Done So Soon?

Coming into college, I thought this English class was going to be the worse course I would be taking this semester. In high school I was not bad at English but I had to put a lot more work into it then my other subjects. At the college level, I thought I would be drowning in essays and reading assignments. Fortunately, my first experience in a college English class was very positive. I felt engaged and thought the course work was just the right amount. While having a few big papers seemed intimidating at first, the process of writing them was not that painful. Instead of reading a novel and writing an analysis about it, we got to focus mostly on rhetoric. I have never focused on this in my previous English classes so I was not sure what to expect. After writing the last two papers though, I can say I really prefer this kind of writing. I enjoyed being able to pix my own topics and argue what I want. I think this was best part of this class because we got freedom to work on topics that we think are interesting.

While I really enjoyed this class, there were a few things I would have changed. Sometimes, I felt that we should have been doing more discussion in class. On a few occasions we did this, such as when we watched the TED talks and gave our opinions afterwards. Also, there were the days in which we spilt the class in half and had a debate. I really enjoyed these days and I wish there were more of them. I think some of the work days were not really that useful. For other people they probably were more useful but for me I think we might have had one to many here and there.

The only thing I wish we did not do in this class is use the textbooks. The textbooks really only seemed useful when we were writing essays since we could use it to better understand how to form arguments and incorporate them into our paper. On the days where we were supposed to read and discuss the reading, I felt that we did not really accomplish much. I think Ms. B was much better at coming up with topics to discuss then the book. Also the topics that Ms. B would come up with to discuss were always more interesting and would get more people talking such as when we discusses Halloween costumes. On those days, class was very enjoyable and I think there should have been more days dedicated to that then discussing topics in the textbook.

Being a physics major, English is not my top priority but I was able to take away some valuable information from this class. While I enjoyed learning about rhetoric over novels, I think the most useful part of the class were the essays. Before this class I knew about thesis statements and topic sentences but this class really helped me improve upon them. I do not think I learned anything new about writing papers but I most certainly learned about how to improve my writing and my arguments. I think I am a better writer now and I also think I can do a better job editing my own writing to find mistakes or weak spots in my arguments.

Overall I enjoyed this class more than most of my other classes. At the beginning of the semester I could not wait to be done with English, but now my opinion has changed. This class was nothing like what I thought it would be and so thank you Ms. B for being such a great teacher.