As a reader, and writer in this semester, I’ve learned that context matters to the information you are reading, or talking about. By providing more context and do some self-teaching, you can understand the piece much better, and give a nice answer to teachers’ questions. As a reader in this semester, I feel like I have changed ever since I’ve entered into college. Before this class I would read a story and pass it off as just “words” rather than just looking at the intent of the author with those words. To summarize what I have said I have learned to “read like a writer”. As a writer, I feel like I have changed somewhat throughout this semester. Sometimes I would make grammar mistakes here and there, but I felt like I have put more detail and context into my writing(which is something I’ve always wanted to improve on). Now whenever I read any piece of work, I would question the author about the choices that they have applied in their work. Things that I like to look at are things like word choice, direction of the piece, and the purpose.

Whenever I write, I would try my best to be weary about my grammar, and the attention to detail I put into it. Sometimes I would expand a idea to be able to provide more context for a subject that seems hard to understand. To be honest in the beginning of the semester I’ve expected to have to read books and have to do reports on them. Even though we did read about philosophers like plato, we just read about what they were trying to convey to us, and what they were thinking in the process of making the piece. This is what led me to stick with the lesson”reading like a writer”. In the early semester, I would tend to not check my work after I’ve finished. now I would check my work because I want to know if I have given the right information, with the right amount of context provided.

Some assumptions that I feel like I had before the semester was that college level classes on English would be a uninteresting experience. As I attended the classes, and focused more on the subject, and I became really invested into the work that we were doing. After being invested, the investment turned into enjoyment for the class, and the genre of reflecting. most of the enjoyment was because of how much creative liberty we had with the pieces we made. We had the choice to research topics that we felt was viable for our pieces,and I enjoyed that. In my opinion self-teaching played a big part in getting through this class. Self teaching helped me understand more about the topic I was writing and reading about. I feel like the feedback that I’ve received from everyone who has reviewed my work was helpful. It either told me that I was on the right track, or was I going far off.

One thing that I felt was challenging in this course was to look for references for the research. Sometimes the topic you are researching does not have much traction, so there is some articles or reports on it. The way how I overcame this problem was to use the library resources. In my library, there is a option to be able to talk with a librarian and they can help you with what type of research you are doing. I used this feature to look for more efficient articles, that related more to the topics than the ones I just google searched. Being a part of the FYLC influenced me to reflect more on my work. This has helped me see my mistakes and my journey to improve on them. One piece of advice that I would give to myself is to learn about self teaching earlier. If I learned about self teaching earlier, I wouldn’t have had much trouble with the topics for my projects.

My project 1-https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/hmgt-eng-fylc-f2021/2021/10/18/education-narrativepolished/

My project 2-https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/hmgt-eng-fylc-f2021/2021/11/21/annotated-bibliographypolished/

My project 3-

Part 1-https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/hmgt-eng-fylc-f2021/2021/12/13/part-1project-3/

Part 2-https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/hmgt-eng-fylc-f2021/2021/12/13/part-2project-3/