I read the article “Higher Education: How Perry Reese Jr. changed an Ohio community forever. It is about an African American man that becomes a basketball coach in a small Amish town in Ohio and how he changed the people of the town forever. In the article we meet Willie Mast who is one of the high schools boosters. Willie was like most people in the town and didn’t know what to think of a black man being a coach in the town. According to Willie, “All I’d heard about them was riots and lazy.” Basically, Willie is saying that he never had any real experiences with black people and was basing what he believed off of what others had told him. He gained a bias towards black people through this. I can connect with Willie in the fact that I let others put a bias in my mind towards African Americans. Throughout these last eight weeks I’ve learned a lot about bias. I’ve learned that not all biases are bad or that it’s not bad to have them. Biases are in all of us and they are inevitable. This means that we will always have a bias in us. Even if we work towards erasing one another will emerge. In his article, Higher Education, Gary Smith writes “Something had dawned on everyone in town. The black man’s values were virtually the same as theirs.” This is an example of people erasing their bias. They had the bias that just because this man had a different skin color than them that he would be different or weird in some way. Once they met him though they realized that he wasn’t any different to them at all. This doesn’t make the people of this small Amish town in Ohio bad people. It simply is a bias that they have. Biases can be bad if we decide to act on them in bad ways. If the people of the town didn’t try to make an effort to see the coach for who he really is and not just his skin color then they would be bad because they would be acting on their bias in a bad manner. Once they put their bias aside they quickly realized that the coach was a great person. This can relate to the podcast that we listened to in class about the prisoners. Once the woman learned of Dan’s crimes she didn’t want to interact with him anymore. She eventually overcome her bias towards Dan and learned that he had changed as a persona and was no longer the same man he was in the past. Throughout the last 8 weeks we’ve worked on these assignments I’ve learned a lot about personality and bias. I’ve learned that your personality is based on how you were raised and the environment you surround yourself in. And I’ve learned that all biases aren’t bad depending on how you act on them. Also I’ve learned that everyone will always have a bias of some sort and there’s nothing anyone can do to not have any biases.

I chose to do my self- portrait with me sitting on my car in front of my house. I did it this way because these are the things that are important to me. My car is important to me because it gets me to wherever I want to go. My house is important because that's where my family lives. They are the most important thing in the world to me.

Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction

The wheels were turning fast. The Boy was pedaling. Trying to get away. It was too late.

This is my flash fiction. I wrote about a boy riding his bike trying to get away from something chasing him. I chose to write about a child riding his bike because it signifies innocence. When I was writing him I was thinking that the thing chasing him was a monster. The monster would be a metaphor for the boys problems. He tries to avoid and get away from his problems but it is too late and they catch up to him. I wrote about this because I'm guilty of trying to run away things and sometimes avoiding responsibility and it ends up causing me more trouble than if I would have just faced them head on.