Reflection Paper In Writing

Students learned the level of detail required to design a living space for six people that could not leave a shelter for several months or even years. Another upcoming example, is a blogging experience that will pair four classrooms of different schools. Each week, a different class posts what they have learned and the other students provide comments, feedback, and encouragement.  This quadblogging exchange will provide an online publishing opportunity for the students. My hope is teachers will see student-engagement increase as a result of the increase in the audience viewing student writing.

Throughout Writ 1 I learned several new techniques to improve my academic writing. Prior to taking this course, I attended a high school which provided little preparation for writing academic papers so I expected to face challenges along the way. One of the obstacles that slowed me down was that I was unable to write a significant and arguable thesis until the last week of the semester. The rejection of my initial drafts encouraged me to learn from my mistakes. My main struggle and subsequent areas of improvements were learning to analyze evidence rather than summarize, understanding the difficult source readings, and learning to assist the reader by writing with the audience in mind.

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.

There are three words that keep me going every day, which are “Keep Moving Forward” these words are part of a classic quote by Walt Disney, which spawned the film Walt Disney’s Meet the Robinsons. These words were used as acts of comfort as throughout my schooling journey I often had myself wondering about the days before. I have conjured up to the conclusion that the past is series of ‘whys’ as in ‘why did this happen?’ and that people often dwell on their past and sometime attempt to re-create it. Throughout my schooling years I have often looked back and asked ‘why?’ as I tried to open the door into my bygone days and try to solve my question. It only so happened a week before graduating that I got a wakeup call onto the fact that I was opening all the wrong doors. Now I am opening a new door into the future creating new experiences and friendships. Throughout my last week of school, I sat in my English class 5 times, for 45 mins each, to reflect on how literature has shaped my values, attitudes and beliefs in my years of education and has shaped the person that I am today.

Spanning 169 million square miles, the Earth is composed of countless regions, all of them incredibly different from another. This is especially true of the two places I have been able to call my home: Houston, Texas and Carmel Valley, California. I lived in Houston for twelve years, and while I found myself complaining daily about local characteristics such as weather, traffic, or school, I never knew how taxing it would be to make the transition across the country, from an urban-conglomerate hotspot to a quaint, nature-centered community. I found most of my hardship in being suddenly dropped into a public school, something I had only had nightmares of, as the public schools in Houston are of some of the worst in America, and I was accustomed to attending a Jewish private school for the first twelve years of my life. Every day seemed to drag onward a continuous eternity of loneliness. But if it were not for Mr. Stadille, the Carmel Middle School Drama teacher, I would not have much of a life to look forward to. Every day as our connection grew, I saw how impactful he is as a teacher, a member of the community, and as a friend.

At the age of 10 years old I moved to the United States after a devastating earthquake that nearly destroyed my beautiful island of Haiti in January of 2010. I was forced to leave behind everything I’d ever known because Haiti was in havoc; I was no longer safe. I left my once beautiful country with one suitcase in hand and a heart filled with sadness. To my friends, I was considered lucky to be leaving, but little did they know, starting over isn't the easiest thing especially in an unknown environment. Although, I myself was a US citizen, I never considered the United States as my true home since I had never traveled there or had the desire to. Everything that I ever wanted, my country provided for me. Life in America was foreign to me, and I’d only heard of it through stories, but now I had become part of that story.

To most, living on a tropical island sounds like paradise or something out of a dream. People often fantasize about tropical islands filled with warm breezes, swaying coconut trees, sandy beaches, and exotic animals. Unfortunately I know that those dreams are not an accurate reflection of most tropical islands. I know because when I was six years old my parents decided that our family of five should become missionaries in the South Pacific. In 2006, without much notice or discussion, we moved from South Carolina to the distant land of Tutuila, American Samoa, an unorganized, unincorporated territory of the United States located deep within the South Pacific. We lived there for four years, and they were the most interesting and formative years of my life.

The other thing I completely understood was that I loved teaching and working in a classroom. Unfortunately, it would take a lot longer to get back into one than I had originally planned.

