Final Reflection Letter

Coming into this class in the spring semester, I knew what it was going to take to succeed in this class because I had already taken Megan’s class in the fall. I knew that I had to stay on top of my work and turn in everything on time or I would get behind and my grade would drop. Luckily, I am not a procrastinator. I enjoy getting all my work done right when it is assigned and I’m usually one of the first people to post on my blog when we are instructed to. Throughout this class, I think I’ve become more of a hard-worker and less of a procrastinator (even though I really wasn’t one in the first place) because of the many assignments and posts we had to keep up with.

When writing the Joining the Conversation piece, I started writing the day we were assigned the paper because I was eager to get it done because I had other things to work on in the class as well. While writing the piece, I realized that it was fairly easy for me to write because I was interested in the paper and I liked being creative. After writing the first three pages, I work-shopped with peers it and continued to write the remaining two pages the day of work shopping.

Megan had been encouraging us to “take risks in [our] writing” throughout the semester and this was the piece where I had the chance to try that. For this assignment, I took more risks and acted more "playful" than I had in any other paper before. I specifically put a star beside "Playfulness" and "Structure that is built around themes and ideas, not sources" because these were things that I had trouble with in the past. 

I felt like it was hard to take risks in the other paper because they were more factual and simply stated points whereas in this paper, I had the chance to express my personal style of writing. I took risks in my paper when I made the characters, which were really the authors, act quirky with each other. I added a small amount of humor into the paper not sure of whether that would help or hurt the piece.

I thoroughly enjoyed writing the Joining the Conversation piece because it was one of the only times in Megan’s class this semester that we got to be creative. Throughout the process, I discovered that I prefer writing creatively and imaginatively opposed to writing analysis', like in the Step 2: Academic Work and the Annotated Bibliography. The Step 2 paper was difficult for me because I have a hard time figuring out what the authors are saying and connecting the information from each author into one paper.

It is clear that writing about an author’s argument is my greatest weakness. Most of Megan’s class this semester was focused on finding the authors argument and figuring out how he/she argues it throughout the paper/work. At the beginning of the year, it was difficult for me to comprehend the author’s arguments from pieces of literature. The reading responses we did at the beginning of the year helped introduce the idea of finding the author argument in a piece and then commenting on how the author argues his/her point. Through the different reading responses, I grew to come more familiar with the idea of identifying how an author states his argument. After finding how and what the authors are arguing, she encouraged us to connect the different arguments and works together in one paper based on ideas. The connection process was made easier by writing the Annotated Bibliography. The Annotated Bibliography assignment helped me tremendously. First of all, the assignment required us to use the library to physically find books that we could use in our paper. This was beneficial because in the future I know I will need to know how to find books in the library. Secondly, this assignment was beneficial because we had to gather quotes from the sources we found and add them at the end of each sources section. In writing the Joining the Conversation piece, where we had to connect the different authors ideas, it was fairly easy due to the quotes we found in the Annotated Bibliography. Lastly, I benefitted from this assignment because I got good feedback from the paper from Megan. I realized in the corrections that Megan gave me that I had trouble with the concept of figuring out how the author argues his/her point opposed to what the author is arguing. From Megan’s suggestions, I found where my weakness was in writing and I’m trying to improve that.

I feel like this class has allowed me to become a better writer through the different activities we did.
1.     Through work shopping with my peers, I got the chance to get advice from different perspectives that will enhance my paper. This specific work shop helped my Annotated Bibliography become more focused on the true meaning of the paper because my peers gave me advice to remove the summary and change it to be more analysis. Because I had trouble with figuring out what was analysis and what was summary, my peers read their papers and I understood more clearly. With Megan’s help plus the help from my peers, my paper progressed.

2.     I thought of my inquiry project idea through group discussions with classmates. Megan’s emphasis on peer interaction ultimately benefitted me because it gives me the chance to get feedback from my ideas while gathering other ideas from my peers. I initially wanted to focus on the diversity of school systems but through the process of trying to develop that idea, I came upon the idea of different learning styles, which was intriguing to me. I chose to focus on this idea because while discussing with peers, I generated ideas and paths I would take that could make this inquiry excellent.

Ultimately, talking and interacting with my peers is very beneficial in furthering my ideas and helping with making connections in my writing.