Reflection about the Course

     My pop culture class is almost at the end of this semester. Look back at this whole semester, I found I gain lot of knowledge about pop culture. At the beginning, I learn the definition of culture. Culture is all around of us. It’s passed from one generation to next generation; it’s shared, expressed, transmitted and adaptive. When people feel unfamiliar way of life due to immigration, it will caused culture shock. During this period, people would adaptive to their new life style. After we learned culture, we turned into learn popular culture. It refers to huge amount of people’ beliefs, behaviors, values, and thought that influence us every day. Pop culture is made up of objects, people, events, place. Iphones, films, clothing, Tyler Perry, Barack Obama, 9/11, Thanksgiving dinner, Holloywood, the White House etc are some example of pop culture. I realized that was my the most interesting Aha moment of the whole course. I began to be interesting in pop culture. From doing project of pop stars, I understood why Justin Bieber is such a star right now. Because he has the criteria of what teenage girls are looking for, good look and talents. Compare to “Justin Bieber”, Jacky Chan that the star of my presentation worked extremely hard for what he want. Though the pop star presentation, I learned many pop stars from my classmates. In unit 3, we studied about movies. Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Espics, Horror, Science Fiction, Westerns are eight main categoris of film, and also there were some sub-genres, such as thrillers. Form learning the movie industry, I understood Tyler Perry’s succeed. Hs was a smart business man. He knew his advantage to catch audients attention. I learned many terms about movie. For example, the center of Hindi film industry is called Bollywood. From leaning the text book –Bollywood Princess, I learned Even how famous the Indian movie star are in Bollywood, they will not easy to break into Hollywood. Stephen King told us several reason why people crave Horror movie. One of divertive reason was watching horror movie gave us an reaction of extreme and remind us how normal we really are. In unit 4, we studied music. I gave a mini presentation of hip pop music genre. Hip pop music is a style of popular music in the US. It included rapping, highly rhythmic, DJing, beat boxing. Also, I learned Blues. Honestly, I could not identify what kind music is blues. There was a amusing experience, we visited the Museum of Broadcast Communications. We learned to reported the news. It gave me a good experience to learned pop culture in Chicago. Thought learning pop culture, I knew more about interesting things in  my life in the US.