Reflection Paper

A writing experience that was significant to me was when I was taking AP Language my junior year. We just had finished watching “To Kill A Mockingbird” and our teacher instructed us to write an essay. The topic was the importance of fatherhood and we had to use examples from the movie and real life to support our claim of how fathers are essential to a child's life. The writing experience changed me because I never had a father in my life.

At the age of five, I learned of my struggle concerning the topic of writing. In kindergarten, this wasn't too much of a problem (because of the lack of writing-based assignments). Once I got into first grade, where the level of difficulty increased, I learned that I was not a good writer. When I say I wasn't a good writer, I do not only mean my writing quality, I also mean the physical act of writing. To get over this, I was required to practice writing at home, along with being given extra/specialized homework. With all of this help, I learned to be better at handling my writing

Science Instructional Analysis and Methods class has afforded me countless learning experiences which I have taken into my intern classroom. I have several take away for this fall’s science methods course. The first being, in Methods class I learned to work in distinct groups of with peers of various levels. My peers who are experiencing classroom teaching for the first time and the graduate interns. Surprisingly, I learned from working with both of these groups. From the graduate level students, I was able to actually make a connection with the content we read about in our text and experiences I had everyday in internship. I appreciate the opportunity, as I felt safe and free to ask questions about the experiences they had in teaching science. I commend you on the way you had broken up the class groups, and afforded us to work with different groups. During this process, I feel I have started to find my voice as a professional. This opportunity allowed me to be more confident to voice my ideas to the teachers I worked with in internship, as I contribute to my PLC group.

While my love for reading sprouted, I soon became obsessed with writing. My passion for reading only helped my writing skills to prosper. In fifth grade, I had a teacher who very well understood that reading and writing were important. Every day, we had a half an hour to write about whatever we wanted. Boy, my imagination ran wild. I often wrote fiction stories. My favorite part was when the teacher allowed us to share our stories with the whole class at the end of the week. This one activity really sparked the beginning of my love for writing.

Even as a young kid in elementary school, writing was one of my weakest subjects. I always sighed when one of my teachers mentioned a writing assignment. It started in elementary school and continues to affect me to this day. Starting out my junior year, I was hesitant to have Mr. Zollman as a teacher because I heard he was a tough grader. I soon found out that was true, but he ended up being the most helpful teacher to get me through my writing problems. Mr. Zollman helped me get through my struggles of writing papers, and he taught me to be a stronger writer.

Well, my first semester in college is coming to an end and I have learned many things about myself, my learning and most specifically my writing. My writing 101 class was a bit of a culture shock for me. I was surprised by the amount of freedom we had in that class and how much I didn’t actually know about writing. Our class’s instructions were to keep a blog of what we were feeling or thinking while writing each essay over the course of the semester. With each essay and blog post, I learned more and more about my writing style and what I liked to write about.

As long as I can remember, writing has always played a major part in my life. In the eighth grade at North Middle School I had Mrs. Parent as an English teacher. Not only did she have beautiful handwriting, which inspired me to mimic her writing style, but she had a natural love for teaching and assuring that I wrote about what came natural to me. When I got to Lima Senior High School, I was placed in accelerated English with Mrs. Stepleton. Although she didn’t have the best handwriting, she pushed me with every assignment. We read: A Tale of Two Cites, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, and the Catcher and the Rye. All of which are voted on every top 100 best novel list I have ever seen. Not only did she push me to read these

Writing has been a part of my life since I was a young lad. I loved making up stories, writing them down, and then telling these stories to my family. My dreams were to become a writer one day, but those dreams were destroyed by my step-father. He would tell me that I would never succeed in writing and never make a career out of it. I moved on from writing at a young age and did not enjoy it growing up after that moment. Once I got into high school I did not learn much techniques on writing due to my 9nth and 10nth grade teachers never putting effort into teaching the students. They would put a movie on every day and just be on their phones for the most part. This way of teaching changed when I entered 11nth grade. My English teacher, Mr. Ho, was different than my previous teachers.

