Reflective Essay Project 4 Luis Galvan

At first I didn't know what to expect for a 1320/1301 class, how bad it's going to be? I remember that I was already late for the first class of the semester without expectations at all. I add this class the night before the first one because of my laziness and because I don’t think there was any mistake and I learned a lot during the semester. As I said earlier I really didn’t know what to expect for the class, I just brought to class my experience as a student but none as a writer in English. Being from Mexico I knew that the language would be an obstacle for this class because before this class I’ve just written in Spanish and now be in an English writing class would be a very difficult challenge.

Throughout the semester I applied to every single class activity my experience and absolutely everything I wrote and thought was because of the way I’ve learned through life. I learned several important terms for the semester and one of the first of all of them that helped me was funds of knowledge. While we were learning this term, I realized that every time we learned something is due funds of knowledge because this is how we used what we know in order to receive more. Another terms that I learned was feedback and revision, I mention this two because they are related to each other. Every time you do revision you are getting feedback. Feedback is getting people ideas about your work in order to improve it because one thing I really make an effort to in the semester was feedback. Without feedback and revision you are going now where.

At the beginning of the semester we started to read articles addressed to teachers and although many times these lectures were boring, I always try to get something useful. SQRs were such a big deal for me because they represent reading and writing at same time. After reading several times the every article and through the practice SQRs become easier to do because every time I do one experience were gained. Moll and Gonzalez was one of the articles I like the most because I learned a lot from its content about funds of knowledge. All the examples they put were really useful in the understanding of the lecture because they tell us about real life cases that allow us to develop some kind of conscious about the importance of funds of knowledge in our life.

In the class we went through several projects, in some of them we develop new theories. In my case project 1 and 2 was all about the way we learned. I had an amazing experience and learned a lot by making all the investigations, researches, surveys and putting all the information together. Sometimes you don’t see what you are learning instantaneously but now that I am writing project 4 I can realized that my skills in writing have improve a lot. Now I can sit and write about everything we have done in the semester without thinking the whole thing in Spanish.

Something that really help me in my process of learning for this class was the all the effort I put to this class in order to get everything done in the best way possible. Having all that feedback and revision really help me process every single idea in a better form, so that my understanding will become better and in that way my works improve.

I enjoy being in this classroom, everything a student can ask for learning was there. We have pretty much of everything like technology, an excellent teacher, interns and classmates that make this English class nicer and enjoyable rather than being just a requisite class for the school. For the technology I can say that having all that iPads, Macs and even those bad markers help through the semester to make it easier. Without all that technology everything would had been old school with just a paper and a pencil for class. The interns were great too because they help us in the process of rethinking all the ideas and make our projects look better with all that feedback that was from them. I think they are really helpful for our teacher because there is a lot of work to do with so many students and a single teacher wouldn’t be enough. Bonnie was great too, even though she always told me to shut up and put me to work. She was nice and comprehensive but at the same time she pushes us through all this work. Thanks to her I can say that I’ve never been in a class that put me in to so much writing and rethinking. For my classmates I can say that all the feedback from them was a very important thing in the semester and that we make a pretty good team. I know that now I am able to keep learning in the next English class.