Themes

Today in class we talked about all of the books that we had read by looking at other students questions from their critical responses. I found these questions to be very interesting and they brought up all types of themes and questions that I had not thought about before. My partner and I were in the Middle Eastern group where we discussed Habibi. We read all of the questions and were able to point out some of the issues that we had never thought about before reading their response question. We were also able to relate these questions to themes in the class. Going back to Habibi, which seems like it has been so long ago, there are many themes that have been discussed in relation to other books. I realized that there are also some really good questions that other students had about this book. I did not do a critical response on this book but I liked being able to read other's responses and talk about them. We were able to pick out a few questions that all related to Poppy's feelings about Omer and how he was Jewish. There were about 3 or 4 questions based on his feelings about Omer and why he did not want to accept him or he did not want other people to know about him being Jewish. This is important to our class because in diverse books we learn about all kinds of cultures and for a character to feel this way about a culture is important for readers to understand. This is true for so many people that may not want to accept others or may feel uncomfortable with other cultures. We also talked about Liyana and how she felt about her American culture. A couple of students asked if she did not want to accept that culture anymore or if she did. I found this to be important in the theme of identity which we talked about in class too. It is important for people to understand their culture or the many cultures that they come from. It is important for these people to accept these things and find their identity.
I found this class to be interesting today, as I was able to see other students thoughts and ideas. It helped me to reflect back on the book, Habibi, and to remember the important issues that found in the world today. I was able to look at this book and relate it to the themes from this class.