This English class was definitely a very transformative experience for me. I had an amazing time, I made a few friends, and I learned stuff about writing. My favorite part about this class was the environment that our professor, Natalie Zimmerman, created for us, it was super constructive and open and I felt really comfortable participating.

I liked how we also switched up the scenery sometimes. There were multiple days where class wasn’t held in our regular classroom, but instead it was inside of the computer lab. This was particularly nice due to the digital work we had to submit. It was way more accessible to be working on these assignments while we were in the computer lab as opposed to being in the classroom. This is because the computers in the lab owned by the school are usually MUCH faster and easier to use than our laptops, or our phones, or any other electronic devices we’d be using instead of the ones at the computer lab. This is bringing me to my first lesson learnt in the class, how to use CUNY Academic Commons. This is the site we used to create our websites where we put our digital portfolios. Before this lesson in English, and before I even had this class, I had no idea this site existed. I didn’t even consider the idea of having to make my own website, but I did it. And it was so easy with Prof. Zimmerman’s help, we met in the computer lab multiple times and she guided us through the process and answered all of our questions about it. It sounds like a very daunting task but it was everything except that, and I’m very glad I now know about this platform because I might go and make more websites, who knows. Aside from that we’ve also learned a few good writing strategies that stuck with me. I never liked annotating texts we would read in class, I thought it was useless until I read this quote from one of our assignments: “Imagine an author is sitting down to write and they come up with different ‘moves’ they’ll make, and why. Annotating a text for what it says / does thus means trying to decipher those writerly choices and ‘moves.’” This changed how I viewed annotation completely.

If we weren’t in the computer lab making our websites, we were probably planning and learning about how to write our personal essays. First we had to write the language and literacy narrative which was about important experiences in our lives involving language, whether it was writing, speaking, reading, etc. I struggled with this one to a great extent. I found it really difficult to find an experience revolving around language that was significant enough for me to write about. The topic I landed on still feels a little iffy to me, but I do think it’s probably the best thing I could have written about. Even though I was struggling with all that, the professor was so nice and helpful, we had so many talkings about it and I eventually made it through the essay. Here’s one of my favorite lines from this essay: “Over time, through more and more reading based assignments, that seed of resentment which was planted in the sixth grade began to grow and grow into more of a resentment apple tree, producing apples of hatred for reading. It didn’t have to be apples though, you could imagine it as an evil coconut tree, or a strawberry bush, or an anti reading clam making anti reading pearls. My point is, I hated reading.” Being encouraged to write in my own voice, I could have a little fun. I learned perseverance here, I never had essays this hard on topics I did not know about in highschool, so this was new to me. But I did it, and I’m taking this lesson to keep on fighting through my assignments and eventually graduate.

The second essay we had to do was our synthesis essay. This was basically a free-range essay where we could talk about anything we wanted to, we just had to make an argument, find sources, and use the sources to prove our point. I had so much more fun with this assignment than the last one. I could actually talk about things I had experience with and that I was qualified to talk about. I loved the idea of this, “This new trend of ostracizing anyone outside of our norms is one of the main problems caused by the technological era. Social media has made it extremely easy to make fun of others, and has effectively ruined empathy in my generation.“ I chose to write about something I’m very qualified to talk about, and was excited until I had to get my own evidence. This taught me about finding sources. I have had to write essays with sources in the past but the sources themselves were usually given to me to pick out of. I was never allowed to find my own topic, and do my own research. This doesn’t seem difficult but it was actually the most time consuming part of the essay for me. I learned how to effectively optimize my search engine so I could actually find results I wanted, and not have to sift through loads of the same repackaged nothings. I also learned I get a free New York Times membership with my school email, which also helped my source search immensely. I also learned in this stage to not overuse adverbs in my writing, especially the ones that end in “ly.” For example, really, actually, very, extremely, etc. I ABUSED these words throughout highschool and nobody ever stopped to tell me that nine times out of ten they would not fit in my sentence at all. But my love for those adverbs persevered, “Makes it very easy to leave nasty comments on a video,” I kept a few in all my essays. But this did hit hard for me and I’ve tried to stop doing that as much, I know this advice is gonna help me in my writing a lot so I’m very (I just did it) glad Prof. Zimmerman taught me this. Overall I really enjoyed this class and got a lot from it, I’m so glad I took it!