Final Reflection on the Class, Essay, etc.

So I genuinely have no idea what this final reflection is supposed to be about. As such, I’ll use it to detail what I thought of the course as a whole, the inclusion of the blog, the final essay, and the work it took to get here.

I felt that the course as a whole was excellent, if a little slow for my tastes. Constant trips to the library to do things I felt were unnecessary, or had already done in previous English courses, made it feel like sometimes I wasn’t progressing in the slightest towards the ultimate goal of having an 8-12 page essay done by the end of the quarter. Also, often peer review ended up becoming a simple “So THAT’S what I need to do!” group discussion, where everyone just states that they understand what went wrong with how they approached it and understand what needs to be done in order to improve the essay being reviewed at that time, but that’s not here or there.

The inclusion of a blog felt like a way of getting a free third class in without having to actually teach, which if I ever become a teacher, I am definitely using at some point. In all seriousness, the reflection made me think deeper about some of my sources/issues, etc., and actually got me to search a little more than I normally would for an essay, which I suppose is a rather big plus. The negative is that, being a twice-per-week class, with the second class being on Wednesday, I often forgot to do the blog, which explains why I have so many new posts on here on the last day of grading for it. I feel like the blog could have worked a lot better in a five day class, with a reminder on Friday that there is a blog due by midnight, though that is just my personal opinion.

The final essay was a bitch. I’m not a fan of argumentative essays, or essays in general; I much prefer creative writing, expressing the imagination through a sequence of words (hence the blog name). Sitting down, researching for five hours, and typing a report based on those five hours of researching is not my forte and it will never be. It also doesn’t help I’m incredibly lazy and don’t like researching for any amount of time.

For what it’s worth, the course was well designed to flow naturally towards making the final essay as painless as possible for an 8 page essay. There’s not really much more I can say about it, having never been a teacher myself.

EDIT: I should really learn to read e-mails before I write blog posts. As an argumentative writer, I feel my peak has become a plateau, ever since freshman year of high school when I actually learned how to write an essay rather than just throw words on paper and call it good. Ever since that eye-opening moment when I realized I had no clue what I was doing when it came to writing essays, and my subsequent improvement in that same class period, very little has impacted either my writing style or my outlook when entering write mode. If I ever took a class that revolutionized my writing like that one class over four years ago, I think I would be shell-shocked to the point of needed to be institutionalized.