Arianna Smith

Dr. DeNicolo
4/25/17
Reflection Essay: PS 1010

This class was a continuation of our last semester course of Honors 1000, which taught us about
the history of cities like Detroit. This course went deeper and taught us more about what goes
into creating cities like Detroit, specifically on the political scale.
Ultimately, we were told to split into groups, choose an issue plaguing the city, and work to
hypothetically solve that issue using the revenues that real policymakers would utilize. We were
taught the different ways to distinguish problems, told why solutions to issues arent
implemented, and told that we needed to come up with a plan that could be easily enacted by
students. We did so, and helped to solve our issue of education by offering our time and services
as tutors for Detroit school children, experiencing our problem up close and having a hand in
solving it.
The thing that surprised me the most about delving into the issue that my group chose, the issue
of education and specifically illiteracy, was that the problem remained unsolved despite what
many would see as the common sense of solving such a detrimental issue, both in cities and
nationwide.
I do plan to continue to work with this problem- if there is any way I could continue to work with
educating children for my honors courses in the future, I will.
I learned two things from the process of working in a group- one, that college group work is very
different as an overall experience from high school group work. Everyone is aiming to get the
best scores possible, and that includes taking on and completing fair shares of work. Two, large
tasks can be easily undertaken with cooperation and planning, the way my group coordinated
where we would volunteer and how.
Teamwork, obviously, is the most applicable lesson from this project. But Ive also learned how
to look at an issue from all sides, and even to create my own point of view in order to better
assess and solve problems.
Being involved in this project hasnt altered my opinion on this issue- I still feel as though its an
important problem that needs to be solved sooner than later, the same way I felt about it in the
beginning of the semester.
The most important experience of this semester for me was being able to connect and form a
relationship with the children I tutored- it helped me to see them as more than disappointing
statistics in a bar graph. The least important to me was the presentation- it was basically a repeat
of our final paper, and I feel that it should have been after the paper in the assignments list. It
seemed horribly unnecessary. However, I did appreciate the feedback that we received from the
presentation that we gave in class, because it made our paper better in the long run.
I actually wouldnt do anything different for this project if I had to redo this semester- we started
early and completed our hours in a respectable amount of time.