The Last Week of Classes

This week in English has been especially slow moving which may have something to do with the fact that after next week school is out. It’s almost the end of freshman year, and I feel so overwhelmed. Between this class and the others it’s become taxing on my mind to think of what all I have to do before I can finally relax. For this class alone, I have three papers I have to revise and in one of those three papers I have to correlate what I’m writing to a page. What makes this week even more stressful is that I just don’t have the time to do anything, Thursday after school I have job training as well as Friday and most of Saturday. If screaming would help trust me I would. Not to mention Sunday night at midnight I have to help with the midnight breakfast in my dorm because I’m a floor President. This blog is probably the most I’ve ranted and raved (but don’t take my word for it, because I don’t remember). I will miss this class for how small it is and the fact that I’m already comfortable with the teacher. Anyways back on this week.. Monday the teacher gave us more tools to make our papers the best that they can be; Wednesday (today) we caught up on blogs and worked on our portfolios more. What’s planned for Friday is outlining our timed reflection and next week classes are over. Here’s to hoping for the best, wish me luck. :)

Another Scary Monday ( Last Monday)

So this last past Monday, I found myself at the center of attention as I read my paper aloud to the class. Personally I don’t really have a problem with public speaking, because once I’m in the swing of things I’m ok, but it’s the symptoms I have that are ridiculous. I heat up and cool down rapidly, then I begin shaking and my voice sounds shaky, wonderful right? Well anyways I was really surprised on the feedback I received for my paper. Many people in the class said that they liked my paper, but what I found to be most intriguing was the fact that a lot of people wanted me to expand more on the ideas. It makes me laugh on the inside (with happiness) that people are interested in my paper and even want to know more. On Wednesday I met with Ms. Neubauer to discuss what I was doing for my portfolio. It was really hard for me to decide what papers to put in my portfolio because some of my papers were more developed than the others. The thing was the papers that were more developed I lacked the drive and determination to finish. Ms. Neubauer helped me figure what I had to do for all the possible papers. On Friday there was once again no class for which I was very thankful for because I desperately needed to rest.

All Caught Up

Monday began with me being discussion leader. I didn’t really know what to do except to say except next, in fact now that I think about it I really don’t see the point in having a discussion leader, except to put one person on the spot when the movement of the feedback stops. It was a bit nerve racking personally and I found myself accidently speaking quiet when I should have been loud and vice versa. However it was another week of work shopping each other paper’s. Surprised as I am, I’m not bored with critiquing papers yet, mainly because it is very interesting to see what people wrote about. It’s almost like getting to know each other by our interests, like if you have passion behind what you wrote it shows, and I love when I see that. I only hope next week when it is my turn my passion shows in my paper. Although I’m not sure how much passion you can have behind a visual analysis paper. I mean some papers don’t and sot of can’t have that much passion behind it, but it all depends on the type paper it is. I did feel particularly awkward during this week when reviewing one person’s paper. As much as I’d like to believe that race doesn’t matter and all that jazz, sometimes some of the things people say without thinking it through can be frustrating. One student wrote his paper about how two black athletes made realizing African Americans are equals possible (basically) when to me being a minority I see that yes every step we take makes seeing that we are equals better but it doesn’t mean that everyone sees us equals because of those two athletes. Well anyways I pointed out the flaw and the awkwardness was over, and tat was this week.

Two Blogs Late : |

So this is the week we began work shopping our papers (Which is something we are still doing). The way that work shopping our papers works is we get a copy of someone’s paper then the owner of the paper reads their paper aloud to everyone, as the listeners we are supposed to critique the paper like in peer revision. However on top of doing our regular peer revisions individually, we are assigned a specific sections o the rubric to look at in the paper. Then from there the discussion leader leads the discussion by telling people to take their turn and share with the class what they believed could be worked on in he paper. Personally I really liked this way of reviewing the paper because everyone has their own style of writing and has been taught ever slightly different forms of English. Thus revising papers like this is really helpful because if one person didn’t catch one mistake another person might, also since everyone has their own individual strengths they bring that to the table as well.

Three Blogs Late :/

During this week we presented our group projects, my group was second to go. I was really nervous because we were one of the first few groups and therefore we didn’t have a lot to look to as an example of how to present. Our grouped had agreed to let Dena be the presenter as her part of share of the project. Although that’s what we agreed on we all ended up contributing to the presentation a bit. While being nervous I was also excited because everyone got to see our group’s page and I worked really hard on the page. The facebook page wasn’t finished, but to put it simply, it was my baby, I was very proud of it. After our presentation though, it became apparent that other groups worked very hard as well, if not harder. The group that did the page on Woodworth was very well put together and I thought the information that they put into it was very informative and impressing. Other than that group the only other group that really sticks out in my mind is the group that did the smoking hangout. I thoroughly enjoyed all the effort that put into it, and it was very intriguing to see how many people really got into their page. It was a combination of the people that took interest in the paper as well as the videos that were put up that made their project the most intriguing to me.