Final Reflective Letter
Dear Marlen,
Your class has been one big, long and interesting journey. Never in my life have I thought I was capable of completing the amounts of writing I did. At first I was overwhelmed on how much work we would be doing and all the writing processes we would be learning about. I have said it before and will say it again that before this class I was very closed minded about writing. I hated it, wanted nothing to do with it, had no motivation, and was never thought of myself as a writer. Since I heard we would be re- writing paper after paper for the grades we want I was so pissed. I only wanted to write one paper, get a grade and be done. Not only learning the process of writing and better ways to do it, I was able find joy in writing this semester. A huge thing about your class was that I was able to open my mind about writing, and the freedom with it. I liked the fact that I got to pick the genre to write in, and write about anything as long as it fit the particular sense we were on. I got to steer away from all those dreaded topics covered in high school and work with topics I wanted to. This made writing for me so much easier and somewhat enjoyable. It’s not everyday you come across this much flexibility in graded writing. Even though this was a course on how well you understand the writing process, having the freedoms we did still gives you an advantage in working with a lot of writing. I actually didn’t mind reading the same paper over and over again because it was something I wrote that I was interested in.
Another thing I remember during this year was our talk about the standard 5 paragraph essay. Everyone was talking about how they were still stuck on that from high school. To me as soon as I wrote my first paper I was stopped thinking about the 5 paragraph essay. This class made it easy to get away from that habit when writing a paper. It was always more or less, having trouble getting started but once that foundation was down, the words just kept flowing. I didn’t have to think about a structure for the paper.
Coming from a student who always tried in school but still hated all the work involved, I had a lot of fun in this class doing the work. I would definitely recommend it to anyone that I might know going here next year. I would re-take this class in heartbeat at anytime. I always enjoyed coming to class and listening to all the ridiculous stuff we would talk about. I just always had a good vibe in the class and there was never tension. Even with all the work assigned. I’m scheduled to take English 202 next semester, and I would very much like to take that class with you as the teacher.
Now that this class has come to an end I can say I do not hate writing nearly as much as I did in the beginning. I never thought I would have the most fun of all my classes on the one subject I least enjoy. Also I never though I would be proud and happy about not only one paper, but all the papers I wrote in your class. Like other obstacles I have over come in my life, like my surgery, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. This class has given me so much confidence for my future writing to come. I feel like I can handle any paper to come my way. I’ll know how to start, format it, organize it, and revise it all to get the grade that I want. Marlen your class kicked ass and no one else can say otherwise.
Thank you,
Andrew Singer
