Reflection Paper

There are multiple reasons I am where I am today and why I’m going where I’m going. I have struggled in school ever since I can remember but without the people that I have had in my life I wouldn’t where I am today. But as I will talk about the teacher have played a huge role in the reason I am able to be where I am today.

For my service learning project I worked in Mrs. Evelyn Costa's first grade class at Meadowlane Elementary. Meadowlane is located at 4280 W 8th Avenue in Hialeah, Florida and was constructed in 1957. There are one thousand one hundred and seventy seven students enrolled at Meadowlane Elementary school. Meadowlane has fifty three classrooms and fourteen portables and there are one hundred and seventy nine students per grade level. The school was built on nine acres of land. The student population of meadowlane Elementary is comprised of 97% Hispanic, 2% White, and 1% Asian.

“Writing an essay is not difficult! I am actually great at it.” This is a common statement that I would formally say, and even believe. In the past, I had never felt the need to thoroughly revise my essays before. In all my past essays, I would work intensely on my first draft and then just turn the essay in. I never spent too much time re-evaluating my writing decisions before turning it in. This process had worked well for myself in the past, and as a result, each essay I turned it would be an easy “A”. When I signed up for EN100 I figured that it would be just like the other easy English class that I have taken. I assumed that I would work on an essay, turn it in, and then earn an A on it, but this was not the case. When I signed up for EN100 I figured that I could continue my previous essay writing methods, but that was quickly disproven. When I received my first graded essay, I was unsure why I earned anything but an “A” on it. It soon became clear to me that I was going to be required to change the way I formerly wrote my essays and spend more time with correcting them.

My writing experiences in middle school and high school were pleasant and seem to mostly relatable to the other middle school experiences where I learned a lot of different writing styles in sixth and seventh grade. In ACOW5 it said that most students advance into middle school without being prepared for writing to multiple audiences or in different styles. This was true in my case as well. In elementary school we did not do a lot of writing and when we did, we didn’t focus on revision a whole lot. Teachers would grade my papers off of grammar mistakes and I feel like they weren’t looking at the content of what us students were writing at all. I seemed to be able to keep up with what we were doing and it also was well taught for the most part once I got into middle school and high school. When I was in high school, teachers always clarified what they were looking for from us and also provided us with instruction on how to execute certain papers depending on what we were writing. In middle school my writing experiences were pretty good too, because starting in seventh grade we were assigned five paragraph essays in our grammar course that helped strengthen our capabilities on grammar and context. I feel like in middle school we only skimmed over the different types of writing when the article speaks about the five different styles. My school did a lot of writing to show learning, writing to learn writing and writing to communicate, but we didn’t start to write to express or to write to create until I was in high school and it was for journal entries or as projects in language art classes. As far as self sponsored writing, I feel like I didn’t partake in it until I was in high school, but for writing to learn and formal assignments we practiced all the time.

While I am always very open about my accomplishments there is one piece of me I don't boast around as an accomplishment. On Wednesday nights, every month, I teach a Rainbows class at First Assembly of God. This class consists of 10-15 preschoolers who want to learn about God. I teach because having an impact on someone’s life,especially someone younger than me, is important to me. This class has a great impact on both me and the kids who come through the program. I personally have gone through all five years of my church’s children’s program. I have taught the rainbows class for three or four years, which makes this year's class my fourth full year of teaching. I still have kids that come up to me getting so excited to tell “Ms. Brooklynn”what they have done since the last Wednesday I’d seen them. These encounters have validated the effect I can have on the kids who come through my class. However,the effect they’ve had on me is even greater. Before I had spent every Wednesday with these children, I didn’t know what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do with my life, and I wasn’t sure what my suture would hold. After realizing how much I loved children and how much I loved teaching them, I knew what I wanted to do. The children that I taught had such a strong connection and they know they have a steady figure in their life. I had a student whose home life wasn’t steady, and he had one steady figure in his life. When he first came to Rainbow’s class he was antisocial and

I have made three salient contributions to the LGBTQ movement and LGBTQ rights. The most noteworthy, in my opinion, was my contribution to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). I was awarded a full scholarship to attend Stetson University and compete for the tennis team as a Division I athlete. During my tenure, I had noticed the discourse surrounding LGBTQ+ athletes had been minimally harmful. I was closeted for three out of the four years as an undergrad. In these years, I both witnessed and was regularly the target of disparaging remarks on the basis of character or perceived sexual orientation. These petty remarks, fueled by ignorance, started to accumulate and I increasingly grew aware of how these remarks became more hostile when the subject was at the intersection of race, gender expression, and sexuality.

Since the beginning of the semester, my writing has changed and evolved to accommodate and sustain longer essays. With longer essays, there is more room for in-depth analysis. Further analyzing a topic has led me to findings that I did not know existed. As I continue to write, I uncover addition and superior methods to approach my writing to the benefit of me and therefore, my audience. Throughout the semester, I have incorporated techniques to further my narrative throughout my writing.

