Feldman-Final+Reflection

We were asked to write a reflection on the pass weeks of our English 1010 and how this journey has bettered us and made us grow. However, I think that the class not only bettered me in many ways, made me grow, but also opened my eyes to a lot of things that will help me in the future. The English course started out very rocky for me, as I tried to get my feet wet with my new English teacher. She was very different than all of my other English teacher’s in the past and she expected a lot more out of me, which looking back on it now, helped me in so many ways. I took this college level English so that I could get the feel of how college would be next year and to show my parents that sending me to college would not be a waste of their money. As a reader, my growth from this class is just amazing. Before taking this English class I used to read just to get the assignment done so that I could get a completion grade. However, now I have learned that I need to read to comprehend, and if I didn’t understand something, then I need to reread and read between the lines so that I can understand what the writer is trying to get across. Also, I never saw myself in a million years actually using sticky notes and highlighters when I read, but as the class went on, I began to utilize them so that it would be easier for me to recall points that the author made when I was doing my writing portion of the assignment. However, hands down, I believe that the one thing that skyrocketed from this class is my writing skills. In the first couple of weeks I was so upset because I would get terrible grades on written assignments and when I got them back the paper was absolutely full of revision marks from Mrs. Lowry. My papers were so covered with marks that Mrs. Lowry had to write comments on the bottom of the paper and then draw an arrow up to the actual arrow because there was no room to write, because there were so many errors. My papers just said r/o (run on) and insert comma marks everywhere and I knew that if I worked hard on those two aspects of writing, then my grades would start to get better. Then after a ton of comma splice and run on assignments, I started to see my grades go up, and started to see the amount of revision marks on my paper go down. Now, when I get assignments back, all I see are good comments like, good job, that’s interesting, and wow. Very rarely do I have revision marks on my papers now, which makes me very happy, because I can actually see how my writing skills are improving. The last aspect of improvement that occurred while on this journey through English 1010, as it is coming to an end is how I improved as a person and as a student. When I first came into the class I had a terrible case of procrastination and laziness. I loved to wait until the last minute and then kill myself the night before, or even fifteen minutes before class starts, to do an assignment. I also use to think school was a joke and I didn’t take it serious at all. However, as the class progressed I started to see myself doing assignments a week in advance and actually carefully revising them. I also noticed ,as the class went on, that college is going to be tough, like this class, and that I need to buckle down and take school more serious so that I can end up in a good position in the future and not looking back regretting my decisions. In the end, this English 1010 class has benefited me in so many ways than I can think of. I just hope that in the end of all this, I won’t just forget it in a couple of weeks and become the same reader, writer, and student that I used to be. I start to think of all the times that I wanted to just give up because this class got way to hard for me, but in the end, looking back at all of it, I am so glad I kept working, and pushing to better myse