On October 4th, in the class Speech-1330 taught by Professor Davis, was the day of the speech midterm. Which to my surprise was a documented multiple choice exam because I was expecting The Midterm consisted of questions in chapters 1-6 of the textbook. The test was a bit rough for me because I was not ready for the way Professor Davis worded the answer choices and I think I could speak for a good portion of the class. I must admit thought I didn’t spend too much time studying and I ended up biting the bullet. But, Professor Davis, being the nice guy that he is, sees that the entire class average was a mere 49% decided to boost everyone’s test grade by 20 points because he saw that the entire class was putting in a respectable amount of work into our class blog. When I was finished I caught up with people who had already finished the test and almost everyone said that the wording answer choices were the biggest problem and were the most confusing. In conclusion, my speech midterm was on October 4th and it surely caught me off guard along with some of my friends but thanks to Professor Davis boosting our grade by 20 points I had a better grade than I would’ve hope for.

Today, we had a double session of English. In this double session we took the opportunity to work on our Project 4. During the first half of class, we discussed the assignments of Project 4,5 and the Persuasive Speech more thoroughly and self-evaluated ourselves before our peers got the chance to do so. During this time, Professor Rosen also walked around and gave individual help to those who asked and gave important feedback. We then moved on to the second part of class. In this part of class we had the chance to do peer review. A chance to evaluate and give helpful feedback to our classmates and also take a look at different Project 4 essays. This gave us a view of how our essays compared to others and how ours could change or what we were doing right. We used the guiding feedback worksheet to help us provide feedback to our classmates. This was a very effective time as people received help and also worked on their essay if they were still not finished. Then we began discussing as a class on what we saw during our revisions, what was done right, what needed work. We used examples and learned how to better our essays to strengthen and better our Project 4.

On Monday November 4th, in English class Professor Rosen went over the reading “Reading Lucy” from the collection Brooklyn Was Mine, about a novelist named Jennifer Egan researching about the Brooklyn Navy Yard. During the World War, women had to take role in everyday jobs because men had to fight in the war. Lucille Kolkin one of the women working in the Brooklyn Navy yard was writing letters to her one true love Alfred Kolkin who was fighting in the war. After reading the letters by Lucille, Jennifer then loses focus on what used to be her main priority which was to do research on the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but now she finds herself addicted to the letters Lucille wrote to her husband Alfred that is regarded as a typical love story between two Brooklynites. From reading the letters Jennifer finds out that As reading through her letters Egan learns that Lucy dies and then Egan looks up information on Lucy’s eulogy. As Jennifer read more of Lucy letters, Jennifer finds herself embedded in Lucy’s world. She felt as if she became Lucy’s friend through reading all of her letters which led to Jennifer trying to find living relatives that would discuss Lucy’s life more thoroughly which would keep her in contact with Lucy in some way.