Molly McKenna
Mr. Paudel
English 102
21 April 2015
Final Reflection
1. In this course I learned the
importance of researching a topic in order to have the best understanding of it
possible. I learned this through each of the assignments required this semester.
We had to do research on our profession in order to interview professionals in
our field of study, much research was required for the research paper, and in
our final paper, research was required in order to create a survey and to find
which questions relating to your survey had never been answered before.
I also learned
the importance of sharing your ideas with others in order to better develop the
topic that is being written about. When you share your ideas with others, they
can ask you questions that will help you understand what areas of your paper
might be more interesting to others and which topics are important to focus on.
This also allows you to talk about your topic out loud which sometimes helps
you find new, interesting things to talk about or could even help you decide
parts of your paper that you would like to remove or revise.
Another
important thing I learned is that it is vitally important to review and revise
your paper. You can never review things enough. In many of my papers, I was
able to fix simple grammatical errors that would have cost me points. Along
with this, it is important to read papers out loud to catch silly errors. Also,
peer review is important. There is always some aspect of your paper that can be
made better.
2. I think small group work and
conferences were the most beneficial to my learning. Sometimes I can be
intimidated to share my ideas with a large group of people, so working in small
groups was extremely helpful to bounce around ideas I was having and get
feedback. Conferences were the most helpful aspect of this course because it is
important to be able to obtain feedback from the teacher who created the
assignment. Only the teacher knows exactly what the assignment is supposed to
contain, so getting advice from them surpasses all other forms of help.
3. I
think large group discussions are not that beneficial unless you have small
group discussion beforehand. Large group discussions tend to contain many
differing opinions and can sometimes cause animosity. Also, some people tend to
over-power large group discussion, so other, smaller voices, tend to not be heard.
At least if the large group discussion follows a smaller group discussion, the
smaller voices can be heard there, and maybe one of the over-powering
characters can speak up for them.
4. I
think I participated in many class discussions. The way the room was set up, it
was hard to engage with those not right next to me or a few seats away, so I
never was able to obtain opinions or have discussions with those not right
beside me. I think I participated very well in small group discussions, the
girls in my small group gave me honest feedback, and I did the same for them.
With their help, I came up with the entire topic for my research paper in a
class period.
5. The
most useful assignment for me was the first one in which we were required to interview
working professionals in our field. Because of this interview, I was better
able to understand where my field is taking me. This also motivated me to work
hard in school so I can be as successful as possible in my engineering field.
It also reminded me why I chose to pursue a career in engineering which is easy
to forget with the rigorous schedule students are put through in speed school.
6. The
most challenging assignment for me was the research paper. As stated
previously, speed school requires an enormous amount of time and effort, and it
was very difficult for me to find time to complete all of the tasks I had to
perform. It was hard to find time to do all the research I was hoping to find
about my topic. Especially when I started obtaining more information about prison
reformation, it was hard picking a few aspects to focus on exclusively.
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