In this blog post, I will be sharing my overall feelings with you about my English Composition 100 class. This was my first English class in my college career, and I have to say it was one of the best classes I have ever been in.
Every Language Arts or English class I have taken has never interested me. I never considered myself a bad writer, but I never loved writing either. I found that writing was annoying and time consuming, and there was nothing or no one pushing me to actually enjoy the class. However, my English professor, Sabatino Mangini, was the first teacher to actually make me enjoy writing. One reason I started enjoying writing was by receiving help to improve my writing. In other English classes I took, we would plan an essay, outline the essay, write the essay, turn in the essay, and receive a grade for the essay. We rarely ever improved it besides spelling and grammar mistakes. In this class, we would focus on writing the essay first and then improving it second. Sabatino would push us to work and improve our first drafts to make a second draft. He encourages us to put in more showing scenes, feelings, thoughts, and even take out parts of the story to see how it would turn out. He explained how completing these possible improvements would improve our writing skills and make us better writers in the future. I completely agree with this statement because if you think about it, how would your writing improve if you don’t work on your previous mistakes? Improving my writing in this class helped me determine that I am going to improve my essays in my future classes. I will always be able to improve, and improving anything in my eyes makes me a better student. The second major reason I enjoyed this class so much was from the sense of closeness I felt with my classmates. Sabatino would start off class by asking how we were all doing. This gave a sense of comfort and fun in the classroom by sharing personal experiences and thoughts with each other really. I felt like I could express my opinion and agree and disagree with others without feeling judged. For example, during the first week of school, we all wrote a secret about ourselves that we have never told anyone before. Those secrets were then collected by Sabatino and written on the whiteboard – without naming who had what secret. We all then walked around the room and tried guessing what one another's secret was. After we found the majority of the answers, we all told our story about how our secret came about in our lives. Knowing each other’s secrets gave us a close feeling, kind of like “I know a secret about you, so were pretty much friends now.” I really liked having that feeling walking into the classroom because I didn’t feel like I was walking into a classroom full of strangers. I felt like I was walking into a classroom with students who have shared similar experiences as I have and students who have went through the same, semi-embarrassing experience of telling our secret story. Having this comfortable feeling around new people made me realize how much I like that feeling. From now on, I plan to break out of my shell a little bit and get to know the people around me, even if I have never seen them before. Looking back at when the class first started, I did not realize how much I would actually enjoy English Composition 100 in college. Looking at the class now, I’m really going to miss my classmates, my teacher, and the fun times we all experienced together.
1 Comment
Sabatino
12/7/2017 01:21:48 pm
I must admit I am smiling as I type my response. I am so glad to read about your positive learning experiences in this class -- and how our social approaches to making meaning have helped you create new perspectives about writing -- and about yourself as a writer. It's been great working with you this semester, and I look forward to our final conference.
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Julia ThorntonI am using this blog for my English course and beyond Archives
December 2017
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