My junior year of high school, I preferred to sit in the middle of my AP English Language class to avoid being called on by my teacher, Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson was a mature, relatively little man with an advanced vocabulary and an awkward humor. I was quite intimidated by this teacher like no other teacher. I would feel intimidated to speak or to submit my work. When I first stepped into the class, I was able to feel the high expectations towards my work once we were handed the scoring rubric for the produced in this class; I had a feeling I would be unable to meet that criteria.
Being a college student and having no credit English class is getting too common because high schools aren’t preparing the students for the real life challenge. First year of writing programs in UIC is hard but for those who are not ready have an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that we can learn more by being in English classes lower that level 100. The disadvantage is that we do not get the credit. The first year of writing would succeed more often if they encourage the students not just to write for their homework or papers but also for their own fun which can make them pleasant.
Mostly due to the fact that that is all we did in my AP English class senior year; Find what the prompt is asking, find literary devices that support the answer to the prompt, do an outline, and write a cohesive, well organized essay under forty minutes. Finding evidence to support my claim was a strength but, a weakness at the same time. It was my weakness as well because I did not really find evidence to back up the authors claim in the passages; I did that for my claims only. To say I didn’t bring any weaknesses to the class would be a lie. I feel like I brought a lot of weaknesses due to the fact that in English class my senior year we did not focus mostly on the grammatical aspect of in writing essays.
This semester I learned many new things in my English 1301 class. I took this class last year but I had to drop it because I didn’t have a professor explaining the work to me. And I really didn’t understand what I was doing. At first, I was scared to take this class. During my high school years I wasn’t that good of a writer.
In addition, students must not able to graduate high school if they cannot write a single decent essay. The institution is responsible for enabling students to be able to write if they cannot do so already. A lack of this skill among students shows that schools are not developing capable young adults. Moreover, a high school diploma has little value if the students holding it cannot even meet the basic standards of writing. Students may still perform well in school
Although I was a growing teenager my life at one point was not all that fast paced, exciting or containing a multitude of adventures. I would constantly become bored talking to people in the present or with whatever I was doing at that time. I had begun to text people just because I could. I would have absolutely no reason to be texting a friend from school how she was doing just because I was just too lazy to find an activity or two for me. I think about my essays and wonderful English teachers because there were days in which I decided that writing the essay or reading these five chapters was a bit too hard for myself.
I never wanted to do my writing assignments like I was supposed to, which didn’t help me learn how to write. I also have the writing I did last semester, which wasn’t much. But the writing I did do last semester helped my writing so much. Last semester I learned how to put a paper together and what goes into a paper; I didn’t know a lot about writing before last semester. Also, I learned how to do MLA, which I had no idea how to do before.
Each folder held about 6 work assignments inside them, I panicked even more when I couldn’t find the book we needed for this class I didn’t want to make the same mistake as the last time. I ordered my book late and our first essay was due within the second week. All I needed to do was relax and stop overthinking everything, I thought to myself maybe this class isn’t as bad as the first English class I took. After opening the first assignment folder and seeing that it really wasn’t so much work it was actually videos and articles of what we will be learning that week I felt relieved, the first folder was actually nice. I was able to see who I was as a writer and actually sit down and see what needs more work I also wrote about my MBTI, I found out I was a big procrastinator and that helped me figure out many things.
Indeed, the ways and the consequences of plagiarism before and now are extremely differents. Before it was something almost unnoticed but nowadays that have great outcomes like not be able to earn a degree. And all this start in middle school and High School years, because teachers are not worried about their students work neither to teach them to develop their own way of thinking. Instead, they only worry about a perfect work/ essay without even know worried to learn they way of writing of each of their students. That’s why students are not learning how to be originals with their work, and they decide to use someone else’s ideas, and not give credits to the author.
In hindsight I now know that this kind of practice was pretty much pointless. The students retained very little information from quiz to quiz and I very rarely asked them to incorporate the new grammar that they learned in any kind of writing. By the middle of last year I knew I was doing something wrong. I started asking my colleagues for ideas and definitely knew that I wanted to incorporate grammar not only on a more regular basis but making it a key part of my writing