Reflection Paper

This last trimester I attended the class, Introduction to College Writing. I enjoyed the class and enjoyed the challenges the class brought. I have always loved to write papers, but my grade did not always reflect my enthusiasm. I took honors classes most of my high school career, learning how to write a very specific type of essay, with strict structures and numerous restrictions. This class taught me how to write different types of papers, and put my personality into the paper. I am ready for English 102 due to the skills that I acquired during this course.

When my parents split up, I prayed to God to help my mom win custody over my siblings and me. Every night they would go unanswered, so I prayed that my dad would stop being a monster. That didn’t work either. My parents split up because they would fight a lot and because my dad was a mean person. He would abuse us with anything he could get his hands on because he would get angry at the littlest things. An example, is when me and my sister shared a room but we didn’t get along so one night we got into a huge argument and my dad ‘spanked’ us with a wooden board. I prayed that everything would get better for my family. No, I didn’t want them to get back together, I just wanted all the fighting to stop. Still every time I prayed it seemed to go unheard, unanswered. So, I gave up on religion, I quit praying and ended up resenting God. Even though I quit believing in Him, I never let my mom loose her faith. I would talk her into going to church any time that she could. I went along with her because I was trying to get some connection back to God. Nothing seemed to work for me, so I just stopped trying. I believed that if there was a God then he is cruel and doesn’t care.

Sitting at my corner desk wrapping up yet another conference call with a prominent energy company at the number one Inbound Marketing agency in America, I swipe the tears from my eyes before anyone else can see. I don’t want this life anymore. I shuttered as I finally verbalized what had been building up the past few years but I was always too afraid or embarrassed to say - ‘The career I worked so hard for was the biggest regret of my life.’ My immediate thought is I cannot wait to get home and wash away this day with a book. My one reprieve in a day filled with angry clients, looming deadlines and office politics is to read. “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails” (White, T. H. The Once And Future King. William Collins, Sons, 1958). Suddenly, a puzzle piece finally shifted into place - I’d read this book more than a few times, but this time the words resonated with me differently. The printed words hadn’t changed since I’d last read them, but I had. I wanted to be happy, continue to learn and teach others how to learn as well and on that axis, my world shifted.

I was walking down the hallway of the hospital when I heard a patient calling out for help in a familiar language. As I walked into the Russian patient’s room, I noticed a group of nurses trying to decipher her concerns. Despite their efforts, she was still crying out for help due to the language barrier hindering her communication with the nurses about her severe abdominal pain. I happily stepped in and translated between the patient, named Yekaterina, and the nurses. The genuine look of gratefulness in her eyes along with the constant “sposibo” of gratitude I received from her for doing such a simple deed was truly something I will never take for granted. Quite often we find ourselves falling into a daily routine, making it easy to lose sight of why we are doing what we love in the first place. After many months of volunteering at the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, this fortuitous instance of being in the right place at the right time reminded me of why I was at the hospital. I was there to help Yekaterina, and other patients like her in the future. I treasure this moment and this memory because it represents perhaps the first time when I stopped feeling like I was simply trying to help patients, and instead stepped into my true role as a healthcare professional making a tangible difference in the lives of people in need of healing.

It was on a cold day in January, 2015 when I thought my whole world was going to be flipped upside down. We were living at my grandmother’s house at the time, and in the back of my mind I knew that we were going to move into our own house because that was the plan ever since we sold our old house. With this in mind, I still remember how I felt when my parents came home one night and said, “Our offer on a house was accepted and that we were moving at the end of summer.” I visited this house with them before, but we visited many houses over the past couple years so it sort of came as shock that everything was official. Living at my grandmother’s house was not ideal and it was no walk in the park so I was happy that I was going to have a place my family could call our own again. Although I was excited, I was also nervous and scared because the house is located 45 minutes away from where we currently live. That meant I was going to leave my friends and family and basically everything I’ve ever known.

For me, moving to a college campus bore a lot of similarities to moving to a different country. For starters, no one looked like me. Coming from a community with a large Hispanic population, I was accustomed to seeing people who were dark like me, who were short like me, who were dark haired like me, but in college I found myself surrounded by the complete opposite. Everyone was lighter, taller, and had lighter hair. While everyone else seemed to fit in with everyone else, I seemed to stick out like a sore thumb. The foreignness did not end there. Once I started interacting with my new community, I realized that we did not even speak the same language. Conversations revealed that everyone spoke in this other language that consisted of acronyms and Greek letters. This was a language I clearly did not understand. The longer I remained in these conversations, struggling to keep up, the more apparent it became that this information did not come from the orientation session the university made all freshmen attend. Rather, this information came from a different source: my classmates’ parents. Unlike me, my classmates came from households where getting a college education was the norm, not the exception. Their parents sent them off to college with a cheat sheet while all my parents had to offer me was a good luck card. Little by little and thanks to a little luck, I was eventually able to create my own cheat sheet and today, I can proudly say that I am fluent in college-speak.

