Guided Questions (Week Two)

Entry 6:

Research/Connections

Topic: How is reflection beneficial to learning?

    Reflective learning has readers step back and really try to understand exactly what they just read. Readers can connect what they just read to their own personal experiences. Reflection also helps build a readers critical thinking skills. It encourages learners to engage more in their readings and take charge of their own learning. 

    I have used concepts from other classes in order to help me understand topics in my everyday life. You can notice a lot of similar concepts throughout different classes if you reflect on your reading and actively try to comprehend your readings. 

    Connecting ideas between classes or personal experiences helps to put things into perspective. Trying to compare ideas between your life and something going on in class or a situation a friend is facing maybe could be explained by a reading you have done. Attention and reflection is a big part of life and does not always need to be based on readings. Reflecting and connecting during and after your reading benefits you in writing. 

Link: learningpool.com

Breaking Bad Habits, Creating Good Habits

Entry 5:

Reflection/Experience/Research

Topic: "Breaking out of habits that limit intellectual inquiry." -writingspaces.org

    Students are limited in showcasing their talents with the 5 paragraph method taught throughout their middle/high school. However, breaking old habits has always been hard.

    Having taken Advanced placement and honors English all throughout high school, we were taught to write our essays with 5 paragraphs. The format should have been paragraph one: Introduction, paragraph two to four: body, paragraph five: conclusion. A lot of students who did the five paragraph methods in my class often did worse on the essays than the students who made their essays sound good and only put in what they thought was necessary. 

    I noticed fellow classmates getting anywhere from a 7-9 and only writing 3-4 paragraphs especially with the time limit we had to write while everyone who was squeezing in 5 paragraphs would get like a 4-6. Now the teacher definitely told us to write what sounds like a 9 paper (I think they changed the grading scale since), it was hard for us to break habits. 

    "Through learning critical reading, freewriting, and outlining techniques," new writing strategies to help stimulate students writing. They say that these strategies can have new college students writing in multiple genres. What about these strategies helps to break students old habits taught to them and instilled in their minds? 

    When you read a document, reflect on what you exactly just read and then review. Ask yourself what the key points are; the "who","what","why","how", "so what". This is all a part of critical reading. When you figure out how to get good with this, you can really improve your writing tremendously. 

    Freewriting allows you to come up with topics and get you started a bit faster as you develop ideas while doing something productive with your time. Freewriting provides writers with providing structure, ideas, and more. Sometimes you may write 2 paragraphs out of an entire page while freewriting. The you can fix them up and now you are done with more than you thought you would be. 

    Outlining helps you plan out and organize how you want the thing you are writing to look. Outlines make your writing more successful towards achieving your writing goals.

Reading Reflections

 Entry 4:

Reflection practices

Topic: Have you used assigned readings in your other classes?

    Personally, if I read something I like, I will continue to bring it up in other conversations. If the reading stimulates my mind enough then I will talk about it with so many people. I have used assigned readings from my sociology, crime and justice, interior design (last semester), and a couple other classes to spark conversations with family, friends or even other people in my classes. Articles are definitely a lot easier to use as they are normally short and easy, however other forms are also easy to mention. 

    I have used topics from other classes to start doing further research and build on a discussion we held in that classroom as a research paper. I have asked people I know their opinions and almost conducted surveys because the reading sparked my interest in other peoples reactions to what I read. Readings definitely help to put things into perspective and go further into research. They also can spark ideas on things to mention, bring light to issues we did not even know existed. 

    The answer to the topic? Yes, readings can be used to connect ideas from other classes or be used in everyday life. Readings can help the reader(s) understand their own life troubles, other peoples struggles or just understand society. -I formulated almost this entire entry off a reading I did in another class to connect the ideas in order to answer the question asked. 

Guided Questions Answered (Week One)

 Entry 3:

Multimodal 

Topic: Brainstorming strategies 

 1. Freewriting:

• Let your thoughts flow out on a piece of paper or on your computer screen and just write. Set a limit for however long you feel is good (10-20 minutes or until you reach a certain page amount) and just go for it. When the time is up, read over it. Pick things that you like and then go with that and start your research.  

2. Looping:

• Similar to the freewrite method but going a little bit farther. Move in groups and write for 5-10 minutes. Move onto another piece and do the same things a couple more times. Analyze what you have done and then develop what you found using this method. 

