Reflection Paper Assignment

There will come a time in most students ' careers when they are assigned a research paper. Such an assignment often creates a great deal of unneeded anxiety in the student, which may result in procrastination and a feeling of confusion and inadequacy. This anxiety frequently stems from the fact that many students are unfamiliar and inexperienced with this genre of writing. Never fear—inexperience and unfamiliarity are situations you can change through practice! Writing a research paper is an essential aspect of academics and should not be avoided on account of one 's anxiety. In fact, the process of writing a research paper can be one of the more rewarding experiences one may encounter in academics. What is more, many students will continue to do research throughout their careers, which is one of the reasons this topic is so important.

Although I am not very good at writing and analyzing literature, English is a skill that I believe is essential and something I have always wanted to excel in. The reason why I believe my skills lack in English is that I tend to analyze situations more formulaically and systematically, which explains why I am a mathematics and computer science major. My primary difficulty in writing before I entered college was my ability to pull important information out of small, specific pieces of text. I never understood how one could retrieve so much information about a story from the analysis of as little as a description of the setting or a couple of lines of dialogue between characters. So, coming into my first day of English 1102 at the University of Georgia, I wanted to discover and use techniques that could help me analyze specific sections of text effectively and accurately. What I found is that there is a multitude of formulas and techniques that can help me effectively and efficiently analyze a story and that I can apply these same techniques to other forms of media. Overall, however, this course helped me realize that the methods and techniques used in analyzing literature and media are profoundly similar to ones used in the analysis of a mathematics problem.

The second day of school into sixth grade was going fine, I was having a good day. I was excited that I was in middle school. The clock finally hit three I went straight home. I got home, I ate and watched tv shows on Netflix.I was having a laid-back day since I didn't have homework to do.It was around 8:50 p.m. and my mom told me and my sisters to go to bed since it was a school night. I went to my room but didn’t listen to my mom. My younger sister Samantha and I were playing around with my baby sister Gema. We were playing on my bed by the corner.

This world sucks, I am a seventeen year old student studying at Bloor Collegiate. Every time when I would have a conversation with someone about a topic that does not have an answer, I would get stressed and cannot express my opinions well. This is my true feelings because I always found it challenging to include myself in discussions with multiple perspectives. I like math and science, especially physics because there is only one answer. I do not have to express myself to anyone, I can just use an equation and logic to find the right answer. Those subjects are more universal than languages like Spanish or English. Even though the way to solve the problems is tough and complicated, you will always get the same answer in the end. I do not like to argue with other people about society and the ridiculous things that build up our world. For instance, people around me say that learning history is important to avoid mistakes that have been made. So far in my life, I do not remember what I have learned from history. This indicates that learning history was useless towards my knowledge and had zero impact on my life.

When I was young, the last words I would hear at night were “In Jesus’ name, Amen,” as my mother prayed over my twin sister and I, while tucking us in bed. Her words surrounded and comforted me like a warm blanket, even on the darkest of nights. Anytime I would have a nightmare, I would run to her room and she would appease me with prayer and somehow compel me to feel dauntless. I admired my parents tremendously and always sought for their approval, so I never questioned any of the beliefs or opinions they were teaching me as I grew up. However, growing up into the person I am today I have learned that Christianity, or religion itself, is not always black and white, and occasionally you face obstacles that challenge the beliefs and opinions you were raised to withhold.

I was born into a time of darkness. Quite literarily, during the first year of my life, my parents found themselves often not having access to basic necessities that we take for granted every day such as electricity or water. Both my mother and father come from humble beginnings, being born and raised in small villages in the outskirts of Armenia. Never would they dream of one day moving to a city like Los Angeles after the kind of life we lived since my birth. Yet what we perceive as completely unattainable to us was actually much more within our reach than we initially thought. With a hopeful perspective in mind, we applied for a green-card and miraculously won a chance for a brighter future in the U.S.

My parents both grew up in small villages in India and worked hard to earn a living for their family once they immigrated to Canada. My younger brother and I always saw the struggles that they had to go through and we both respected the work and sacrifices that they made for us. My father for the longest time worked as a head chef in a Greek restaurant. He would always tell us stories about how he was the only South Asian chef in the kitchen and had to quickly learn how to make Greek dishes and new recipes all alone. As a new immigrant to Canada and as someone who was in a new cultural environment, he had to overcome many barriers and challenges. Aside from recipes, my father had to learn a new language and Greek customs and traditions which were very important in the small family owned restaurant. He was able to adapt and turn his difficult experience into a positive one through persistence and determination. He is now able to speak Greek fluently and make amazing Greek dishes!

The First United Methodist Church of Monroe, Louisiana has essentially acted as a second home for me. Ever since I was a baby, I have been attending there. It is a place where I have

Before I took this class, if you had asked me to give you in my own words what I thought culture meant, I wouldn't of been able to answer. Today culture to me is identified by things that vary from the food you eat, the music you listen to, and things that influence you to be who you are today. Like me, today some of the biggest cultural influences that have shaped me to be who I am today are hockey, friends and family.

