HONORS 394

This was the first honors class I took on the campus of the Unversity of Washington. Transitioning from an online student to an in-person student again was jarring and difficult. I am immensely grateful for the vaccine, and the ability to once again attend in-person lectures. I can now physically interact with my classmates and form connections that were previously impossible with Zoom.

 
I was recommended to take this class by one of my Honors 100 classmates. They exclaimed that this class was a "must take" and I took their word for it. This class lived up to my expectations and deserved her praise. The teacher, Catherine Connors, is a wonderful and caring person. She takes the time to get to know her students and prioritizes learning over the rigidity of grades. Her class style is mostly focused on discussions with other classmates on topics we were assigned to learn about before the lecture. She also posted mini-lectures she personally recorded giving us a brief rundown about the topic we were going to delve into. These lectures were astoundingly helpful and aided me in contributing a meaningful portion of the discussion during class time. 

During the quarter we covered a plethora of different topics. However, all of these topics centered around one thing, women. In every aspect of Ancient Greek and Roman life, women were placed at the forefront. Some of the topics we covered included: the textile industry and women's contribution, ancient medicine, and childbirth, rituals involving women, women philosophers, women poets, sex gender and identity, Greek and Roman law. All of these topics illuminated something seemingly contradictory. I realized in this course how much women contributed to the creation and culture of society, but also how little their identity was preserved. Before this class, I was exposed to less than have of the important women I learned about in this class. All of the were important and crucial to the identity of Greece and Rome. This shouldn't be surprising though. Throughout history, women have been oppressed. They were trapped within the household and barred from contributing meaningfully to the world. However, some still did it. Even after their death, they continued to face oppression. Historians chose not to write about them and preserved their legacy. Documents and papers by 18th, 19th, and even 20th-century historians deliberately did not write about them or include them with their men counterparts. This is why we have not learned about the women who managed to make a mark on the world. I am glad that this class was created and works to correct the egregious error engrained in the education system. 

My favorite topic we covered was delving into sexuality and gender identity in ancient Greece and Rome. This is ultimately what I decided to do in my final project. I examined different documents, both secondary and primary, to learn about the LGBTQ+ people who existed millennia before us. I found that gender and sexuality were regarded with very different standards than they are today. Homosexual relations were extremely common for men, and occasionally for women. As well as intersex and transgender people. These people have existed for as long as time immemorial. We only have to look. 

This class is able to fulfill the diversity requirement because it aims to include all different types of people within the ancient Greek and Roman world. We looked at how different races were treated, and what they actually based value on during that time. As stated above we looked at the differences in gender identity and sexuality. Most importantly, this class focused on a group making up more than 50% of the population but has been excluded from history, women. We did not focus on only stuffy white men we've heard about in every class throughout our K-12 education. Instead, we worked to uncover and discuss people who we haven't heard of, but still deserved the same recognition.