I can’t believe that I forgot to write a blog and I just remembered this morning….
I was extremely sleepy because my sleeping schedule has been off and I think I fell asleep in most of my classes. (Thank god I didn’t have any midterms this week unlike others)
Anyways, paper #2… I don’t know if I did it correctly. Because the paper direction said thorough reading, I did choose a poem by Whitman that interested me the most, and I tried to analyze each lines of the poem. However, I am not so sure if that’s what thorough reading means. Other than that, I feel sort of guilty about choosing a poem that we used in class. I didn’t choose the poem because we worked on it in class and to make my life easier, but still makes me feel guilty. I just chose the poem for the same reason written in the paper. The message Whitman was delivering was just the advice I got from my SAT tutor.
Aside from the guilt and confusion about the paper directions, this paper, I did try to develop a thesis. Since I had a clear thought of how a thesis should be like unlike before, I tried to create a clear thesis, but I am not sure if my thesis is an argument or not. I realized that I am not the only one to be struggling with developing with thesis(all along I thought I was the only one) and I think I benefited a lot from all the thesis practices(although I kept falling asleep because the room was so warm)
By far, I think this English class felt most comfortable for me. Professor Kaufman’s process of writing has shocked me because all my other teachers strongly forced their students to use outlines and I was really convinced that they help us to write, so I thought I have to develop and adapt those skills even if it isn’t the style I like. And the topics of papers are somewhat more comfortable than other English classes because it is not relevant to books we have read in class, and there isn’t anything for me to create what I don’t really care about. The papers I have written had somewhat of space for me to write about my own personal experience, and get really involved in writing. Plus, I learned clearly how to develop a thesis. All my English teachers made strong emphasis on thesis but none has actually taught us how. They always said the “main point” of the essay, so I just listed what I am going to talk about in terms of list and my point of argument by taking a side of a question. I am somewhat glad that English course sign up was done somewhat randomly because professor names were covered.
Alright, back to sleep, I can’t fall asleep today.
Jason Cho
