Category: Portfolio & Reflection (Page 1 of 5)

Looking through all of my work from this term, I can see my mental growth. I can see me going from being shy and worried about the things I thought I shouldn’t share about my personal life. I can see the transition that led me into being a free thinker and a creative writer. I started using my own experiences and my personal problems to make topics that would help me with my writing. In all, I’ve learned a lot about myself as a student and a writer. I think during this term, writing stopped feeling like a duty or as if I’m solely doing this for a grade into a safe space for myself—a place where whatever I felt or whatever emotions I couldn’t voice, I was able to write. It allowed me to not only reflect on myself as a writer but as a person.I think there’s a large group of things I’ve learned over this term that I can use to help me in my process throughout college and my personal life, such as understanding and getting past procrastination. For me, it’s always been something I’ve struggled with, but over time in class, I’ve learned ways to better apply myself, be more present and aware of the opinions I put out, and my choice of words not only while I’m speaking but also in my writing. Procrastination has been a problem for me since middle school. I’ve always struggled with keeping myself grounded or entertained by my work, but the mental building that we had a chance to go through and the readings that we had a chance to look through in the beginning of the term helped me build a mental toughness. I know what I can do when I’m at my full capacity. I know how good of a speaker I am, and I know I have the qualities to be a good writer.  But procrastinating was not the only thing holding me back. My structure and my grammar also affected me a lot throughout the term. Being able to revise and reflect onto my work, even after we went over the writing structures in class, showed me what I was missing. In a way, I’m happy that I’ve been able to notice the areas I struggle in, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t upset by how easy these problems were to change. If I would have taken the step of being more hands-on with my work, better analyzing my work, and before having the teacher tell me I need to look over my work, me doing it myself, taking that initiative on my own, would

have saved me. I started off the year strong, and my grades began to decline. I can make a million excuses, and some of them are justified, but above it all, I should have applied myself way more because I know I can do more. I know what’s being asked of me, and now I know how to better apply myself for next time. The skills that I picked up in class, I transferred to all my classes—my studying skills, my writing and analyzing skills. I’ve realized just how much paying attention to the work we put out actually matters, and it’s saved me a ton.As far as using what I’ve learned this term in my community, I understand how to better communicate with people. I look at conversations, emails, articles, and even text messages differently now that I understand tone and genre. I will continue to apply myself and these habits into my day-to-day life. One of the best things that I’ve learned from this term was the way different people with different backgrounds and different perspectives on learning showed us their growth as students. This helped me to better adapt into this coming school year. Seeing that made me reflect on my own challenges—being an immigrant while trying to find my own footing in this country, having to create my own learning mechanics to be successful, understanding I had no choice but to do what’s best for not me but my family. For me, that was finishing school. I think this whole term as a whole has helped me become a better student, a better writer, a better listener, I came into this school year seeing as just any other era class but I was wrong this was my most hand to hand class that I got a chance to be apart of this semester and its allowed me to find a very intense creative side of me 

Beginning with the first week of English class thinking it would be just like any other English class. A mindset like this and approaching a college atmosphere it was a bad way to start looking into from now. Also, accepting and knowing I procrastinate a lot it made me elevate my self to do better this year forward. Our first Unit assignment was to make a personal essays based on your view on the educational system. This really intrigued me because my thoughts about school were so profound it felt like so easy to write about. Writing the essay I spoke about me skipping a grade, how school felt irrelevant to how I wanted my life to be, the good and bad expierences in high school, as well as stating school is a place for kids to go through to get to whatever they want to do in life. Writing sections of my story the feedback from my professor it made me understand how to structure my writing and grammar better. With this I took into consideration and wrote my story called Be Enlightened telling a story of who I am. When officially done with this assignment this made me feel like I went to a next level. We had peer review in class so I partnered up and got feedback from two people in my class and both said it was a good, however the same feedback from my teacher they said as well organize my work better. A line I said was “When students genuinely enjoy the learning process, they are more likely to be motivated, attend class eagerly, and activately participate making the classroom a place they want to be” with this it was intended to encourage the teachers to make school more engaging to what I wish it could for all students. Besides the Unit assignments there were reading assignments that we annotate and have a discussion about next class. These readings led to different parts of your Unit assignments. One of the stories we read was Later by James Surowiecki and this story basically about procrastination helping me understand myself better. I’ve gained insight on how to deal with procrastination and writing what I’ve learned from it that is people know what’s right and still do the thing that seems “worth doing” and with that it could lead to what needs to be done is now setting you back. This can be a cycle and still battling it I want to break this cycle.

