Self Assessment google docs link

As unprecedented 2020 comes to an end, it is also going to take the 2020 Fall semester along with it to ride off to the sunset. My first ever semester in college, an online semester and a semester with ups and downs. “First time ever” is always challenging and this semester has certainly been so but there has been lots of good in this semester and looking back, FIQWS 10111 class definitely stands out to me. English and composition has never been a strong side of me, but I confidently say that this particular class has taught me a lot and that’s why I would be more than happy to take a journey down the memory lane and review the semester for this amazing class. 

The first ever assignment that I remember I did in this class was writing a journal entry. In the first journal students were asked to write about an experience in nature so I wrote about my visit to the Grand Central Park a year ago. The second was about writing about an experience in a marginal world which was inspired from Rachel Carson’s “Marginal World” and I wrote about my experience in a swamp forest. Journal entries were low stakes assignments for this class which appeared to be very fun and easy tasks to complete and I feel very good about what I wrote for them.

Similar type of low stakes assignment was discussion board. This was mostly a weekly assignment where we were asked to demonstrate our understanding of readings by answering a few questions on the assigned readings. The readings were mostly about grammar and rhetoric. I really liked discussion board questions since it wasn’t time consuming and I think I successfully achieved the goal of this assignment which was to learn about rhetorical tools and their usages. Overall, I really found this assignment both enjoyable and informative at the same time.

Speaking of rhetorical tools, I have to talk about reading assignments. This was simple. Our job was to read some literature and discuss it in our live class. I think the goal of this task was to demonstrate the incorporation of rhetorical tools learned through discussion board readings and help students understand the rhetorical aspects of writing. “Marginal World”, “City Person Encountering Nature” were two of the writings we worked with. Now, the part of me not being strong in English and literature has mostly to do with my weakness of understanding literature works. I will say I haven’t achieved the goal to its full potential but I think I made progress in my weak zone. 

The most important task of this class was to write three different papers. First one was the narrative essay. This was a very unique type of essay to me and my very first time writing any of its kind. The essay asked us to write about our memorable experience in nature in detail and connect our stories to address environmental issues that the planet is currently dealing with. I saw the paper as an elaboration to the journal entries where I narrate my own story and where I let myself get lost in nature. So, I talked about Central Park again with more depths and tried to address how creating parks in busy cities can help balance cities’ ecosystems. Although it was very different, this was the easiest amongst three in my opinion as it didn’t require any research and I was very satisfied with my effort in this. My draft essay had a little less details than asked for but ultimately I fixed it and I thought my professor liked it as well.

Exploratory essay was our 2nd paper that required students to raise  a debatable question on their subtopics and analyze specialists’ point of view to talk about the problem that helps form their own conclusion on the issue. My subtopic was “how climate affects water scarcity” and I found out three major ways climate affects water scarcity but “which is the deadliest” was debatable and hence I explored expertise’ claims and findings concluded that sea level rise is the deadliest way climate affects water scarcity.  My draft for this essay wasn’t very good as I was being too general and missed the focal point of my task. However, I did make a comeback with my final form of the paper and I believe my professor was satisfied with my effort. 

Finally, the 10 page research paper was our major assignment that asked for conducting a research on the subtopic where students had to make a thesis statement addressing the subtopic and use scholarly sources to support the argument throughout the paper. The research paper also had to follow the convention of APA style of writing which was a really hard skill  to acquire as a first timer and took a lot of time for me to understand the formatting. I struggled writing my draft for this paper but soon I got my hands on APA format completely and I made the best use of my time and finished the final paper at the very last minute. I still have a lot of doubt about if I was able to follow the rules for writing a proper APA style paper but if the goal was to learn and gain experience about formal writing, then I definitely made it.

Overall, this has been a very straight forward class with simple grading policy and mostly 75 minutes synchronous sessions on Mondays. Live classes were very enjoyable with very helpful fellow students and definitely Professor Nicoludis. Our professor had a great personality and was very helpful to us. I was so happy about how fast he replied to our emails and questions and how understanding he was of our problems. To be honest, this was one of my best classes this semester and I will always remember it. This class may be over but we made it nonetheless and the learning outcomes and experience of the class will be with me forever.