Political Science 100- The American Political System

I took this class during the Fall 2019 semester. The material itself was not too hard because much of it was review about topics that have been taught to us other times in school like the Constitution and the court system in the United States. What did challenge me though were the books we had to read and write book reviews about after we read them. I had never done a book review before this class, so I was not sure what to do at first. So, for the first one I was just following the professors directions to the best of my ability. After I got that grade back and saw his feedback, I understood what to do better and made the necessary changes to make the second one better. Part of what was hard and interesting about this was that these books were about specific parts of the political system that had confusing terminology sometimes. I had to learn this terminology to the best of my ability, so that I understood the book and put the terminology to good use in the book review. One of the books was a more straightforward view of the American political system, while the other was very theoretical. I had a harder time with the theoretical book because the ideas in that book were not always straightforward. Sometimes I had to dig deeper to get at what that part of the book was saying about the American political system. These book reviews helped me understand that there is a deeper meaning to many books that have to do with politics. You just have to understand and dig down deep enough to find that meaning. Now, I recognize that I can use this knowledge to see the deeper meaning of many topics, not just politics. Below is one of the two book reviews I did for this class.