Reflective Essay Project 4 Nora Cruz

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.  ~Clay P. Bedford
In this course I have learned how the writing process works. We have read different articles that contain important facts that helped us as students to understand reading and writing in a different way. The important fact of all this is the help we received from teacher, interns and our classmates. Basically that helped us throughout the class, without the help from others we would not be able to make it.

All my background for reading and writing was not that good, even though I have always like reading. During High school I participated in reading and writing contests like spelling bee's or accelerated reading contests. But I have never done essay projects before, so it was a totally new experience for me.  I was totally excited to receive this course because since It is my first semester at a total new place for me, total different education system, but at the same time it was a challenge, even though I studied at a bilingual school I am used to receive classes in english but I will never be the same as actually having english as our main language. But I did have the expectations to put all my efforts into it, and to achieve a good grade.

From my investigations and research I learned how reading and writing can be applied to Any general topics, like they are all related. you can really learn From your research, you can see how a public document can inspire people around you and public documents can help others express their ideas.
With all this i learned many others concepts throughout the process of research like for example the parts of the essay, the uses of note taking, how to understand funds of knowledge ia better way.

In this writing class I have learned important concepts as funds of knowlege, rhetorical reading, and peer response, which I considered were the most important ones in our learning process. Those concepts I could use them easily because I understood those concepts in a practical way, in a creative way we applied them during class so that helped also to strenghten the idea of what those words meant. I liked how we discuss them in class and gave them different concepts, concepts which we could understand in our own words that made it easier for us to catch the idea better. Also we discussed the articles we read and we all discussed what we thought of each author, we shared if they expressed their ideas correctly or if they just confused us more.


The main questions that I think everyone came up with was: Am I doing this correct? Is my writing good? But I think we all got answers throughout the process, we received feedback from the teacher, from our classmates. So I think the class worked well the way I did, it was interactive enough to keep us interested on the work during class.


One of the most important processes of our class sessions was the conversations we developed from our writings with other students, and even with the interns. We received helped from all the people in the writing studio, so I think that was a big success because it made us feel we were not alone along this process, that If we looked for help we can find it and we can make it through. Also we had many technological facilities in the class that made things run much easier for us and for the teacher, I liked the fact everything was done online and in that way we kept things simple and not complicate each other turning in papers, etc.
The use of the Ipads was really efficient and made us feel comfortable with the class and the fact that we would have time to work in class for our projects. During the course we did many reading, and many writing, we even had to do some research, handout surveys, etc. I like this part of the research because we did something that we were not used to do in class, so that was exciting to try something different but always applying it to the writing and reading topics.

Of course, I did have complications during the course, one of them : time. Since I work and also go to school I need to find the correct time to get my assignments done. I needed to create a study schedule that includes staying up until late to study for quizzes or to get my assignments done. I think that was one of my main difficulties I came up with. But I also had minor ones, like not having enough words to complete my essays, or not understanding a reading, etc.

I think this was a good course, we all learned from it, we all shared our experiences with it. It was very good that we all get along so well and that we all helped each other. So I feel like I have learned a whole different concept of writing and reading and also I am looking forward to apply all that knowledge in all my classes.