I feel like I did the best job and was most successful on essay 3. I shocked myself by how creative I made the poem flyer, and I also was very satisfied with the grade I got from it. It was a fun assignment to do and I’d also say it’s my favorite assignment of this semester. I would say that discussion boards in general are work that I could’ve done better on. A few of them I didn’t do and a tiny bit of them I didn’t receive full 100% credit because I either didn’t respond to a student or I posted my discussion on the weekend. I’d say the main thing I learned this semester is how to really read poems and understand them. It’s kind of general but I’ve always struggled with understanding the true meanings of poems and this semester definitely helped me on that. I’d say I gotten better at understanding poems and being able to talk about them.
Amanda Perkovic
I would rate my ability to read poetry after these past two weeks a 7. Reading the different poems and analyzing them really helped me understand the true meanings of poems, but I struggle with some here and there. Understanding the poem in general is always confusing and I need to reread a couple times and definitely annotate to get some ideas from it. I feel like my experience with poems can help with the reading of Oedipus the King because I’ve seen many different words and the definitions of them. This is one of the things I struggle with the most when it comes to poems, many of the poems I read use words and phrases that are from an old period of time, which we don’t use anymore. This always confuses me, but I think being able to read numerous poems these past two weeks that both show and don’t show it will help. Touching more upon the word choice and how I struggle with understanding it, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” because they both use certain words that I don’t understand. The difference between the two is that “Oedipus the King” uses those older words such as “thee” and more less, and, they added the definitions of not so common words on the bottom of each page which was useful to me as well.
While I was writing essay 1, I realized that I had procrastinated which led to me to kind of rushing the essay. I also learned that I wasn’t fully prepared when it came to giving examples from the primary and secondary sources which was the story and the overview of that story. I realized that I was so focused on talking about how the student didn’t write her essay in the format of the outline and that they didn’t have a thesis, but instead had a theme, that I wasn’t talking about the two stories and the thesis of what it should’ve been. I was mainly talking about structure and formatting the whole essay and in the body paragrpahs which I could’ve avoided. When I got my feedback, I also realized that my body paragraphs could’ve been more organized and informative so that’s something that will make me change how I approach future writing assignments.
If I had to write an essay that focuses less on socio-economic issues and more about interesting/important details or elements in the story “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara, I would probably decide to write about the symbolism that Toni Cade Bambara added into this story. One of the symbols I saw was when they went to the toy store and as they were looking through the window, they saw a boat that was priced at one thousand one hundred ninety- five dollars. Sylvia had to reread it twice because of how ridiculous she thought the price was for one toy, which I agree on. Sylvia was shocked and a bit angered at this which can symbolize that she has a different perspective on what to spend money on as well as the relationship she has with money and wealth. This one toy can symbolize the difference between poverty and wealth, depending on who’d buy that and who wouldn’t even believe the price. Lastly, the title I’d give this essay would be something basic and maybe along the lines of “Symbolism in The Lesson”
My understanding of the prewriting assignment in Week 1 activity. 10 is that it showed me how to write a good literary essay. I was able to see the process of making that essay. I had to watch a video that taught me about the formation in essays, as well as an illustration of that formation. I also was able to see the MLA citation guide which showed examples of the citations for books, journals etc. There was two PowerPoints that taught us everything we need to know as well as gave examples about both thesis statements and inserting quotes. I also read the stories and saw a student sample essay as well as the directions to that essay. Lastly, the purpose of this pre writing activity is for all of us to have the knowledge of what to do and not to do, in order to successfully submit the literary essay.
