FINAL REFLECTION
At the beginning of English 1102 a freshman girl, named Taylor, was a little worried that she was going to be bombarded with a lot of boring writings and assignments but the class turned out to be quite the opposite. For about the first several weeks in the class they spent there time focusing on class readings and class discussions. Taylor learned so much that benefitted her writing from both of these. Although she was quiet and did not talk as much during the class discussions she was definitely taking everything in and taking notes that she would use later on in her work. When Taylor began to write my exploratory essay she was able to incorporate several of the class readings to help prove her point on stereotyping. When working on the exploratory essay she learned a lot about how important the revision process was. In the first draft the class used peer review to suggest where a drastic change should be added within one anothers essay. Taylor added a song at the beginning of her essay for the drastic change. With the second draft she submitted it and Mrs. Steele left her comments on how she could improve the essay. She then completed her final draft which was quite different from the first draft and was very successful due to the whole revision process that it had undergone. After finishing the exploratory essay the class quickly moved into working on the inquiry project. To begin this project they completed their inquiry proposal, which most definitely helped shape the whole project. Taylor chose to have her inquiry project focus on attendance in grade school and how it affected the education that one received. After that they spent a day in the library where they were informed on how to find reliable sources for their projects. With the sources Taylor found she was able to create several dialogic journals to summarize what she had read from my secondary source and make it easy for me to incorporate into her paper later on. Taylor also had to do her own research to incorporate within her project. She chose to interview (hyperlink) her mom who was an attendance counselor and a high schooler. After the first and secondary sources were complete it was time for Taylor to write her first draft which had to be wrote in play format. When she heard this she became very concerned and worried that she would not be able to do it. After she started writing she found that it was a lot easier than she expected and she loved it. For the second draft she had to write what Mrs. Steele called an academic introduction. Taylor had never heard of this before but with the help of the lovely article written by Swales,it was a success for sure. Lucy then gave the class an option as to whether or not they would write their inquiry paper in play or academic form. Taylor chose to stick with the play form. She submitted a third draft to Mrs. Lucy which she promptly returned with comments and Taylor was able to make changes and include in her portfolio. With the inquiry project, Mrs. Steele placed the class into groups with people who had similar inquiry topics. Taylor was placed in a group with Nadia and Eli even though they did not have very similar topics. They were called the miscellanious group. This made it very difficult for them to work together because they all had very different inquiry topics but nevertheless they worked hard and came up with a panel discussion where they assigned an at home reading on attendance policies and then they conducted a class room discussion. They are currently working on a multimodal aspect of their inquiry project to present to the class. Everything Taylor worked on all semester was combined into an easily accessible online portfolio that she took very seriously because it showed all of her improvement all throughout English 1102. In this course Taylor seemed to use her knowledge to expand on various kinds of research and especially focus on the kind of research that had meaning to her. She learned that English can be fun and is a great way to make you think outside of the box!