Author: Pavel Nunez

Pavel Nunez

Dr Carrie Hall

5/18/19

English 1121

                                                             Portfolio

Looking back on my writing in this english class and the previous english class i took, I have noticed just how much my writing has improved since the beginning of the semester and that first assignment. In the beginning , I was being a writer that didn’t know what he was talking about in his essays  and over thinking everything. Then I learned how to write in my own style and quickly writing an essay that should make sense on a certain topics. The work I’ve written and selected for this portfolio show that I have improved dramatically as a writer progress at the end of this semester. In the beginning of the quarter there were many things that I had to revise in my essays, and they took me twice as long to write as well. However, by the end of the quarter writing, although not quite second nature to me, has become much simpler and my writing in general has become much stronger as well.

There was a lot of things that  I have learned this semester. One was trying not to do my papers last minute, and stop trying to make them perfect near the end and half the time it doesn’t work out for me because I simply didn’t have enough time, so instead I usually start writing my essay as soon as it is assigned to me, so far it has become so  much easier for me to finish and feel done with it. The portfolio(of my essays/projects) that I’ve chosen not only shows how I have changed as a writer, but it also shows how I got better. My portfolio has the best work I have written, but also the mistakes I have done in the past , and through revising I was able to see the mistakes that I  make almost every time I write an essay, Now I’m going to quote something from my drug essay and relate it to this reflection. “ Most of the drugs mentioned can easily be accessed by going to the doctor and getting prescriptions for it even if your not in pain(this can quickly be abused in a way to get more of the drug you want), while doing so they also recommend more than the safe dose you’re suppose to get so that is another unfortunate cause, Another is how potent the drug is. Some drugs are stronger than others and can make you develop cravings for it which prevents people from having a normal life without the drug(which they are addicted to)”. As you see here, I actually learned how to use information from another text and summarize simply all without using the act of plagiarism. Also I knew what i was talking about, before all I did was rush my essays and hand it in like it was another day at school. Also I learned how to use real life examples of certain topics and relate it to my essays/projects that has a certain criteria for what you are writing about. One essay he had to write about struggles we had in life and other things. “Sometimes in life I always get I never give up and that’s just how it is . But it wasn’t motivation that helped me , it was the effort that lead me to that  .A quick example of this would be the time Where I was walking upstairs to my next class which was in the 8th floor, I refuse to take the elevator that day because there was a lot of people in. But as I was going upstairs and I was tired but as I went up the stairs I saw a 10 dollar bill below the staircase where almost nobody could see it unless u looked a certain angle”. This example from my  “Don’t Give Up Essay” shows a good example of relating to real life struggles/motivations and how I wrote it in a good way to build on the rest if my essay which is like the building blocks that leads to my main point in my essay.

Basically  the writer is saying about  how “Lemonade” made use of explaining the black female’s body. The author explains how Beyonce’s album attracts people of black females(and make them the norm) and how the black female body comes in all sizes, shapes, and textures with all manner of big hair and also  to challenge the devaluation and dehumanization of the black female body The writer makes me have an understanding of the picture of a black woman’s life which was interesting. The author also portray black women to always be the victim and explains why.

What I learned from the article is that “Lemonade”  is showing a clear message to the readers of what black female goes through in this time and the history of it .

Also based on their writing, I would like to use the element of meaning in my own writing because in this article it gives more meaning of beyonce and how black women are portrayed as the victim. One bad thing I wouldn’t add is how long the story is. To me it simply would make me lose interest if  an article has a lot of pages unless it has a good title that is eye catching. Another is 3 different things that relate to each other just like the article, which was beyonce herself, black women and lemonade.

