Reflective Essay 'Woodchucks'

Well trying to learn in my English class it was very hard for me because I did not understand the way in which the teacher is teaching because it did not appeal to my learning style, which I figured out while doing our second paper. The way I figured out that help was needed by only my second paper was when going over the paper and seeing what were the problems with the paper I still was not able to correct what I was doing. Overcoming this was particularly difficult because when coming to the teacher for help I still was unable to grasp the learning. This is when I turned to peer for help which helped me tremendously while in this class, as well as, visiting the AAC on campus where someone sit down with you and go through and help you improve your writing techniques and skills that what helped me achieve a passable

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things” (Jean Piaget).

In Martin Luther King Jr’s quote, he exposes that education teaches a person to think intensively and to think critically. One of the author’s main ideas is to tell people that education is able to make people intensively to what they do, because this is a way to make you success in college. On the another side, education is to teach one to think critically is mean that people have to learn what they mistake on, so they are able to change their mistake and become a better person. Education helps people to get the job they want, to desire and achieve their goal and make their own personal character. The real education goal is to encourage people to learn, and to use the knowledge in order to become an intelligence person, and to build their

The theme of this poem is an overall extended metaphor of woodchucks and the mind state of the people that were influenced by the Nazi warfare. Also, that what happened during the Holocaust was horrible and inhuman. The tone of this poem starts out to be non violent, however, shifts to a more aggressive tone when we get to the third stanza. Also, the speaker makes a shift as well in lines 10-12 “ They brought down the marigolds as matter of course and then took over the vegetable patch nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots”. In these lines, the speaker’s personality is more in a nonviolent perspective. However, the speaker changes to a not have grace for the woodchucks in lines 13-15, “ The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling to the feel of the .22, the bullets; neat noses. I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace”. Then again, the speaker also changes their mood to almost heartless in lines 22-24, “Another baby next. O one-two-three the murderer inside me rose up hard, the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith”. The speaker of the poem is mostly likely not connected to the woodchucks and it is a woman, also we know is that she ruined their garden. The mood of this poem is sad of how the speaker became so violent. The way that the speaker handled the situation influenced my tone and mood to be more disgusted from the inhuman way that they were dying and how the speaker started to have a little fun with it. Some of the different elements that the poet used affected the audience’s mood of the situation and the poet also used some figurative language in the poem as

How much deer could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck were driving down the road and came across a dead, pregnant doe? Well, the woodchuck chucking the dear is a bit irrelevant. Rather, the two poems Traveling through the Dark by William Stafford and Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin respectively focus on the relationship between humans and nature. Woodchucks takes an allegorical approach, with a heavy handed political message. Traveling simply examines the significance of human life in the context of nature. If the poems were literary characters, Traveling would be Jane Eyre, Woodchucks would be Brutus. Traveling is personal, with the narrator having a strong sense of humanity, but ultimately basing his actions on logic.

One of the largest rodents is the Sciuridae family is the Woodchuck (Marmota Monax) or more commonly known as the Groundhog. It is a fairly common animal most heavily found in the north and north eastern parts of the United States and across most of Canada (Encyclopedia of Life, 2015). Most Woodchucks choose to live in a habitat of grasslands or along the edge of a forest. They tend to like a cooler climate, but during the heart of winter they will hibernate in burrows that they dig throughout the year. The Woodchuck is a incredibly interesting animal that creates elaborate burrows for homes and one of the true hibernators.

Desensitization happens when someone becomes less likely to feel shock or distress at scenes of cruelty, violence, or suffering by overexposure to such images. In the poem “Woodchucks,” by Maxine Kumin, what seems like a normal story about exterminating pests turns into an all-out war between a farmer and some woodchucks. Often times with war comes the aforementioned desensitization and although the poem may appear to only be related to the Holocaust with the use of the term Nazi, it can actually be viewed as a warning about how easy it is for a normal person to become desensitized.

In the poem Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin, the speaker progressively becomes more obsessed with the woodchucks which is seen through Kumin’s word choices and the tone of the poem. In the beginning, she was willing to get rid of the vermin “humanely,” by gassing them underground in their home. However, this attempt failed, resulting in the speaker’s obsession with eliminating the garden intruders. After the woodchucks invaded her garden, it became the last straw. With the devastating sight of the ruined garden, the speaker became angry and violent, which led to her first kill of the mother woodchuck, releasing the murder inside of her.

Maxine Kumin is the author of the poem Woodchucks. She has received many awards such as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize for Poetry, and the Aiken Taylor Award. She was born in 1925 and studied poetry at Boston Center for Adult Education, and was taught by John Holmes, who was a poet (Colt). It is said that most of the inspiration for her writing is from a farm that her and her husband, Victor, purchased in 1967 and later permanently moved into in 1976.

It is the duty of the educator to prepare students to live lives of quality and purpose. Intellectually, a life of quality involves being reasonable, adept, and thoughtful, and enables people to be good citizens of their community. Skills that will prepare students to live such a life include the ability to reason carefully, to think agilely, and to reflect deeply. These skills are attained best when students evaluate how others express their thinking and precisely what thinking is expressed. The students themselves attempt to express substantive ideas in clear and convincing ways. The teacher is foremost a model of that which is taught, which obligates the teacher to live that life of quality and purpose. As a model, the teacher is therefore able to act as a guide for others, serving occasionally as a source of knowledge but mostly as one who points the way for fellow explorers.

Education is a very important part of society. I feel that it should teach children how to function in a society, and learn the basics they will need to expand on for the rest of their life. I feel that it is used to teach moral, and ethical standards of living. The schools are used to help the children learn to function in life, and achieve the goals of their choosing. Education is important because without it I firmly believe that society would be a very savage institution. With the things that we teach in today’s schools we give the power to know the basics such as reading, writing, and math but we also give them the ability to function in a society. As a teacher I hope to set my student of fire. I want to see them come alive with a desire to want everything that is out there for them. I want to be able to make a difference in just one person’s life. If I can do this I would feel I have done what I am supposed to do. I want my students to know the world is theirs to take and do with it whatever they may choose.

Since beginning to write papers in English class, I have had countless successes and failures. While many of my English classes have taught me how to improve my writing, I have not learned very much in others. My most recent English class was last year, my sophomore year. My class was particularly undersized; therefore, it gave each student the opportunity to have additional individual attention. Throughout the class I experienced high points, weaknesses, and even difficulties that I never overcame. Overall, my writing skills improved, but only marginally.

The focus of my study is on the development of advanced students. I feel so much time is focused on the development of struggling learners, that we as educators lose focus on developing our most advanced students. Analyze-Write-Pair-Share-Apply is a modified version of Think-Pair-Share I use in my pre-calculus classes. My pre-calculus classes are composed of mainly 11th and 12th graders. Aside from students thinking about a problem and sharing their ideas, I added the component of having them write down and apply their knowledge to similar problems. I am interested in conducting this study to see how the Analyze-Write-Pair-Share-Apply strategy, impacts my most advanced students’ understanding of the content. I plan on collecting information through interviews, observations, and surveys. Through my study I hope to gain some insight into how the Analyze-Write-Pair-Share-Apply strategy will influence my current and future advanced students.

“Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.”