From the beginnings of my foray into the study of history during my formative years of education in elementary school, to the rigorous minutia of a Tennessee high school’s curriculum, the period from Pre-history to the Enlightenment age was briefly discussed in the younger years and very rarely toughed upon in the later ones. Oftentimes, it seemed as though only a week of classes was devoted to this period at the start of the semester, eschewed in favor of the more “relevant” modern history—the Industrial Revolution, or Reconstruction, or the World Wars. So, coming into this course, I can say I only had the faintest grasp on this time period, particularly the timeline of events and a hint of understanding about each civilization’s unique cultures. It was also at the start of this semester that I believed the most important information I would learn from this class would be the conflicts and downfalls of these long-gone societies. Instead, I have realized that while I understood a great deal about the rise and fall of these civilizations as they related to humanity’s timeline as a whole, I failed to recognize the significant role of philosophy throughout history and how it has shaped our world today, evolving through the ages from the founders of western thought, the Greeks, to the Middle Ages with the integration of religion and philosophy, and finally into Modern thought with the arrival of Machiavelli. I also learned how these schools of thought relate to Christianity and

Ever since I was a child, I’ve always built an imaginary box around my life. It contained everything that I was used to and shielded against any major external changes. This included my school life. Other than my pre-k class, I’ve never been to any other school except for Maryvale Elementary School. I was in the French Immersion program there with over 50 other students. Throughout the years we all became very close, especially since they were the some of the only people I knew my age. By third grade, 10 students had already left and more would continue to leave. This only reaffirmed the bond between the rest of us. In fifth grade, the total number of French Immersion students in my grade only amounted to a little over 30 students.

School is something that is required for everyone to take. It is where everyone goes to learn through the academic classes. Many go in hopes of being able to achieve their dream by attending school every year. But many others, including myself, believe that a majority of the classes that we have to take do not support us for the future we are trying to pursue. Sure, the classes we take in elementary school are the proper stepping stools for future development, but I’m not talking about those classes. I’m talking about the classes we take in high school. I go to a Vo Tech high school which helps you choose your career path through the Career and Transitions class (CAT). Only certain parts of the career and transitions class are actually useful. We had a good month to look at the options that we could choose to have as our career area for the next three years of high school. The rest of CAT class was extremely unnecessary. We had to read a book about habits that a “highly effective teen” would have. We spent practically 3 whole marking periods on this book and I believe this could have been spent on something more beneficial for our future. This book was meant for us to change our bad habits into good ones, but nobody had taken this class seriously because they realized that there was no reason to do something like this. During that time, I wished that we could have learned about the Spanish language because it would be a lot more enjoyable and wouldn’t be a waste of time when

Like most new occasions in life, you must go in with an open mind and remain possessing this sort of mindset throughout the duration of the encounterment. This is the tactic I chose in regards to this class, English Composition 1. The reason I say this is because of one specific reason and one specific reason only. That reason being: I haven't always had the best luck with English professors in and throughout grade school. Attempting not to pick fun, I have not always been a huge advocate for my past professor’s teaching styles. A common response to this may be “That’s your issue.” And it is undoubtedly my personal issue that I had to come to terms with. If my learning style differs to that of a professor’s, it is my responsibility to alter things. For example, my senior year of high school, I qualified to be apart of Advanced Placement (AP) Writing. It was a class, in which you were required to meet certain criteria upon admission. They looked at things like your ACT score, in regards to both Reading and Writing, as well as your overall academic performance. Within this class, students were able to qualify for contests, in hopes that their essay was chosen as the best. That being said, I was given the opportunity to read my commemoration essay in front of the entire school and many visitors on Veterans Day my senior year of high school. My essay is still being used as an example for the up and coming AP students, in regards to the commemoration unit within this class.

It was yet another dull day in my high school English IV class. I arrived on-time and placed my worn out, overused, school issued computer on my desk and began looking up the day’s assignments. Soon enough the teacher would begin to speak, but before he even began I was already sitting there with the feeling of annoyance. “A fifteen-page senior research project” the announcement read. “Fan-fucking-tastic,” I remember thinking to myself. Another complete waste of my precious time I could have used to work on my car, or finish the next level of the video game I had been so often enjoying. The teacher announced the usual, “No plagiarism, 12-point font, double spaced, MLA format” nothing we hadn’t ever heard before, but somehow always managed to require 30 minutes of my life to explain. “This ought to be easy,” I had thought to myself, ignoring the rest of the instructions given. Little did I know; this paper was going to change the very way I thought about life.

Every school year thousands of students embark on the painful process of composing a research paper. It is a ritual that no one is expected to enjoy; it is seen as something that simply must be done. Students are expected to pick a topic, research it, and then transfer the information into a research paper. These papers often say nothing, but manage to spend just long enough saying it to bore and pain students, parents, and teachers alike. This, in many respects, is not only an unproductive process, but in many situations is counterproductive, leaving students hating research and not understanding what they were asked to accomplish in the first place.