Final Reflection
Tommy Jimenez
ENC 2135
Mat Wenzel
2 August 2017
Final Reflection
When picking my classes I was told I need to take ENC 2135 and I was in all honesty quite annoyed because I had just spent the last two years of taking AP Language and AP literature to not have to take an English class. Coming out at the end of the road, six weeks past my initial thoughts, I can say these have been the best six weeks of my life in a long time and giving me a different view on English classes and getting rid of the stereotype I had of English classes. It was a surprise walking into class and seeing that we would be studying genres considering I never really read the whole class title; it threw me for a loop we would be studying genres like the difference between a mystery and a crime story but it was through the blog posts, leading discussions having me read other people’s views, and hearing and presenting text presentations that I actually knew what a genre was. The book was nonexistent aside from giving a broad context it was being in class and learning with everyone else through awkward pauses and deafening silence to having people volunteer for Jessie’s improve game.
For all the projects, I think I should say I really had no idea fumbling my way through topics and having to narrow my topic down for both project one and two. Talking to Mat actually really helped with him giving me direction where to go and focus my ideas. For project one I talked about my favorite movie, the movie that made me fall in love with movies. Before talking about the movie, I knew I wanted to talk about the movie industry and films but after everything it turned into something so much more personal with my love for movies coming from my family and remembering the good times. The project definitely made me access my life and childhood making me realize things and enjoy those memories by writing about them. Having other people read my personal narrative was intimidating at first but working with Mat and my group I felt it made me connect with the class and people more opening me up to be not first but second for most of the volunteering.
With the second project that was a fiasco I had no idea what I wanted to talk about or what community I wanted to join. I didn’t know what I wanted to write or what to write in general. The task was very daunting 2000 words! I’d never written a thousand words until the last paper. With time and help from my group I finally landed on a topic with Vegetarianism and it was really interesting and helpful watching certain influential video and interviewing members of the community. Finding out the different reasons on why people are vegetarians interested me the most pushing me to make the transition. Whenever I started writing my project two everything started to fall in place seven sources weren’t a problem I had more than ten. I learned more than I thought and was ignorant to the little information I actually knew and never thought that a class project would make me want to make a change in my life and as big as giving up meat.
Project three was my favorite for one because it was easy but because I was able to infuse my personality into my social media posts and connect with everyone with dumb puns like “potatoes gonna potate.” I was able to be creative and actually spread the word with recipes. This project also made me really love Wix more because I hated it for the better part of five weeks. WIx was the death of me I couldn’t upload anything. I couldn’t format. I couldn’t categorize. But now I am a Wix master being able to make hyperlinks and creating my own website for one of my genres. This was a really hard but fun time learning to use Wix and finally after so long being able to have everything come out the way I wanted especially my website. For me it was really nice to see whenever I presented my project that people actually visited my website and were looking at it and having people message me if I was going to keep up everything after and I think I might continue with everything and not let the puns go south and become stale Kale.
This class isn’t what I expected and ended up teaching me something which is the point of a class but it surprised me anyway. In the future, I hope I have classes as good as this one where I feel comfortable enough to go up in front of everyone and lead discussion or write a super in-depth log and go up to present a text presentation I’m proud of that will make everyone laugh. This was a great six weeks learning about genres and Wix and how to write a better essay and changing my mind about English classes.