Dr. Christine Weinberger is a Mohs surgeon who removed a Basal Cell Carcinoma from my mother’s face in 2014. Today, my mother has no concern about recurrence in the area and only has a discreet scar along the alar crease. Impressed by her doctor’s professionalism, bedside manor and extraordinary similarity in interests to mine, my mother urged me to reach out to her. When I did, she invited me into the clinic to observe her typical busy day of greeting patients, removing initial stages of their skin cancer, histological preparation, review of the slides, and then either further excision or closure. She performed over fifteen procedures eliminating people’s skin cancer that day. I left feeling the thrill of adrenaline and exhilaration, having discovered that I wanted to spend the rest of my life as physically and intellectually stimulated as I was that day. The next morning, I woke up to an email from Dr. Weinberger, informing that they had a job opening and would like me to apply. Soonafter, I arrived for my first day and during the initial orientation period I was immersed in literature and training in wound care, anatomy, wound healing, suture and staple removal, unna boot application (for chronic ulceration), surgical preparation, sterilization, identification of infection, biopsy procedure, clinical photography, gloving up to assist in surgery, UPTs, and EMR documentation. After mastering these skills, I became responsible for a full schedule of 15-20 postoperative

Do you know why you are still overweight? Do you understand the reason why you can't lose weight or not be able to keep it down and when you do you just jump back the other side plots as a bonus a few extra kilos you don't want?

This semester has been busy, I have written four papers. Scoring better than I thought I was capable of. St. Edward’s University was not my first choice, because I knew that St. Edward’s focuses on their student’s writing skills. The only reason I applied was because my mom wanted me to. I got waitlisted at my first choice and then my mom thought my second choice was too far, so here I am at a University that requires more writing from a person than anyone has ever done in my life. Reading and writing are not my strongest subjects, I am better at math, chemistry, anything with numbers.I set foot in this school with the thought that I was going to fail or just barely pass Rhetoric and Composition. I was going to take it in the a university that its goal is to improve the student’s reading and writing skills. The truth was, I expected to dread the class. On the first day of class, a man in his early 40s started screaming at the 14 kids in the room. He is different than the teachers I had before which is refreshing, his name is Professor Braun. It’s November and this is the fifth paper he has us writing, it is a reflection on my writing from the beginning of September to now. From Untitled Paper #1 to Are you Certain of Your Own Truth Paper #4, I am able to see a big improvement such as there are less careless mistakes, my ideas are more developed and carried throughout my papers, and there is a more concise support and more analysis in my papers.

This semester introduced me to newfangled concepts that, paper after paper, have helped me succeed in my classes. Professor Ulrich has done an adequate job of instructing me in this semester’s composition one class. Each one of my papers provides proof of my academic development as I acquired and applied new concepts. Additionally, across the span of my first daily writing to the last, although I admit to having ups and downs, there is evidence that I have retained what I have learned. Now, I possess rhetorical knowledge, critical reading writing & thinking knowledge, a composing process, knowledge of conventions, and proper use of writing technologies; furthermore, each has cultivated me into a better student this fall semester.

Growing up I was always taught that everyone was created equal, although my parents are not religious they always believed that we all came from somewhere and that we were all equals on this earth. I grew up in a small town so there was no diversity really. No one was ever treated too different based on what they looked like or what gender they were. We were just a small community of rednecks all just trying to live our lives.

I’ve been writing essays and reading books ever since I could remember. Starting out, I didn’t exactly like English class as a whole subject. I was always more interested in math, science, and history. English was always a boring subject to me. As I grew older and older and got to experience much more English classes I’ve found myself digging deeper and deeper to find better books to read and more interesting essay subjects to write about. As an English student, I’ve discovered how much my thoughts on essays has changed, what types of books I enjoy reading, and what my strengths and weaknesses are when it comes to English.

Before this summer we were still in high school, thinking about where we were going to be for the next four years of our lives. About what we were going to study and what we want to do for the rest of our lives. Now I am just thinking back to everything I learned over the years, it was all just teachers pushing a lot of information into our heads trying to make us memorize everything we needed to know. There were only a select few that really tried to teach us and not just ram information into us. I remember my sophomore year in high school my English teacher was also the coach for most of the school’s sports. Even though he had so much to think about he still took the time to try and make us learn in an unique way. Instead of having us write essays about things we did not want to read he would make us debate. Everyone would get excited because why not put something teens like doing with something they do not like doing. Arguing, something they liked doing, and English, something that most did not like to do. We sat through a lot of pointless class periods that we thought we were not going to learn anything from. But now I realize that what they were saying was important. They each had their own way to teach but all were teaching the same thing to some extent. Now we have to face the adjustments between high school writing and college writing and also everything else it brings to our plates.