English is, of course, a mandatory class, but this doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun. Over these past three and a half months of being in English, it has been an eventful time. I am not a big fan of writing, so I didn’t enjoy writing essays after essays after writing assignments. Yet, I still learned quite a bit. After these three months, I learned A LOT of major things overall. One thing I learned was how to properly cite sources in a paper and works cited. Another was to have fun and be able to think in-depth in class. You see, our class isn’t based on traditional grades, our class is based on the guideline of thinking and the effort you put in. I feel like I have accomplished a great deal.
As the semester comes to an end, I find myself reflecting on not only how I have survived the second semester but also what more I have learned. I did not think it could happen to me. I did not think I could handle all the work. I did not think I could become a better writer. Somehow after all the hours I put into writing and putting effort into the papers that I wrote this semester; I became a better writer. I also tried to focus on one-two of my greatest weakness in this class, which is procrastination and organization, with the attitude of, if I could just become better in those then I would become a better writer.
Organization, I am not very good at organizing my work. It’s a problem I have had for a very long time, which really disturbed me especially in English classes. I wasn’t very good at organizing my sentences, paragraphs, and other things so I was really disorganized. This class really helped me with that because of two reasons; our teacher letting us show our work to our classmates, which they helped me a lot with by giving me criticism to help further my paper in different ways, and the second reason by introducing us to the writing center which helps me improve further in my organization skills. They also helped with other things like commas, punctuation, periods, indenting, and much more.
Procrastination has become such a bad habit for me. It is very hard to stop procrastinating with everything once you have gotten into the habit of doing it. Once I had a term paper due for my psychology class, It was to be ten pages long and we were told to spend a lot of time doing it. Being the procrastinator that I am, I waited until the very last minute to do it. I waited until the night before to do the majority of it. Needless to say, I was up very late that night. This class has taught me that the earlier you do things the more beneficial your final result will be in the process.
So, what makes this class different? As a very busy college student, I have had to do my classes without thinking too much into them. I was doing it to get the best grade possible in the class so I never really learned anything but, in this class, I can’t do that. It focuses on a different method which is thinking and analysis it focuses your mind on doing that instead of simply focusing on grades.
One article that we did that shaped my perception was How Language Shapes Our Reality. This was a very interesting article to read as someone who has a different language and came from two different places, Nigeria and the UK. Those two languages and places shaped the way that I know things and affects what I think, say do and also what I perceive. It was very interesting to read this and learn a lot from it. Analyzing my past actions, I realize that they are shaped by my Igbo language and like the article said, making my perception of the world different than most peoples.
Another article that I loved, and which shaped my perception of things is Genre in the Wind. This talks about what we call genres, so what is a genre? It’s a ”kind, sort, or style” and is often applied to kinds of art and media, for instance, sorts of novels, films, television shows, and so on. In writing studies, we find all sorts of written genres, not just ones that you might classify as artistic or creative’. And goes on to describe the different types of genres. Which is so interesting, genre being a huge part of everything we see and do. Hear me out, when we see a couple walking down the street, we automatically think love which is a genre on its own. We think it’s very romantic, which goes into the genre of romance. When we see two people fighting, we automatically think that’s a brawl that looks like action which is a genre in itself. I just think our world as a whole goes through different types of the genres at different times and it’s constantly moving and changing.
And the last concept we discussed was discourse community. I really enjoyed the reading we did by swales; he provided the reader with a framework on what a “discourse community” is. Swales begins by educating the reader on how this concept of a discourse community has been and continues interpreted in different ways. Although he disagrees he cites that it is possible to compare a discourse community to a speech community, which is “a community sharing knowledge of at least one form of speech, and knowledge also of its patterns of use”, He also discusses what makes a discourse community different from the speech community.
My life moving to an online environment or a proper word quarantined has been a lot of work from trying to help friends issues they are having in their online class and other factors like that. Online classes are a pain to me because I love the in-person environment. Taking care of my mom and grandma, my mom is a nurse who is always out during the coronavirus epidemic, so I always have to check-in and make sure she’s okay. I also have to take care of my grandma who has not to be too good since this pandemic arrived. I am the VP of men of color, so I had to make sure my members and my organization stay afloat. As well as my work which is being a student orientation leader, which takes up most of my time from classes since we have a work meeting every other day that’s 5 hours long. But a positive to this is that I learned a lot having all this time to myself. It just made me complex and more intrigued. As an extrovert, staying at home isn’t my thing but it made me think more into the mind of introverts and how they do things.
Theory Aspect of the final reflection I thought would be the hardest but the more I saw it and got more examples about it, the more it came way easier to me. All the reading we did were all connected, Discourse community, how language shapes our perspective, different articles talking about genre and let’s not forget the color blue and etc..,.They all built on each other like a bridge, the previous one helped you understand the next one a bit better. I noticed it after reading the discourse community and when I went back to redo the other articles that I had read. I don’t know if our teacher built it that way or if it was random, but it was definitely brilliant the way it was orchestrated and used.
Unfortunately, my group partner and I weren’t able to finish our group caption because of various things. Like it only being us and other things like moving to online learning and stuff. But our group photo caption was about the concept of dating and the different dating sites there was like Tinder, Facebook, Black People Meet, Plenty of Fish, Christain Mingle and Old People Meet. This project was a lot of fun to do with my partner Samantha. We found different stuff about it and how big online dating is in our generation today. We also did surveys to find out what different people were thinking about the different dating sites and how we date this day.
Personally, the setup of this course helped me learn a lot more and frustrated me a lot too because of how confusing it was sometimes. I enjoy how our teacher Professor McLaughlin set the stage but let us be free in writing our paper instead of giving us a script that we had to follow like having requirements to get an A on a paper. I really feel I have grown as a student in this class and a writer in this course over the semester.
Josh Obi 