Pavel Nunez

Dr Carrie Hall

2/6/19

English 1121

                                   Don’t give up and in the end it will show

Sometimes in life I always get I never give up and that’s just how it is . But it wasn’t motivation that helped me , it was the effort that lead me to that  .A quick example of this would be the time Where I was walking upstairs to my next class which was in the 8th floor, I refuse to take the elevator that day because there was a lot of people in. But as I was going upstairs and I was tired but as I went up the stairs I saw a 10 dollar bill below the staircase where almost nobody could see it unless u looked a certain angle. I picked it up… I felt like the luckiest person in that staircase, It must have been a coincidence that day because I forgot my money at home.Going to the main story of my luck, the time this happened to was actually recent, When I passed my  Computer System Technology class. So it was the beginning of the semester of 2018 and this class was required for my major so I said to myself “ This class should be easy”. I was wrong(like really wrong) ,but that didn’t stop me from having doubts. It was an 8 AM class so that wasn’t really a good choice but I wanted to get out early so that was the trade off. At first the class wasn’t too difficult the following 2 months because we were doing basic stuff. But after that it was complex and there was a lot of rules to cover when coding, and I noticed people around me were far worse where I was. Some people would look over my screen after showing the professor my program that runs correctly. Sometimes they would ask me for help and I helped them but it was still difficult for them( I don’t blame them). But overall i knew what I was doing even though it was difficult to comprehend the material being given to me.I knew I couldn’t give up on this class because it was a class for my major in this school. Sometimes I would leave early because I already did all the classwork which was a good thing. Fast forward to November 6(which was the last day to drop a Class), I was debating whether or not to drop the class because I didn’t really like my major anymore(Computer Science) because I don’t think I would like sitting behind a chair just typing 100’s of lines of code for a complicated program while also being behind a computer screen all day long, I should’ve thought of that sooner but it didn’t come to mind until it was too late. I decided not to because that would’ve been a waste of time and money. The next day out of the original 30 students that signed up for the class only 8 people remained. But my friend that was in that class actually dropped it since it was too difficult for him , so basically he gave up since he  probably wasn’t motivated enough to finish and pass the class. It was sorda disappointing that my only friend in that class decided to withdraw but it was his poor decision. Furthermore I had a test coming which I didn’t know about because I was too lazy to check the syllabus, I didn’t know what was going to be on the test so I just accepted my fate that I was going to fail the test. The day I took the test, I didn’t expect it to be almost the same exact things we had to as classwork, So I dodged a bullet on that one and I passed the test for it.So finally it was near the semester and I had to take my final. Suddenly this person who I thought supposedly dropped the class showed for the final after nearly being absent for 2 months, I honestly thought he gave up on the class My professor was actually quite mad at him but he couldn’t do anything so he just let him take the test, When the test started he only took a couple of minutes it finish it and left the class, even though there was around 15-30 lines of code that you have to write down for a few problems. One was about making a program that is able to calculate the GPA of your classes by entering the amount of classes, the grade for each class, and the amount of credits each class was worth. Another was typing the Radius and the Height for a given shape and putting the formula for each shape to find the volume of all the shapes, all of this was basically impossible to write under 20 minutes). Some people had to resort to cheating( No names) by looking up the program for the specific problem, the professor was just using his laptop and actually caught someone using their phone, He gave him a warning instead of giving him a 0 ( which was generous.), I said to myself “Wow, he was lucky”. I give him some credit though for building the motivation to cheat on a test which your not suppose to do .So after finishing I just went home to sleep and hoped I passed the class. Then I checked my grade and I got a B+ thinking I would get a C or maybe lower. But in the end I passed.

Overall life isn’t about the motivation on things you want but how much you effort you put in to get there .

Pavel Nunez

English 1121

3/11/19

Dr Carrie Hall

                                                         Don’t do Drugs or Die

Every day,  a lot of people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids. “The misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl—is a serious crisis in the United States that affects everyone. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total  cost of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States was 1 trillion dollars since 2001 including the costs of healthcare, addiction treatment, and criminals”. Before the 80s-90s this wasn’t even happening and everybody was fine, So what happened?

