sunday before classes start again

that break for thanksgiving was much needed. i was getting real tired of doing work and studying and taking tests with no breaks week after week. it felt good to go home and do nothing for a few days. along with just getting some things done that needed to be that i couldnt do when i was here. unfortunatly one of those things wasnt homework. i was gonna revise my paper but forgot and when i remembered i just put it off untill sunday night like right now. i didnt want ot think about school on break i was so ready to get away for a few days from work. the last minute sunday night theme seems to be really common. whenever you really need to do homework and dont feel like it its always ill just do it later, or ill just do it on sunday. it never fails. i do it sometimes but since i have been in college i have strayed away and have had good work ethic and gotten stuff done with the exception of a few times.

2 papers in 1 week

writing those 2 papers in 1 week was not very fun but in the end it worked out fine. it didn't take too awfully long to revise my paper so it was ok. i would rather write 2 papers in 1 week than have to just do it the next week. so it just saved me time next week which i am ok with because i would love to just be able to relax on thanksgiving break.

essay

i really like this paper and think it is very good. the use of pictures can somewhat help you imagine as your reading what her story is looking like. i think it was well written and wish i could write a paper this long or even this well. i thought it was very interesting too. it caught my attention because i have never read about anyones personal experience going to another country on a missions trip. especailly brazil. i had a friend from there a foreign exchange student 3 years ago and he showed us pictures and told stories about it. so its cool to read about people going there. i thought the paper was well written i would give it a 5. towards the end i thought the paragraph about vaccines was reptitive and confusing. i also thought towards the end that she was just trying to get 7 pages and dragging some things out to long. but other than that i really like it.

mid term paper

for the midterm paper i reallly didnt know what to write. the topic was not what i was expecting at all. i thought it was going to be about the beah book, and it was to a point but not really. it was more about ball state than anything. which i should of figured because what isnt here. i didnt write the basic 5 paragraph essay though thank god now reading that is not good. i just simply answered the questions that the promt asked probably not even in a good writing paper form. but i tried to tie in the book and personal experiences together thinking that would help me with some of the ideas and it did. but when thinking about project 4 i am hoping that i can branch off of those ideas some more and go a little more in depth with the community aspect of it. when i think of community i think if my neighborhood or town. i dont think of our english class as a community. which some people do and i can see that but thats not what c0mes to my mind.

common reader

For the new freshman a few books sounded interesting like close range: Wyoming stories. I like the western books about how it was to live in the west when there was no law. The stories can be so good and enticing that it keeps you wanting to read more and can be suspenseful with the Indians and storms and sickness. I think Into Thin Air would be awesome to read. It's not something I would just pick up and read but if I had the opportunity to read it like they will I would love it. I think it would be very interesting and also it's a first-hand account of what happened. I'm a sucker for those stories though. I think The Smashed Book would be great too. I love drunk storeies. They're the best. But I also think this book would be very informative to all people, especially incoming freshman who think college equals drinking, when it doesn't have to. I think Why Are All The Blacks Sitting Together would be ok. I am always interested in culture and ethnicities and how they interact and get along. I think it might bring people out of their own little world and they can see others and not be biased against them.

hate writing

The videos on why students hate writing I thought was very correct. Most of everything they said was in some way shape or form true. It take s a lot of time and academic writing is difficult, and students a lot of them time in high school didn’t have to write papers almost at all and haven’t been taught the basics or anything about it to make a good paper let alone college worthy paper. Writing on subjects that we don’t like or subjects that we have no interest in makes it a lot harder. We feel like there’s no time to do this stuff and when you don’t like it, it makes it worse. It’s like sitting through a 3 hour movie or longer you absolutely hate. When you think I don’t want to do this it makes it worse, because you psych yourself out of it and that just makes it harder to write. The other video I thought was ridiculous at first and didn’t get what was going on but after I watched for a minute it does explain ethos logos and pathos. And puts it into a different perspective I guess I could say.

It is really cool how we are reading this book and your father in law has gone there for a mission’s trip. It’s kind of ironic. I think those pictures were very interesting. And that he might have visited Beah’s village is really cool. The stories he told us were very interesting too. About the lady with the cokes and how the living was. With no electricity and running water, to me that sounds horrible maybe not the running water part that isn’t bad. But the electricity I would hate. I’ve been to the boundary waters in Minnesota. There is no electricity or running water there either so I can relate a little bit. Him going there to build a school that was probably destroyed in the next war I didn’t think about until Karen said that. It’s really cool to read a book about something true in another country, have that author come and talk about it, and then also have someone who has been there to help is awesome. We haven’t gotten a lot of different views of this country and the war. It has been very helpful in imagining what has happened.