As a type-A individual, I really do not like it when things do not go as they have been planned. Unfortunately, this has caused some additional stresses and anxieties in my life which I do not have much control over. As a double-major, it is so crucial to stay organized and have a schedule to stay organized and complete everything that is required of me. But, college can be stressful, but I think that I am handling it much better than I could have imagined. Throughout my educational experiences here during my second year at UConn, I have been able to handle stresses much better than I have previously in high school and especially throughout my freshman year. As I am writing this, I realized that by surrounding myself with individuals who I know are positive influences on me and planning time for myself, I am able to reduce stresses in my life.

First I would like to mention that I enjoyed reading this Chapter as it hit home for me because the teachers from Loyola Marymount University believe in building family and community strengths and I fit that mold. Even though demonstrating passion and empathy is mostly frowned upon by many in our institutions due to concentrating on teaching to the test. If you provide your students with a safe learning environment, my experiences have shown that they are more apt to flourish. As a result, I provide this type of atmosphere in my classroom. For example, one of the teachers interviewed, Leticia Ornelas, had “Lotion Day” Nieto (2013). I have shared my lotion with students as well. Some of them fall under the English as a Second Language (ESL) programs. And like she mentions, it provides them with a safe, caring, and passionate learning environment because you build that rapport. Building teacher to student relationships is essential to student outcomes.

Dive into the perils that is writing. All of us have been writing since we were young. Throughout this semester of English, I have learned how to write in APA, and I have learned how to use every detail possible to extend and expand my essays. The literacy narrative essay, research essay, and annotated bibliography have all been essays I have written this semester, and each one has been a different challenge.

When I was four years old, in the dining room of the house in Geneva my family was renting, I unleashed one of my historic temper tantrums. “Mom, no one talks in your dumb language!” I said, vowing to never speak it again. While my mother was upset I was insulting her native tongue, German, she understood my mindset. My experience growing up in different places meant my perception of the world wasn’t reflective of my ethnic background; while we travelled to Germany every year for the holidays, we had never lived there. At this point in my life, I treasure the fact that I grew up in a bilingual household with parents who were passionate about language, but my journey to this point has been a strange one.

On December 12th, 2014, we were in church listening to the pastor preach about helping others. After church, we talked to the pastor about taking up for the homeless people in Anderson County. Instead of having a church that night the whole church came with us to give them the stuff. I like that I help the homeless people. One of the people that we help was crying like a baby because she was so happy to see us.The little thing we did make them happy. They look like they were going to cry. The homeless were delighted to see the stuff we gave them. I could hear the sound of happiness in the room because they were laughing. The room was as happy as a child with its mother.

I don’t really know when exactly I noticed that I was “different” but, about 8th grade. My education started in pre-kindergarten where showed my first signs of emotional, social, and communication disabilities, however it was just chalked up to being a little slow. In elementary school teachers and students verbally, socially, and physically bullied me. Students both my age and older would use “dodgeball to physically attack me. I was often made fun of for being slow or “weird” and the teachers themselves would often leave me out of class and would use me as an example of what not to be like. Finally, after being told by my principle in front of my parents that I was “never going to amount to anything” it was right about then when I was officially diagnosed with Autism. After that I left the elementary school and I went to three other schools where I could get help from teachers that were prepared to help. In some of the schools I was still bullied though not as horrible and others were perfectly fine, but I not still didn’t receive the help that I needed to become motivated and overcome “scars” left behind. During my early education mother helped me communicate a phrase that I felt perfectly describe how I felt “Spiraling down in a world that secluded those who were different”. After going to 6th grade I finally meet people who felt the same way as I did, however it was short lived as junior high came around my mom decided I should be home schooled. After a year and half

Overall, I feel as if our presentation went very well. If there was anything I could change it would be having more class dialogue and it not seem so one sided. I also would have liked to ask more questions considering the class already had prior knowledge, of this content. The questions that I would have like to have asked most are the higher order thinking questions; such as, how and why. An example would be, “Why would you select the more colorful curriculum map over the one already filled out?” The anticipated response would hopefully be: “The colorful curriculum map is broken down into each month in the school year; whereas, the filled in map only has two months.” When creating a curriculum map is should be done for the entire school year and not just a month or so at a time. While assessing all of the feedback that was obtained, it was noted that everyone gave extremely positive with minimal critiques. I enjoyed how the class respected our wishes of giving only constructive feedback. The few suggestions for improvement were for me for to speak up, for Brianna to stand up and maybe move around the room, slow down a little (which was corrected as we presented and noted by some), one person said give more guidance on what to write in the organizer, and one said she wished we would have informed them sooner that not all the puzzle pieces would be complete. When it came to the organizer we did not really focus to much on that because we know everyone learns in a different

In the tapestry of life, I’ve learned to be accustomed to people from diverse colors of race, textures of beliefs and patterns of culture. In every stage and in different settings, I have been surrounded by different threads of individuals with their unique life experiences. Each experience and relationship have women me into an expressive piece of fabric that rejects the narrowness of uniformity.

When I picked up the book Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland, I could not help but form a negative opinion about it. I thought, “Great. Here is another book trying to tell me how to generically make my life better.” I looked up at Ms. Purser with a sneer and pessimistic thoughts running through my head. As soon as I began reading the first chapter, though, my opinion turned on its head. This was proving to be a book written from a real person’s perspective. Instead of cliché instructions on how to improve my life, I was reading the story of a man who came up in the ghetto, but changed his mentality and began leading a