My Reflection Letter

Dear Audience.

            My name is Heather Kuhnhenn, English Composition 101 has been an emotional rollercoaster for me.  Even with all of the challenges it has been a great experience and has helped me figure out my strengths and weaknesses in writing.  By no comparison it has taught me that I thrive when I can express my voice in whatever I may be writing.  When it comes to writing I have great difficulty trying to show my voice without saying “I”.  Apparently I really want the audience to know I’m talking about my opinion but I’ve learned it’s unneeded and doesn’t make for a good thesis driven paper.  At the end of this class though I have found out that it isn’t needed.  I can now say that I’ve successfully written a thesis driven paper without the use of “I”.  To be perfectly honest thought, I think my struggles, taking the bad grades hard emotionally and getting frustrated with myself, are what helped me improve.  After not improving on the second paper like I thought I would, I made myself go the last mile I could to try to succeed and made an appointment to meet with one of my professors.  I felt instant gratification.  I took what I learned and ended up rewriting my entire Traditions Paper.  Whether or not the paper could still benefit from more improvement, comparing it to the other papers I did, you would be astounded with my progress.  Finally being truly proud of a paper I did in this class has been worth all the struggles.  Not only do I feel my writing skills have improved but the pathway we took to get here has been an amazing learning experience as well. 

            Aside from the increasing my writing skills, this class has opened my mind to let me see diversity.  Participating in discussion boards made me see how someone else can view the same topic completely differently.  Diversity is just that, the difference between one thing to another.  We looked at diversity through identity, community, and tradition, seeing how each small or large part of someone is diverse.  We started out establishing how each person has diversity in just what they feel identifies them.  How even a little thing like a purse or wallet can be used to identify a person and what is important to them.  (That was probably one of my favorite assignments in this class, since I had never examined what each thing showed about me.)  Then we merged into looking at our communities.  Each individual has a community they fit into.  Since someone can be part of a number of communities it was difficult for me to pick just one community that would represent me in class.  For me it was horse riding, for others it was church or music. 

Diversity can expand into different areas in our lives and is different for each person.  Out of a selection of movies I chose to watch American East for this class.  This movie showed how an event that affected everyone can result in many different outcomes for different communities.  It made me see how when looking at something I was only looking at it one way.  After learning how to distinguish the diversity amongst communities we then focused on their traditions.  For example the religious community still has certain traditions that others don’t see fit for this day and age, such as how arranged marriages in some religions are still normal. 

I enjoyed how this class made me look deeper into myself and think about what identifies me, but then also really opened my eyes to see the diversity that surrounds me.  I had never looked so deeply into topics to try to see all the angles.  From really thinking about what my name means, where I belong and why (my horse community), or how September 11^th effected the Muslim people.  I feel acknowledging the different identities, communities and traditions people have help us understand more of who they are and what is important to them, and in that become more accepting of their differences.  Even just learning about my classmates really made me aware of how diverse we are.

            To show my progress and what I have learned from English Composition 101D I’ve selected 4 pieces of my work to showcase.  I’ve chosen my timed write based on the movie American East to show my critical thinking.  I truly had to look into every character and action in this movie, to see all it is trying to teach the viewing audience.  Not only did I have to analyze the movie, but I felt I got a lot of understanding of what the Muslim community went through after September 11^th, that to be completely honest had never crossed my mind.  To show a piece that I need to work on, I chose the blog on food traditions.  I chose this because I feel my strength is showing my voice to the audience, but when I read this blog I know I didn’t do it to the best of my ability.  When I re-read it I thought of many ways I could make it better and I’d like to show that my skills are better than what I originally showed in this piece.  For the piece I feel best showed my voice I chose the Discussion Board posting I wrote about my name.  This best showed my voice because while I was writing it I was excited about the topic and when I re-read my posting I could hear my enthusiasm in what I wrote.  For my overall choice of all the items I did in this class I chose the last paper, the Tradition Paper.  This paper was a leap in the right direction for me.  I learned the most and am the most proud of the outcome.  I started out with a below mediocre paper but not want to end the quarter on mediocre so I searched out help from the professionals (our professors).  I took what I learned in that 20 minutes and rewrote what I feel is a great paper.  This has been a very rewarding class.  Honestly probably the toughest I’ve taken yet but if it hadn’t been I don’t think I would have learned nearly as much as I did.