3. Listing:

• Start jotting down ideas, write a sentence for each and then group together similar ideas and/or pick your favorite idea from the list. 

4. Idea mapping:

• Write the subject in the center of a page and then work out the details around the idea.

5. Researching:

• Just start browsing ideas until one really sticks out and then continue exploring the idea. 

6. Ask questions:

• "What if”, “pros and cons”, so on. 

Book Review 1

 Entry 2- 

Research and Reflection

Topic: Quote from The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa

""Dirty people," I heard. 
Had I heard it right? What have we done for me to have to endure that? What crime had we committed?"(Page 9)

    A bit of backstory behind this quote. The novel, a historical fiction, at this point is taking place in Berlin, 1939. People said this to this twelve year old Jewish girl. 

    Historical Information: Doing some research further to really get into this quote I looked up a timeline of things Hitler did when he came to power. Important dates/years on this timeline included: 

• 1935, Hitler created the Nuremberg Laws. These laws essentially stripped Jewish people of their civil rights as German citizens, they were also defined as a separate race. With his new law, marriage or sexual relations between Germans and Jews was forbidden. 
• In 1936, he started promoting Nazism to the world. 
• In the later part of the year 1939, the "New Order" was put in place. This was a plan to abuse and eliminate Jews and Slavs. 

    Now in the book, this girl has a rich family. They own a hotel or apartment complex. German tenants in the building told this to the young girl because of her background. They call her and one of her friends "dirty" because they are Jewish. In 1939, there was a lot of racism towards anyone who was not German, actually they also discriminated against anyone who was not considered to be the perfect Aryan; having blonde hair and blue eyes made you "favorable". 

    Racism is seen throughout so many countries and so many different time periods and we still can see racism as well as sexism and other types of discrimination today. People often argue that racism or any other discriminatory actions are taught. In the book, a child is called dirty by an adult based on her race. The adult is a mother and says it with her child next to her, the child used to attend school with the young Jewish girl and they were once friends. However, she picked up from her mothers habits and either did not say anything or spit at her old friend. I guess you could say that racism is in fact taught. 

    The reason I picked this quote from the book is that up until then there were not perfect hints that this girl was Jewish. The title is misleading. The German Girl, she was not considered German by anyone in Germany in that time period. She then goes off on a rant explaining how she is German, more German than most of the "real" Germans. She even explains how. I guess I picked this quote because I keep going back to it. I know that the book takes place 80+ years ago but we know that this was a real event that happened. Racism still goes on- people are still so mean to each other.

Link to timeline I used: https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/timeline/nazifica.htm 

Questions in Writing

Entry 1: 

Reflective Interaction

Topic: Reading/Quote from Understanding Rhetoric: "Introduction: Spaces for Writing"  

"There's so much to say-- how do you know what's worth saying? And when to say it? And how?"

    Seconds after reading this, I began working on my blog. I started creating several rough drafts to capture what I want to say on this quote. Collecting and composing my thoughts into what I feel best portrays my emotions for this one sentence. 

    To state why I chose this three pages into the introduction, the reason I struggled so much on starting my commonplace I didn’t know what to say- the quote explains how I felt. 

    To break down my thoughts, I want to look at the quote in pieces and reflect further on it. To start, “There’s so much to say,” yes there is. There are 171,146 words in the English language and a lot of problems everywhere in the world. There should be a lot to say. “How do you know what’s worth saying,” you don’t. How do you know what to say when people in society today constantly judge you? You never know if people will like what you have to say in your work. 

    If you sit and consider that there are so many topics you can choose from, so many people to please, then no one would ever start sharing their thoughts with the world. You cannot sit down and work on something and expect to please everyone. While I understand writing is more for others than ourselves, some part of it is for us. Writing can be so powerful. Somewhere in this world- someone feels exactly the same way, somewhere your writing can help someone. Whether you write a blog, book, article, so on; you can help others. 

    The takeaway? You can never answer these questions if you close your mind from thoughts. How can your paper, story, whatever you write be wrong when it felt right to you? 

    To end- writing is unique to each individual person. So the questions you ask or the “how do you know what to say, when to say it, how to say it”- that is entirely up to you. No one else can tell a writer not to say what they want, how they feel, that it’s not the right time to bring something up. If you write it, when you write it, know that then the time was right, and that it was worth mentioning.