beah

I think beah is an awesome writer. How he tells stories and include all the things he does and still stays right on topic. I feel like after reading the book I almost know him like I grew up with him. All the detail and stories he has in his book are put in there awesomely. How he used foreshadowing and jumped from year to year t different places, and also putting many short stories into 1 main idea. I really enjoyed reading it because you never knew what was going to happen next it constantly keeps you guessing which is really cool because it makes you want to read more and more. I hate saying its an awesome book knowing that it is a true story and all this really did happen. How the people where scarred by these events and killed is really a horrible thing that should not happen. But it did and thankfully someone came out to write about these things and not only educate us but help us become better writers ourselves. He wrote this book starting in the same class we are in. so it must be possible.

library

I kinda like going to the library, I thinks its fun to look at all the old books and old issues of magazines. The library in my town is not that big. It has maybe 10 shelves of books, I’m pretty sure that more people used it to rent movies than read the books in it. It didn’t have very many interesting books. Today’s library tour thing was pretty useful. I think it was good to do that especially because I have never been in it except for the tour I took in it on my high school visit. The stuff we learned will become good information to have in the upcoming years. There library here has a lot of stuff in it and will be very useful. I will probably go back and look at those sports illustrated issues from a long time ago. I think that would be cool to read.

art museum

At the art museum I had a pretty good time. I thought it was a good change from the class room to go somewhere else and have class for a day. The helmet mask that we looked at was interesting. I thought that its pretty interesting on that it was made from wood and could be worn on your head. But I lost interest in it real quick and was ready to go on to the next piece of art which I thought was really cool. It seemed disturbing that in the painting that actually happened. I cant imagine being burned alive just for the oil in your body? Defiantly not a good way to go. When we had to act out the art it was fun to be able to see it in a 3 dimensional way instead of just on canvas might change your view a little bit on paintings and see what the artist is imagining. The last set of paintings we looked at was very weird and I don’t get art that I honestly don’t think that some of that stuff is art. I think that paint that’s swirled around or thrown on a canvas is just that. But that’s my opinion.

beahs presentation

I thought Beahs presentation was awesome. He had a lot to say not only about the book but about life and school and hard work. I honestly thought it would be boring and all about the book. But it wasn’t, I really didn’t know that he didn’t want his book to be published or even that he thought of writing one for that reason. It was really nice to be able to see what he had to say about his experiences and how he threw humor into the mix of it even at its more than what I expected. I like how he talked about his uncle and his reasons for how hot water worked or the walk ways that the ground just moved. I also liked the stories about when he went to New York and had his own hotel and had electricity. We really do take that stuff for granted everything we have runs off gas or electricity when the power goes out nothing works and people are at a loss. When he talked about being in college in Ohio was cool I didn’t know if he has only see places like New York or in states like ours with not much. We can relate to him and its cool.

high school vs. college

College life so far has been excellent. I don’t think it will get better until next year when I have an apartment. When I was in high school it was a boring drag. The same people every day, it was a small school and it was getting really annoying. I didn’t really have to try at all. It was very easy, I could just show up to classes and get A’s and B’s. The tests were very easy I didn’t have to study at all. Now that I’m in college I am starting to believe that you really do have to study 2 hrs for every hour of class. But I’m getting used to it so it is not really a big deal anymore compared to the first 2 weeks. I like being in college so much it’s exactly how I thought it would be. I don’t spend any money here either except for the occasional 10 bucks on the weekend so I’m saving so much money here its amazing. The only thing that sucks is the sports teams this year. BSU has never really been good at sports except for last year. That really raised expectations for this year and there not doin so hot. Which sucks but it still doesn’t have a touch on high school. Its way better.

rubric and my level (for week of Sept. 2)

i think that my last paper i wrote in high school would be somehwhat ok yo turn into mrs. Nuebaur but not great. our english teacher did make us write 2 essays and tryed to make them college level. she wanted us to get used to writing in mla format and circle everyt little mistake we made to help us improve on our composition. then we wrote another one a few weeks later to see if we improved. so i think that helped improve my writing but we didnt have very good topics in my mind. it was hard to understand what she wanted so in the end it helped a little but not a whole lot. i think on the rubric i rate about a c for college level papers. i could use some improvement and for as much as i would hate to say it i think practice is how im gonna make it better but i hate writing papers. this class will definalty help me in writing and thinking of ways to write differently. so far this class hasnt been that bad either i dont mind having to get up and come so that will help in my writing i think. ha i hope

eng 101

I’d like to say that in high school I did not write a lot of papers. My schools English department wasn’t the greatest. We did not do much especially when it came to writing. So my goal for taking this course is to be able to write better and more efficiently. I want to be able to learn different types of writing styles and also have more confidence in my essays and papers by knowing how to and properly write effectively. I know these two courses will improve that for me and prepare me better not only for the rest of college but life in general.

When I write my papers I tend to either not hit the important topics enough or I write too much on one topic and not enough on the others which makes my papers kind of out of balance. I’ll get into writing about one thing and it ends up being most of the paper that I didn’t intend on doing. Making my papers lengthy while still remaining on topic and writing what the paper is supposed to be about is somewhat difficult from time to time too. I’m hoping this class will clean that up and make me a better writer for future classes.