and dried as I had believed, nor is
religion as one sided. These realizations furthered my beliefs that everything
is connected in some way or another and that we are all trying to address
the same fundamental questions about mankind. Vonnegut literally blew me
away with his ability to metaphorically change the way I once viewed
science and religion as two of the most contradictory creations of humankind
only to recognize that science and religion in many ways are the same thing.
Coupled with his storytelling and literary style, this new realization made me
very partial to Cats Cradle over the other books we explored during the
course of the book club.
Throughout this semesters Honors Book Club, I felt positively challenged
academically, which helped me grow as a student and a person. Initially, I
was rather challenged by attempting to balance my other humanities work
along with completing the books and projects for honors. I rapidly fell behind,
at first overlooking some of the reading deadlines. I quickly grew from this

and started planning how much of the book I would read each night to
complete the reading on time as well as what was required to balance other
homework. I found my new planning skills very rewarding as it helped me
figure out how to balance and complete other schoolwork thoroughly on
time. Beyond the logistics of doing the work, I found the book club
exceptionally rewarding largely because of the caliber of the discussions that
we had.. Each book we read gave me a new and unique appreciation for
American literature along with introducing me to new ideas and concepts.
Our discussions often pushed the boundaries of what I had thought about
each book and forced me to consider more deeply what the author was
trying to convey. Overall I found the Honors Book Club challenging, but with a
challenge always comes a reward or a lesson. I believe that I have grown a
lot as learner and a person by improving my ability to comprehend literature,
and our seminar discussions introduced me to new ideas that contributed to
my personal growth. Each book taught me new, exciting, endless things and
our projects and reflections furthered my skills to articulate my opinions and
thoughts about literature.