I’ve never been the type to just love writing. Before my senior year in high school, I always felt like writing was more of a job. I knew writing had educational purposes, but it still didn’t make the process any better. My whole view on writing changed last year. My 12th grade English teacher, Heather Carpenter, influenced the way I viewed writing. My whole class was assigned to write almost 30 papers for a Senior Portfolio. Each paper had us reflect on our high school years or tell us about our future plans. When I first heard about this assignment, I immediately dreaded all the work. As we all worked through the assignment, my dread turned into enjoyment for writing, all because of my teacher and they way I started to view writing. Even though writing can be difficult and time consuming, it’s good to be an open minded writer because it can release inner thoughts and emotions and make a person willing to consider new ideas.

Have you ever had something in your life that has made you ask yourself, “What were you doing with your life before I came? Something that has unknowingly changed your life forever? That’s what writing has done to me. Writing has shaped me to become the person that I am today. I was not always as driven as I am today, but because of my errors in writing, I started to strive to be the best version of myself. I started writing my own stories when I was a freshman in High school; it was mid-February of 2010 and school was going to be over in a month. I was only twelve, and I had no background in writing novels whatsoever. All I knew was, I had tons and tons of ideas that I had to write on paper, and so I began writing. It was a sunny afternoon, you could hear the birds chirping, the wind whistling and the most prominent sound of all was the teacher’s voice echoing

They all loved our writing classes and would write stories and articles and spoken word pieces every chance that they got but not me. I enjoyed literature class more, reading about the tragedies of Hamlet and the exciting adventures Beowulf. When I was in writing classes I always felt like writing assignments were so constricting. I was never interested in the topics we were writing about or even if I did find the topic interesting I would rather research and read about it, not write about my findings. However, in my junior year of high school we were given an assignment to write three narrative stories about anything we wanted. We were going to read everyone’s stories in class and talk about them each day. I didn’t know where to start, as per usual with me, so, I went to my teacher and asked for help. He told me I could tell a story about myself, talk about something no one knows about me, since the stories would be anonymous. This got me thinking about what people don’t know about me and I ended up writing about my anxiety and it was so easy to write about. Just the feeling of getting something off my chest was great. This really changed the way I looked at writing. I always thought of writing in terms of books I liked reading. I always held my writing up next to highly praised works. It wasn’t fair to compare my class papers to the works of Mark Twain and

If i am too be honest ,most of my early writing experiences did little to instill in me, the importance of learning

It may still be hard for me to start a piece of writing, but like I said, once I start I can’t stop. I believe that with every experience someone has, whether it is in or out of the class, it will always effect the way that person portrays his or her writing, such as myself.

Over the course of the semester, there has been numerous amount of areas where I believe I have improved in comparison to high school. What has helped me in my writing is the writing class and the in-class writing workshop. The writing class that is located in the Kremen education building has helped me with my writing greatly because in the writing center the person in charge teach us lenses and we apply those lenses to the writing, draft, or reading that someone brings in. The in-class writing workshop has helped me because other students get to read my writing. This is helpful because I get feedback from many students and they let me know what needs to be fixed. A new tool I have been using is They Say I Say. The book is very helpful because of the information and examples it provides such as the templates. I have been applying the templates into my essays and I have seen a significant difference.

What is life, who sets the rules, who tells us what is right from wrong? One important question I always ask myself, which is my place on this planet earth. A lot of time, as a female that comes from a country that values men more than they value a woman, I feel as though, I am constrained to act a certain way for the fear of being singled out as a bad seed. Even though we all feel that as humans we have the free will to do whatever we want, a lot of times culture and religion might get in our way of freedom and free will. Growing up in a Nigerian home, as a female you don’t have much say in your life or the choices that you make in life. Growing up I always felt like I had no say in my house which was true. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I was a female and most of it had to do with my culture and my role as a female