Final Reflection

Throughout the semester I often thought what is the purpose of this class, or what am I supposed to take away from this assignment. I couldn’t really answer that question, and for some assignments I still am confused about their purpose. However I feel that there are quite a few assignments, discussions, and blog posts that have made me reevaluate my own education and what I can do as a student to ensure that I take advantage of my education moving forward.

            At the start of this semester I had to make quite a few adjustments because of how different UNC is from my old school. The reason I transferred here was to get involved in clubs on campus, something my old school lacked. But when I got into these clubs my grades suffered in ways that I have never experienced. For example I struggled with updating my blog throughout the semester. Believe it or not I didn’t even remember to create the blog and post it on Moodle until the night before it was due. Instead I was busy fencing and playing video games with strangers. The funny thing about this situation is that I actually thought that I was doing well in the class because I didn’t find out that I wasn’t posting enough onto my blog until midterm.  At that point a sense of worry came over me because of how low my grade was and I began to make it a point to check Megan’s blog to ensure that I have done all of my requirements were meet. The downside to this is that I still struggled with producing quality work on a few of my writing assignments. Take my Writing History for example after my second rewrite I still had a boat load of changes to make. I struggled with this assignment because I never thought about how my academic writing has impacted me as a writer.

Being in school all I ever thought about was what can I do to get an A, after I get the grade for something it fades out of memory and has to be really special for me to really remember. So when I was asked to explain what kind of writer I am and how my academic writing supports that I began to panic and was like “I don’t know where to begin”. In hindsight I think that this assignment shows how I don’t have a serious value of education and that I may take certain classes or assignments more serious than others. The bad part about that is that I learn from everything I experience, in school it’s a lot harder to actual learn from everything because of the constant stress about meeting deadlines and getting good grades. This is why I want to strengthen my approach to me education, obviously I am not going to learn from everything except for how to follow instruction and accept feedback. But if I can consider the purpose from everything and get out of the robotic mindset of do this, change this, or meet this requirement then potentially I will be able to take something away from every assignment.  Recently I had to do write an Exploratory Essay that opened my eyes to a new type of writing. In an exploratory essay you have connect a single thesis with three different articles by three different writers, while explaining how each writer argued the same thesis in a different way. My issue with this assignment is that not only am I required to exclude my personal view of the topic, but I have to force one thesis through three different articles that may not have a lot in common. After doing this assignment I felt like I cheated myself, I didn’t really find any solid information within all of the articles that argued one thesis. As a result I would include certain quotes and tried to make the thesis very broad in order to make my information fit. That process should me how my education has turned me into a robot when approaching certain types of writing, there have been lots of essays that I have written just to meet a standard set by the teacher or a rubric of some sorts.  Me being a student I won’t see the long term benefit of ever assignment, however if I think of ever class as a stepping stone towards my bigger goals then I will be able to focus on every assignment as a crucial part of my education rather than just another assignment.

Overall I really appreciate the Inquiry Project I have worked on over the course of this assignment. So far this assignment has impacted my way of thinking and academic life in ways I didn’t even expect. My inquiry question was how do African American communities affect their students academically? Throughout my research I learned so many disheartening things, and I would always ask do I fit this category of black students or am I some of the few that have received a good education. One part of the project was the Joining the Conversation, which was an academic essay that attempts to answer your inquiry question. Throughout my essay I talked about how poverty has a direct impact on students, and how most of those students do not matchup to their white counterparts academically. I felt nervous, sad and a little angry because I grew up in a poor community and prior to coming to UNC I had never been around white students. By having those two facts about me I know that I can fall into some of those negative statistics about African American students, and by me not being around white students prior to college there was no way for me to figure out how I matchup to white students. I did really well in school growing up, but I don’t know how great my school’s curriculum was and if I would be able to perform well in a tougher school. So now I think to myself do I read at a proficient level, can I compete with white students and what can I do to ensure that my future education is a good one. As a result of that paper I not only reevaluated my high school education but thought am I putting forth all of my effort to obtain an education that will help me achieve my dreams.  

Every day in class we would typically start with a journal writing which would consist of a response to a variety of different topics. We called them “Writing into the Day” and I enjoyed most of them at the early part of the class because of the interesting topics that we would discuss. The very first entry we did was a response to, what do you think when you hear the word school? Initially I thought that the purpose of school was to prepare students for different careers, as well as give them general information to progress further academically. Looking back on that journal entry I now think that school is here to give students tools to not only thrive in the workforce but socially as well. I believe that in school the humanities that this country values are not being taught in addition to the regular curriculum. Things like effort, which is very important in school is not being taught which leads to some students falling short because they are not trying hard enough. These Writing into the Days have made me think that schools are overlooking so many of the smaller issues in school and fail to address them in class. By nature humans learn to interact with one another however in a place like school they way in which we interact with each other could differ. Students could become bullies, or feel like social outcast because they may not perform well in school. If schools are not teaching the humanities of the real world then we must rely on other outside sources to do so, and in some communities that alternative may be more harmful than helpful.

Over the course of this semester both in English and throughout my classes in general I felt as if this school is more rigorous than what I am use to. English class however helped me figure out why certain styles of education are not effective. I found it very interesting that I was taking a class that allowed us as students to learn about ways to be effective both as the educator and the educated. My Annotated Bibliography is a tool that i had never used like this before, and quite frankly I prefer it this way. By requiring me to think ahead of time of how i will use this information, the essay is essentially laid out in a well structured manner. That assignment alone opened my eyes to different ways to approach future essays, and kind of made me think why didn't I learn this in high school. From this experience I have learned that I need to put more effort into my education because as I progress the classes are getting harder and the outside distractions are increasing as well.
 Thinking back to all of my assignments it kind of reminds me of a video game. A video game in which you do a lot of smaller things that inevitable help you overcome the big thing at the end. This semester I was overcoming myself and the thought that college is easy. I’m not saying that college is hard, just that it can be easy or hard depending on how well you prepare for it.