Week 12 of College
-
- What I did
- Took tests for multiple classes
- What went well
- The tests were not too bad
- What was hard
- Studying for all of those tests this week
- To-Do List
- Present my monologue in FYS
- Take my music quiz
- Write papers for my POL, BUS, and ENG classes
- Where I left off
- Taking more notes for my classes
- Writing essays
- Feelings
- This week I was swamped with tests. Next week I am going to be swamped with essays. I am not looking forward to it but I just have to power through. Survive the next week and then I can relax.
I was so busy with everything, I totally forgot to write a clear thesis in my paper. In my mind, I knew what I wanted to say but just did not write it down. When I revise my rough draft, I am going to add “First-year writing courses help students with writing more than high school classes because of the content that they teach and the mindset on teaching”. I feel like I totally forgot how to write in general, so this paragraph was the only one that had every part of MEAL. The problem was that I did not find a lot of sources and tried to fill my paragraphs with more of my experiences than facts. Honestly, I am really ashamed at the drop in my ability to write this past week so I will be working to incorporate MEAL in every paragraph of my polished draft.
Therefore, with the improvement in writing from increased awareness, it strengthened the groundwork for how to write from now on. High school classes build on what was taught in previous years with no regard to whether the foundations are strong enough. Young archive reconstructs what was taught previously, reinforces understandings of the basics, then builds on from there. In accounts taken from multiple first-year students on how they identified themselves in the English high school classroom, they all described themselves with having varying issues in English proficiency. For example, a student named Billy recalls her experience in English Literature as “bittersweet”, especially during the poetry unit. She states “I felt like I never had the right ideas and I was unconfident in my ability to interpret them. Also, for the first three years of high school my teachers just skimmed through the poetry unit. None of them enjoyed teaching poetry, so we never went deep into it” (Aitchison 307). None of her teachers taught the fundamentals of poetry, how to read it and write it. Every time she progresses to the next grade, her teachers assume everyone knows what to do and carries on. As a result, she identified herself as “‘a decent reader and scholar’ but ‘not a good writer’ because of having ‘always struggled with writing’” (Aitchison 309). Young archive can help her revisit poems and self-correct her little knowledge of how to interpret and write poems. Everything she knows is what she had to learn by herself from a younger age and through many years afterwards. Now, with a more developed brain, she can understand more aspects of the poems she read a long time ago. After the use of the young archive method, Billy did say that she positively changed her perception of her writing. Her first-year writing teacher stated that she saw Billy and the other students “assert themselves as strong, successful readers and writers invested in exploring the nexus of language, literature, academics, and identity” (Aitchison 310). Young archive really does strengthen the groundwork for first-year writing.