How did all of this began? “Well In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates. This subsequently led to widespread diversion and misuse of these medications before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive. Opioid overdose rates began to increase. In 2017, more than 47,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose, including prescription opioids, heroin, and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.That same year, an estimated 1.7 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers, and 652,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder”. Based on the text you can see that drug overdoses are a huge problem in the United States, you can easily get addicted to it, Most of the drugs mentioned can easily be accessed by going to the doctor and getting prescriptions for it even if your not in pain(this can quickly be abused in a way to get more of the drug you want), while doing so they also recommend more than the safe dose you’re suppose to get so that is another unfortunate cause, Another is how potent the drug is. Some drugs are stronger than others and can make you develop cravings for it which prevents people from having a normal life without the drug(which they are addicted to). Biologically most drugs affect the brain’s circuit by flooding it with the chemical messenger dopamine. Surges of dopamine in your brain circuit cause the reinforcement of pleasurable but unhealthy activities, leading people to repeat the behavior again and again.Which what causes addiction in the first place (Learned in Psychology).

Before,the government overall is not doing a lot to help prevent this epidemic from getting worse but instead chooses to do other unimportant things like getting involved in another war that has nothing to do with us, increasing taxes, and increasing the military budget which is more than the 7 next countries budget combined . The amount of people getting killed by overdoses of certain drugs just keep increasing and there seems to be nothing being done to help prevent this tragedy.

Now, Donald Trump(our current president) has shed some light on the opioid crisis happening in the United States and has declared  the opioid addiction as a national emergency in 2017. One year later he signed a bill to promote the development of non-addictive pain medications. It’s a right direction towards ending this crisis but there still needs to be a lot of work done in order to make a dent on the staggering statistics of drug overdoses

Also drug addiction isn’t just a problem , it’s also a proven disease like cancer, diabetes etc, and if left untreated(like any other disease) it could be fatal and cause death. But unlike other diseases having  mostly physical health symptoms, drug addiction is all mostly emotional and social based. This drug addiction can destroy friendships, family, maybe lose their jobs and harm themselves physically also or harm others since they end up crazy or turn into a “crackhead”.

Also these days, one big influence that is probably increasing the amount of drug use leading to the increase of drug addicts and drug related deaths is music. Since the 80’s there has been a lot of music that has been growing popularity and mention drugs and during that time was the, which helped fuel substance abuse since people thought it was “cool” to use drugs and it killed a lot of people in mostly poor neighborhoods.Crack was one of them, it is basically a free base form of cocaine that can be smoked.This drug was cheaper than regular cocaine, so this was bought and distributed to mostly low income neighborhoods in cities in the United States. One rap artist was 50 cent. 50 Cent actually wrote his experience selling drugs into his songs. In the song “Corner Bodega,” he raps about his young years of being a drug trafficker, and he spoke about being  a cocaine dealer in his other song “Ghetto Qu’ran.”. Another could be depression, ironically crack can give you depression after the effects wear away, but depression can make you take drugs as a way to cope with it, or maybe being around drugs make you do it. Let’s say you in a party filled with delicious fried food and everyone’s eating it.This makes you want to eat that too. It is sorda the same with drugs, but drugs have more consequences that will impact your life in many ways negatively. Another could be a way to deal with their personal problems that deal in family,school,job etc.

But some people don’t know how to treat drug addiction and they end up dying. The first way to prevent overdose when it comes to prescription drugs, like opiate painkillers, is to follow prescription dose described by the doctor exactly. This alone can make it less likely that addiction will develop in the first place.

For people who are already addicted to drugs, the best way prevent overdose is to get into and complete a rehab program to achieve recovery from addiction, Even though the recovery rate for rehab is low there is still a chance that you should go to it in order to straighten out your life and get it back into the right path like Macaulay Culkin( kid from Home Alone).

Overall, please know what you’re doing when taking prescription. Measure the right dose, be sure it’s the right amount, Afterall please be a regular working person instead of a statistic of a great drug epidemic killing lots of people who made mistakes using drugs and abusing them in the first place.

Mentor Article:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/learning/learning-with-nine-key-questions-about-the-green-new-deal.html

Source:https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/3/16079772/opioid-epidemic-drug-overdoses

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/02/13/585199746/cost-of-u-s-opioid-epidemic-since-2001-is-1-trillion-and-climbing

https://www.drugrehab.com/featured/substance-use-and-rap-music/

https://www.jurist.org/news/2018/10/trump-signs-major-opioid-crisis-measure-into-law/