Skills such as active reading, critical thinking, and annotating were weaved throughout this course in our writing and with activities during class. These activities included a memory game in which groups of us tried to create a list of memories and then cancel out common memories leaving the person with the most unique answers to win. This made us use critical thinking skills and look back through the semester and remember obscure details or learning techniques, lessons, inside jokes, and even random rants that occurred. It was awesome having the whole class interested and excited to be a part of the fun. Another activity was the “bomb shelter” in which the class had a list of people that varied in age and had a fact about them such as a “17-year-old cheerleader” or “56-year-old retired nurse”. We originally had to cut 15 people down to 7 and then 4. This had our class take turns to share our opinions and work together to find a group we agreed on. We focused on active reading while working on our paper about forced identity, reading articles and video transcriptions to use as evidence to support our claims. We also used songs and their lyrics to look deeper into the meanings behind the words. This allowed us to practice annotated and find easier ways to break down large amounts of text. Overall, the various activities made the course engaging and helped me focus on the content we continued to learn.