Next is our Unit 2 assignment it was to make an Research Annotated Bibliography this was something I never did before and approaching it with creativity I felt good about it, however that’s not even the case. Thinking of a question to reasearch about left me to overthinking and when that happens I scramble in my mind causing me to stress. When talking in class about the assignment I start chatting with one of my peers asking what he feels about drugs he encourage me to go for it so I did. Now the question came quick to me due to how think of this world we in and how stubborn people can be it formulated the question Why do people take drugs knowing it’s bad for them? Knowing the audience I wanted to attain are people who are curious of taking drugs and want more information that can guide their decision to take them or not. In my conclusion, a statement that I feel is important is “I’ve learned that this world is more attentive to wrong things instead of the things that are really important”. I highlight this because as a person who is very in tune with themselves this world has a lot of distractions keeping us humans back and you wonder from what greatness with God. Completing this assignment I was confident that I did good for my first time, but that wasn’t even the case. I got a D- due to my analysis not meeting the requirements and the citations were wrong.

Last but not least Unit 3 is a project that’s based on your decision. You have to pick the genre you want to connect with your research question. And I’ve chose to do a blog for my topic which is Drugs that have an affect on people good or bad. This was a new thing for me and it let explore my creativity,  which was the best route to play. I’ve decide to make a survey and have a QR code for people to scan. The survey consist of questions getting to know each individual, which gives me data to collect what age is predominately using and why they’ve chose the drug. The blog title is Students find their Escape because my intended audience is high school and college students mostly, but can still relate to those who do drugs or curious of taking them. “So, personally, I wouldn’t recommend doing drugs because there are other things in life that can make you happy without relying on drugs for that so-called “happiness” you’re looking for”. I said this in my blog and is important because even I know drugs is just a temporary get away from own doings. However, I can’t control a person just give good advice and hope the individual reading the blog is takings drugs on their own hand.

Saying farewell to myself going through this course that made me a better writer and reader. Ms.Wang is a great teacher glad to have her as my freshman professor thank you.

During this semester, I have learned a lot about myself as a writer and as student. There were times where I got assignments where I struggled and didn’t know how to start writing and felt confused, but I was able to persevere and get a good grade as well. My least favorite assignment was homework 9/7. This homework had us picture an incident that changed our view on education and to describe the scene. I don’t have a good memory and I am not a very detail-oriented person so it was hard for me to write all the details I could from the experience I had years ago. Something that I have learned about myself as a writer/scholar this semester is that I am a good writer I just have to focus on certain aspects of my writing in order to be even better. What I can work on is learning how to incorporate quotes in my writing and also learning how to properly cite. The techniques I have learned in this class are definitely going to be used in my other classes. For example, the IQIAA method which teaches you when and how you can use and introduce quotes in your writing. Another thing I will be using to my advantage is the grammar workshops we did. I will use the sheets we were given in class in order to properly write any papers in the future and fix my grammar mistakes in order to be more articulate.

As a student, I have always felt like my writing was missing something. I never knew what exactly but it just felt like I never wrote my very best. As the semester kept progressing and we kept getting more assignments, this feeling didn’t exactly change but I was starting to see a pattern in my writing. I always have trouble starting my papers but as soon as I have a clear outline on what I’m going to write and how, I am able to write a lot and consistently. After noticing this, I now know that in order for me to start writing a paper is to have an outline and plan out how exactly I want to introduce my points in the paper. This way I can find adequate evidence and feel like my points are backed up and are not missing any key ideas. Another thing I want to work on for future assignments is my conclusion. Every time I write a paper I feel like my conclusion is the weakest part of it. I have trouble wrapping up the essay without repeating myself a lot of times and making it boring for the reader. For my RAB, I was struggling with writing my conclusion. I had said, ” I think I might need a little help with my conclusion but I hope to get some feedback that can help me when we do peer review.” In the end, I was able to get some feedback which helped me a lot because I ended up getting a 5/5 on my conclusion. I do believe that when I get feedback and or some pointers on my writing it helps me do better because many times there are things in my writing that I don’t notice but others do.

My experience revising assignments was very enlightening. It was surprising to see the little things I missed on my papers that my peers noticed or my professor noticed that I didn’t. For example, in my annotated bibliography I failed to correctly cite many sources. The correct way was supposed to be MLA and I cited in APA instead. It made me see that I need to pay more attention to my work and revise everything before turning anything in. At the beginning of the semester, for one of the homeworks we had to read an article and a response to it and how we could use the skills we read about. I had said, “Something Bunn did in his writing that I want to try to do in my own writing is starting my essay with a question or a quote that gives context or is related to what my piece is going to be about. This way I can capture the reader’s attention and prompt them to read more.” WHile revising my assignments, I realized that this is something I failed to do in my papers. I kind of did it in my RAB but I didn’t do it more often. I would like to try this technique in my future writing in order to find better ways to get my reader’s attention.