Tsechok, Yama
The City College of New York
English 21007
Professor Sara A. Jacobson
May 20th, 2021
Self-Reflection Final Essay
Spring semester and the first year of college has honestly been nothing but stress. Who would’ve thought that a virus could shut down the planet for over a year. A global pandemic was something we learned in history, something that had happened thousands of years ago, people during that time were less developed then we are now thus making them more prone to a global accident. Since COVID-19 was mishandled, it caught many people by surprise and many countries were not properly prepared to deter it. If proper measures were taken, we would be back to normal life sooner than later, kids can be back in school, parents back to work and the economy back to health.
Asides from that, what I have learned during this course is the question you may be asking, well for starters, I came to this class without really knowing what the class was really about. During the first week of this class, I knew right away that this class was much more different then your regular english class. This class was much more technical and a lot of research was involved in the process. During these past couple of months, our instructors gave out a lot of tasks pertaining to writing and most of it was so that we could adapt and evolve to the different forms of writing. The first-course learning objective was “Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility” To answer this objective, I believe I have achieved this because of the feedbacks I received from the Professors and Students who checked my work over. When I first started the class, a lot of mistakes were visible and it was easily pointed out to me. From those feedbacks, I gradually started to improve and made fewer mistakes on papers. I also learned from viewing the works of my peers, while checking over their work, I noticed differences in writing styles and that also helped me improve my papers.
The second learning objective was “Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment” and it mainly focused on the self-Improvements regarding those skills. Regarding this, we were able to improve drastically because we enforced these strategies more into our papers. We wrote a couple of drafts and passed it along to our peers for peer review sessions and from the feedback, we carefully fixed our papers. Drafting was a big success because it was almost like a fail proof test. After your initial draft, both the student and teacher would comment on it and because of that many of us were successful on our final paper. For this learning objective, I believe I achieved it because all my papers were better the second time and that was because of peer reviews and multiple draftings.
The third course learning objective was “Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation”. From this, we learned to change up our writing format so that it could fit the preference of the audiences. The main goal of this was to make sure that when we write a paper, we didn’t start losing the audience mid paper and with a certain audience in mind, we can structure our writing to their preference thus fitting the paper. For this course learning objective, I could say, I somewhat achieved it because for our Engineering Proposal project we focused on a major group of people and sticking to that got us a good grade.
The fourth course learning objective was “Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes”. For this I can say that I already had prior experience as I have worked with multiple groups for multiple projects, but still I did learn extra material from socializing with peers from this class. Working with students in this class on the engineering proposal was fun and challenging but with the right feedback and help, we managed to get it done.
The fifth course learning objective was “Engage in genre analysis and multimode composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond ” Although I’m not too sure, I assume that this simply means exploring different types of academic literature, and if that’s correct then yes! I have achieved it. The reason being is that my english classes were never that technical when it came to writing, but that all changed when I enrolled in this class. Another example would be the Lab report paper, it was my first time comparing a set of lab reports and writing down the similarities and differences. Also with our technical description paper, I’ve never explained something in such a depth.
The sixth course learning objective was “Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing” which basically translates to having an objective in mind and supporting it with evidence throughout. In my opinion, I believe I have incorporated these in my writings since High School because it’s a very common subject and we learn to use it in almost every class. For example in Math, to solve for X, we have to solve the whole equation and follow it all the way through to get the answer. In this class we used this in our engineering proposal project, where everyone selected an innovation and supported it through all the way to the end. So yea I think i’ve already achieved this but papers from this class might also help me get better.
The seventh course learning objective was “Practice using various library resources, online databases and the internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects” This is one of the major courses I learned in this class because before this class, I had not used the school Library once. When we were doing the Lab report project, we used a lot of resources from the cuny database and City library. I’m grateful for this because I can use these same materials for future classes. I believe I have achieved this goal as we had to explore multiple databases and flipped through dozens of reports in the city library portal.
The last course learning objective was “Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)”. This simply means to include sources that we used for the papers and cite them correctly so that our work isn’t labeled or found to be plagiarized. Although I learned about this in previous classes, retaking it in this class has sharpened my focus and I believe I have gotten much better at it because a lot of our papers involved researching and supporting claims.
Overall, I would say that the course learning objectives offered in this class have nothing but only helped me become a better writer. Even though I am familiar with some of the course learning objectives, I still got a refresher on those specific materials and I know it will only help me for the better. This year has been one crazy year, but with professors like you, It has been enjoyable. Classes were fun and projects were exciting.
