Assignment 6 - Grace Payne

I would say that the course that has meant the most to me was a class I took last year, AP Comparative Government. We all had to take AP US Government as freshman, and that helped us get knowledge of how the United States government works. AP Comparative had you learn the same stuff about government but for 7 different countries (Nigeria, UK, Mexico, Russia, Iran, and China).
Each of those countries are very different, hence the reason they were chosen.
Growing up in the US leads to the belief that the US is the greatest country in the world, with the
greatest form of government in the world: democracy. AP Comparative Government doesn't necessarily challenge that belief, but it shows the pros and cons of different types of governments. It also challenges the beliefs you previously held about those countries. For example. you learn about Nigeria's extensive issues with military coups and corruption, but also about how they are apart of OPEC, and make quite a bit of money from oil. Before taking this course, I never paid much attention to Nigeria, so I didn't know anything about their conflicted history.
The reason this course meant the most to me was because it forced me to look outside of my American bubble and actually bother to read about foreign diplomacy. We were forced to figure out everything about these countries, including their economic status, capital, their type of government, and the history of their government, and then we had to compare them to each other. Towards the beginning of the year we read The Ugly American, which was a book about diplomacy outside of the US, and that really showed me how Americans were viewed by other countries.
This course caused me to think critically about America's role in world politics compared to other, different types of governments.