In the two stories we wrote about our educational lives, I noticed that they are quite different. Most strikingly, one is a positive experience related to school, and the other is negative. One celebrates my desire to learn and the other showcases a time where I felt unsupported at school. In the first story, I spoke about my love of tests and quizzes and how, even outside of school, I would spend time enjoying testing myself and my knowledge.

This is interesting to me because throughout the years I have heard many people complain about tests. Many of my friend suffered from “test anxiety,” where they felt that even when they knew the material, they blanked out while writing an exam. In recent years, it seems like public education curriculum has began to gear away from test-based learning because many students do not learn effectively this way. While I understand this, I can’t help but wonder how many students are out there that learn best this way. There is something about the challenge of a quiz or exam that makes me want to do well. It makes me want to learn the material and lock it away in my memory.

The fact that people can see something so differently has given me insight into some of the research I have done for my paper, as well as the readings we have done for class. Of course researchers try very diligently to make sure their articles are not biased, but this seems an impossible task because the primary sources we use for research can be filled with bias. If someone were to find my story about loving tests one hundred years from now, would they assume that everyone who went to elementary school in the late 1990s loved tests and had their mom make up ones “just for fun” at home? It’s so easy now to make these assumptions when we read primary documents.

I would expect to use my first story in my portfolio as an example of the kind of bias that can occur in primary documents. This process has opened my eyes to this and makes me want to read my research sources with a more critical perspective. The opinion of one does not necessarily mean it was the opinion of the majority.