Final reflective Letter

Dear Antoine,

For every class, there should be different goals in which your professor should strive to guide his or her students towards. Throughout the quarter, your professor will hope to help you achieve these so-called “Student Learning Outcomes” until the time the class is completed. This can be proven in multiple ways, whether it’s the students’ participation in class, how much effort is placed in every assignment, and/or their overall grade. For my English class, I successfully achieved my Student Learning Outcome by continuously updating my blog with assignments that evidently proved my overall progression.

A thesis statement can arguably be the most difficult feat in essay writing, but the paper is not considered an essay without one. Its expected purpose is to help the reader acknowledge exactly what you intend to prove in your essay. From the given topic of the essay prompt, the thesis must not be too broad, but enough to write a certain amount of topic paragraphs required. At the same time it has to be a clear and reasonable statement that demonstrates your understanding of the topic. In my essay, “The Path to Educational Success,” I wrote a strong, yet broad thesis: “We have to always remember that there exists a huge divide of economic and educational inequality within society, and that there are many improvements needed to be made to our educational system that better align students’ passions with financial success.” Over the quarters, I have experimented on whether it’s best if I thought of a thesis first or after I have completed my body paragraphs. I finally realized that it was more efficient for me if I created a broad thesis sentence first and then alter it after completing my body paragraphs. That way, a stronger thesis statement could be formed from combining the ideas and topics from every paragraph. It may seem as though the thesis is clustered with too many ideas, but after reading the essay you can see that it correlates with everything well. 

The key to writing a good essay is to provide a variety of different sentence structures. It helps with sentence flow and paragraph cohesion. Throughout the quarter, it was not only important to complete the essay assignment, but to also underline different sentence structures. We didn’t spend much quality class time going over the different variations – appositives, adjective clauses, dependent clauses, etc – but it should already be something taught throughout high school. Compared to the first essay written for the class, I can pinpoint over 20 different types of sentences used in my most recent essay, “The Importance of History.” With the reminder to underline these sentences before turning in the assignment, it allows me to be aware of what needs to be implemented. Keeping that in mind as we progress through the quarter, each essay should substantially improve in quality.

Communication was never my strongest trait, but it steadily improved with every class I attended. Every week when we met up for class, it involved a lot of group activity. Instead of sitting through boring lectures, I felt like I learned a lot more through the sharing of ideas with other students. The only way for the student to learn or the group to pass, communication was the key. This was proven through my presentations - “The Path to Educational Success” and “Living in a Transnational World: Society’s Ideals” - where I worked together with my partners to synthesize our ideas into one successful presentation. As a group, we created Google presentation slides as visualization to be embedded onto our blogs. I was also able to get in front of class and teach a whole chapter to the class the way that my group thought would be learning productive. Sometimes learning doesn’t just come from listening, but also from teaching.

I’ve never considered myself as a good writer, but I was always open to challenging myself. I’ve gained an incredible amount of knowledge through attending classes and improved in both reading and writing. My professor was able to help me achieve my Student Learning Outcomes and I have the blog to prove it.