Reflection Letter: Letter #1
Dear Marlen,
The saying, time flies by when you’re having fun, is in full affect when I walk through the door and into your classroom. For example, I just used the word your. I start to question myself, “Is that okay, or should I change that?” Little things that you have said have been imprinted into my mind and have changed the way I now write my papers. I want to believe that I may use “you” because this letter is directed straight towards Marlen Harrison himself also known as you.
Your English class was recommended to me by one of my friends who did a lot of drugs every day. I trusted in his words because, he was so genuine when he spoke about the class and how much knowledge he gained over the semester. Even though he might have been high while he was speaking about your class, it just seemed so appealing to me. Hence I am now writing this letter to you describing what I myself have learned.
I would have to say before I came into your class I was the typical procrastinator, due to the high school ways of bullshitting every paper. In high school you can just sit down the night before, eat some Fritos while watching the game and type up a five page paper with ease. In your class you do not allow that to happen and I respect that. I learned that after trying to put off my blogs and the reading from the Hacker and Ackerman books. I have never been much of an annotator but now I think I am addicted. Addicted to finding new facts that I did not know or to actually see how crazy Diane Ackerman really is. Then when we go over what we read in class, I get that anxiety of, “I wonder if anybody else highlighted this, or am I just going to be the loser kid with his hand up?” Apparently that woman has done everything possible in life. It truly is amazing. There is no time to waste in your class, there is always something else you should be doing or have done already. This class has not only changed the way I write, but the way my school work is done for all my classes. Before this class I was sluggishly moving through the motions of college life. I would go out and partying nearly every other day, saying who gives a fuck to my morning classes, and all around just doing poorly. This English class has changed my whole work ethic completely. I no longer wait till the last second. I go to all of my classes every day. I have a sense of remorse when I do not finish an assignment. I am in a constant state of thinking about what I can do to get shit done or how can I improve this. It’s phenomenal what how this one class has taken me from a student on academic probation to now answering questions in classes and participating. I am still waiting to see the results from the first tests of all my classes, and then we will see how much the improvement has gone up.
In these past four weeks you have taught me something that I would have never of learned in high school. That there are other ways to write other than how they are telling you. A writer needs to combine genres together and form their own style of writing for their audience. What you give us is just what is inside the box, the basic format. Then you flip the script and let us go outside that very same box, which no one has ever done for me before. This class has opened up my perspective to everything in life. I look forward to coming to class every day. Even when I come in ten minutes early everybody else is already there ready to go. I look forward to what else I may learn in the future.
Sincerely,
Brock Kawana