Writing is a tool that will be used throughout my lifetime. It is a tool that is worth taking the time to perfect because it will only be beneficial in the long run. On my writing assignments, I earn A’s, but I still have areas that I need to work on. The areas that I struggle the most would be with simple grammar errors such as the use of commas, writing with an active voice, and writing short,simple sentences. First of all, I often do not know where to place commas in my sentence. I struggle with this because I tend to add commas in the wrong place, so I have become confused with the proper use of commas. This is a small grammar error that I can easily correct by learning where and when commas are needed. I have also found and been told that I write in a passive voice when I should be using an active voice. This is a technique that I have to work on by practicing it and noticing the difference while I am writing and reading. Finally, I often write run on sentences or sentences that include unnecessary information. This makes my writing unclear and difficult for the reader to understand. I could improve by writing shorter and simpler sentences that include only the essential information to get my point across. I have noticed these mistakes in my writing and it has also been brought up by others, so I am currently working on improving it.

I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior when I was 20 years old. At that time I was struggling with my family, problems in school and toxic relationship with my boyfriend. Despite believing in God I still did not have the knowledge of his word and the spiritual skills to find the wisdom and spiritual resources. In the midst of all those difficult circumstances a miracle happened: the Savior chose me, one of my aunts invited me to a Bible study group where I was captivated by the love, forgiveness and guidance that the word of God and His Holy Spirit was giving me in that moment the peace which surpasses all understanding, so from that day I made the decision and went to my aunt's church, to a retreat and then baptized accepting Jesus as my savior.

Throughout my four years of high school I have attended many classes, sport events, and had many other experiences that changed my view on life. As i later look back on these experiences. I see how much they really changed my view on people, the way I treat them and about life in general. Over the years, all of these experiences and situations have built me up and turned me into the person that I am today.

Before I left Spelman for my domestic exchange at LSU and Stanford, that story was just a good memory, but when I was away, its importance to me was more than nostalgic, it was an example of the power black love. HBCU campuses, like Spelman, create spaces for loving blackness not only to cultivate self-worth or restore dignity but also to activate black love as political resistance. What I experienced with the Outdoors club and what I took for granted before I left Spelman’s campus was how supporting, encouraging, accepting, and acknowledging blackness in the classrooms and on campus was a daily enactment of loving blackness as political resistance. For example, when I am in convocation and the student introducing themselves before introducing the speaker declares their major and the audience roars “YAASSSSSS,” that is intellectual reinforcement and support from their peers. The applause is to congratulate the student for making it this far, declaring to continue, and letting them know that they are not alone, but they are in fact supported. At a PWI, this would either be considered ratchet or it would not happen at all. Furthermore, loving blackness as political resistance looks like the letter that the professors of Spelman College signed in support of the students’ protests and awareness campaign on sexual assault and sexual violence with the AUC. A student or a group of students on Spelman’s campus started a sexual assault and sexual violence campaign with the hashtag

My mother does genology for my family so I know that I am mostly a mix of African, Native American and not enough European to really think about. I look like a normal African-American girl and most people I come in contact with assume the same thing. To define myself without race I would say I am invested in the betterment of other peoples lives and performing in front of an audience. As a black woman I am affected mostly in my major, theatre, because being black is a factor in whether or not I am cast in certain roles. Personally it has been a rollercoaster going to predominately white-schools and still finding a way to love and appreiciate my blackness. I’m reminded of my race daily when I have to mix my foundations to find a shade that isn’t offered or when my theatre professors suggest I do a monologue from “A Raisin in the Sun’ and as of recently when I look at the news I am affected by the fact that the injustice in the world based on race could happen to me or a loved one in a heartbeat.

A Hindu spiritual teacher once shared, “This world is your best teacher. There is a lesson in everything. There is a lesson in each experience. Learn it and become wise” (Sivananda). When I take this wise advice and reflect on the past year, I see many lessons that have helped me become a more mature and responsible person. Many of these lessons have been through my English course with Mrs. Frohoff. In this class, we’ve had many units, such as the types of love, writing assignments, including many 1-page reflections, projects, such as a memoir and a PSA, and presentations on themes like identity and critical world problems. It has been through our memoir assignment, the large number of deadlines given, and the presentations required that I’ve been taught valuable lessons about who I am and how to grow as a person throughout this school year.

I’m a very academically driven student and have several, quite lofty, goals for my time here at Texas A&M. I want to maintain a 4.0 GPA, or at least a minimum of a 3.5 in order to maintain my Cornerstone Honors status. My dream, and biggest goal, is to intern for a congressperson in Washington DC, and I also want to study abroad, hopefully in England.

There are over 4,200 religions throughout the entire world but I grew up in a Christian home believing that God is the way, the truth, and the life. Christianity is a religion of grace and mercy, but many people struggle to believe in a transcendent figure that they cannot see. I was taught that all concepts in the Bible were valid through the Nazarene church; these beliefs are confirmed, in my opinion by the plenary theory of inspiration. This is what I grew up believing about the Bible.