English 111 Reflection

It’s the end of the course and I can honestly say that I enjoyed English 111. It was not that I didn’t think that I would, but that I thought I would get a boring teacher who wore tweed jackets and sounded like Ben Stein. I thought every assignment would be boring and forced upon the students, us dragging ourselves into class, dreading the minute our instructor would walk through the door. It wasn’t like that.
Our assignments were challenging more to our creativity than our logic. We had to figure out how to take what we would learn and infuse it with our different creative views and witty sarcastic natures. It was the first time I had ever been in a class where most of the people were sarcastic people, including Paul Gaspero, the instructor.
I can not choose an absolute favorite assignment, but the one that I put most of myself in, the one that had most of my personality was the "What You Believe" paper. It allowed me to think about what made me who I was, what values had been etched into my soul. It was something that could make me stand out with a voice I had only used in journals or when I was out with friends. It allowed me to be me.
My second favorite was the "Rhetorical Analysis" because, though I don’t plan on ever running into my classmates outside of school, the ones who reviewed my work got a look at who I was behind the make-up and smiling face. I realized that smiling was my cover for pain and just recently learned of other girls doing the same thing because they’re hiding just like I was. The assignment allowed me to open and honest about why I am the way that I am. It allowed me to talk about things that most believe would take years to get over, but not me. I grew from this paper, realizing what things I had forgiven people for and what still hurt me to some extent.
The assignments I hated were the "Diagnostic Essay" and the "Revised Diagnostic Essay" because when I write like my paper is a story, I don’t like maximum word counts. To me it hinders the creative flow, though there are sentences that can be cut, sometimes the paper can lose some of its emotional pull or sensory because it was above the word count. I write drafts of the same book, finding different ways to say things, but I don’t have a set word count. When writing a story, one just has to write and see where it takes them. Then they can start cutting out parts. With me, sometimes in these two essays, it was as if I were murdering my paper because I could not allow it to grow as much as I knew it needed to.
Also, I hated the Bruce Springsteen documentary. I know it was about his creative process, but we seemed to use him as an example more than anyone. Sometimes I wanted more examples, someone aside from our instructor’s personal views that we could take notes about.
This course is not a soul searching course nor is it about becoming a rock star. The work is real and the deadlines are serious. It does prepare one for the actual world because even if something is late, it has to be done. Like, even if someone says they’re sorry years after the incident, it still needs to be said. Even if someone doesn’t finish the analytical report, it still needs to be done. It is just common sense and a far way from high school English classes.
This class wasn’t for everyone which explained why some dropped it. It’s a class that doesn’t take mediocre work or slackers. If someone can’t handle real deadlines and real consequences, but just want to coast by through life, this isn’t the class for them. For someone who wants a challenge, who wants to be pushed, and to have fun in the process, this is a class I would recommend because the classes that can change one’s outlook creatively and logically are the ones that really matter. Otherwise, it’s just a class on someone’s schedule.