This is Rismeldi Batista and This is my english class year reflection essay. This class was the most diverse that i’ve taken. This class had effective peer reviews and the teacher gave us liberty in every inquiry either we had to be creative, or research something that interested us. Peer reviews meaning sharing or collabing with other classmates and then revising your work again before submitting (which we also got a grade for) What i enjoyed the most and helped me from this semester was that she always check up on us by asking to complete unit reflection’s on what she coudl've done better, what we had to turn in, what exercises and tasks we enjoyed doing the most, what we learned, what we couldn’t exactly grasp, etc. Although we had like weekly Homeworks, it was nothing so heavy that we couldn't understand and it always related to what we spoke in class. The Teacher was always effective in asking us to elaborate when writing about something. I remember one time we did an activity where we went over Martin Luther’s speech that he gave and we were supposed to highlight with a classmate what we felt like were rhetorical devices inside each paragraph then, we would swap papers with each other. Another activity i really enjoyed and made the class even more fun was that we had to write in different forms. For instance Miss Olivia passed out little notes (haha like the ones you find in fortune tellers, and each of them (everybody had a distinct one) it was that you had to “write like a very fancy person” or “write in shakespeare”  and she let us understand that we could write what we felt it was supposed to mean , didn't necessarily have to be right or wrong. I felt like this was interesting because it tested many of our skills and where our mind is in these aspects. Also one thing that the professor tried to do was let’s say if we had to do a research essay, she’d model it in class how you research, what not to do, the structure of essays (i kid you not she would break them down in the board, explaining step by step). This Teacher was always on point with the grading, and you could come to her if you had any questions. I felt like my writing processes got much better than it was before because now i understand how to analyze a bit of text and web it into a paragraph using the best english devices, and because the teacher explained it so well i kind of memorized to kind of look out for certain things for example Grammar, When things are Missing or claims don't make sense, etc. 

          We would read about how to make claims, if they were specific enough, how we would connect it to our arguments etc. Something i was surprised to learn about was that when doing essays, its not just an essay like in the first paragraph, which is the introduction you don’t necessarily include “data or textual evidence” that is more towards maybe the first or second body paragraph. This is also what made me be a little bit more careful in each of my writing processes because i would get a little too carried away with introducing too many textual evidences without analyzing the claim first or even explaining how it would relate to the topic. Which is why i had to edit and re-write my Social Movement paper on Abortion.

       One of the things i also used to worry about was like not being able to write my essays correctly for example, things like MLA citations i literally had no clue on how to do, until one class day Miss Olivia showed us the different types of citation styles according to where you’re getting it from and how. Another thing she showed us which was helpful and insightful was not only because there’s apps that can help you with writing, that you should actually use them. Because they can still not detect or help you write as flowing as you do yourself. She told us that even when paraphrasing, you have to know to cite where you got it from. 

               In this english class i understood how intricate english writing actually is. When it came to interpretation, i learned that many things we speak or say are actually literate english. I made this example when doing a rhetorical exercise that i came up with this simple sentence and then i realized i didn’t know that before. Also, just as i am learning to use this commons gc website, this class helped me with it’s use of blackboard, zoom and etc. Something that was of great help was that the teacher was really tech. Like most work had to be turned in through google docs, or blackboard which in my opinion, texting and typing is a little more faster and versatile now in days.

         Something i’d like to take forward to my other classes is to stay as engaged as i was in this class and this class made me a little bit more outspoken and i participated more in a way. Also i’d like to in my next class maybe be given like more prompts like this class and not always just writing essays, but to do more activities and or exercises that are like a fresh new break which later could probably help us in the class overall.
         One thing that i would like to change and engage in is locate more research sources and not be quick to use them without checking their credibility, timeliness, bias, and accuracy (which before i didn’t use to know about) like wikipedia doesn’t have the best credibility although it is commonly known to have any “answer” about something.
          In  Miss Olivia’s Class i also learned that readers aren’t supposed to “infer” your stance, idea or the point you're trying to get across. Sometimes because we want a faster way to write it, we forget that there are many convenient ways to set up a sentence so it can show what you are writing about. I’d like to re-iterate that one of the things this class has also made me confirm even more is that in english writing, reading and overall to understand it it very important how you set things up, what they go as by, correctly knowing how to recognize your errors and when to spot them etc.

Rismeldi Batista
Reflective essay of English