At Freestyle, our Reflections unit was not just self-reflection. While the overarching question throughout it was, “Who am I?”, we also reflected on racial injustice in our country. We started off the unit with a personal essay for college. This gave us time to reflect on our own experiences and decide how to best portray ourselves in only 650 words. Our next assignment was to read Citizen by Claudia Rankine. This is a lyrical essay about racism towards African Americans, so while we reflected on the tragedy of racism in America, we also observed Rankine’s poetic technique. After reading Citizen, we had to interview someone with a different social circumstance than ours. We reflected on this anonymous person’s interview to write a lyrical essay of our own. I made my personal essay a bit too personal to display on a website, but I do have my lyrical essay and the projects I created in Design. My Lyrical Essay will be in the next section and my Design projects are posted below.

Design Projects

Alternative to the Personal Essay

My classmates and I wrote 650-word personal essays for college. Mine was too personal, so I will not be posting it on this website. Instead, I am posting a “two-pager” I wrote for my english class last year. It is about ageism, the discrimination of older people.

Right now there is a large amount of old people in the world. If you have not already, you are most likely going to dry up and get grey hair at some point in your life. Because the act of growing old is prevalent and inevitable, it is worth taking time to think about the elderly. Most decent human beings do not even have to consider the importance of a newborn child, but today elderly people are being so severely pushed out from society that I have to write a two pager that brings to light a question that should not even have to be asked. Are old people of value to our modern day society?
Scholar Jared Diamond comments in a UCLA article, “‘[…] from a scientific perspective — natural selection —’ Diamond noted, ‘It may under some circumstances be better for children to abandon or kill their parents and for the parents to abandon or kill their children.’” Although we do not often see children killing their parents for survival in civilized society, we do see the abandonment of parents that are getting too hard to care for or care about. It is not uncommon to send your elderly parents to a nursing home. Although they may have a condition like alzheimer’s or dementia that demands special attention that a nursing home offers, sending them away can cut them off from their friends and family. When kids get diagnosed with mental illnesses we don’t put them in a home, we get local help for them and continue trying to give them the best life possible. At what age do we stop caring to give our family the best life possible? Not all elderly people have family to send them to nursing homes. But one thing every old person is affected by is ageism. Ageism is the discrimination against someone because of their age. The American Psychological Association comments, “[…]in a survey of 84 people ages 60 and older, nearly 80 percent of respondents reported experiencing ageism– […]”
Elderly people in the tech industry are experiencing particularly frequent ageism. AARP says, “In a survey of 1,011 currently employed tech workers in the United States […] Nearly half of all tech workers are millennials[…]”

Perspective Piece

For this assignment, I was supposed to attempt to answer the question, “Who am I?” I do not feel that I did this successfully, but I did strengthen my abilities in Pro Tools and Adobe After Effects. This is such a valuable skill to know; I can use it in a variety of ways.