A.P. World History

Habit of Mind 3

 

Assessing continuity and change over time and over different world regions

Reflection

At the beginning of the year, Mr. Rodriguez scared our class by telling us that in May we would have to be able to write three different types of essays for the A.P. World History Test. Just by hearing the unfortunate news, he gave us a prompt to a change over time essay “Analyze the cultural and political changes and continuities in India during the last centuries of the classical era, 300 C.E. to 600 C.E.” To myself I thought how am I supposed to analyze how things changed over a course of time, because most essays I’ve written prior to taking this class have been either research papers or persuasive essays, the common types of essays used in English. However Mr. Rodriguez provided us with helpful lessons to help and prepare us, the students, to attack the prompt by giving us charts and to apply the concept of how a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. He would also go over how to analyze and explain why or how something is changing in class. As a class, we would discuss how we wrote the thesis for the prompt he gave us, make a simple T chart which separated the changes and continuities, and explain and analyze the specific region. Mr. Rodriguez also said that we should make a small time line to help organize how something changed in a specific region either politically, economically, or socially and to show if it also affected another society over a course of time. This habit of mind is crucial to the mind of an A.P. student, to have this ability to explain and address the changes and continuities of a specific society or place will help benefit us a student in other subjects.

Evidence

The evidence I chose for this habit is my first change over time essay. In this essay I discuss the effect of the fall of the Mauryan Empire in India. I state that after the fall, India was ruled by a series of regional kingdoms, and was experiencing different forms of governments with religion that continued on or gradually became less appealing. Already just by ready my thesis statement I can tell that it’s sounds funky and weird. But after all this is my first essay in which I discuss changes and continuities.