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Richard Gutierrez

Professor Beadle

English 115

9 May 2019

Reflection

Coming into this class I already knew what to expect. I had taken this class in the

previous semester but i had not passed. I was never worried about my english class coming into

college because throughout high school I had always earned A’s on my papers. I faced a lot of

challenges my first semester of college, it was one of the roughest times of my life. I had moved

away from my home to attend CSUN, as well as having no connection in the city or any job I

found myself becoming desperate. These emotions quickly spilled into my school life, and my

academic success turned into failure.

When I started this class I was confident that I was more than capable to earn an A. I still

do believe that but with such a young mind I had always pushed school work till the last minute.

My semester did not start off strong in this class. Project space proved to be an easy essay to

write having to only use evidence from the provided articles. I had set a goal to read all the text

and analyze it so my comprehension can be at a level to discuss these article in a professional

manner. The first two articles were pretty brief and had a clear message sent across. When it

came to the third article it was so compacted with information that I didn't want to read and

analyze all of it, I only need a few pieces of evidence for my argument. Skipping over the text in

the last article is what really weakend my essay. I had only been able to vaguely state what the

author was arguing for because I didn't read the whole text. The paper wasn't strong in

clarification of my argument but when i went to revise it I structured it better.

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Realizing my mistakes, I wanted to start Project Text strong. When I saw it was based of

a book the first thing I did was go to the library to see if they had The Metamorphosis so i could

check it out. They informed me that the book was not available due to the fact that it was

misplaced from its original spot on the shelf and no one could find it. I was not able to get the

book in time and i missed a couple of the exercises leading up to the essay. I was thankfully able

to grab a hold of a copy of the book online. And I used that text as the primary source for my

essay. I believed it to be one of my better essays, with a proper recurring theme. In this essay I

was limited on time due to my work, school life, involvement, and because I did acquire the text

late. One of my strengths in this essay was my counter argument and refutation. I felt like that

paragraph had the best flow and the best clarification. The book gave many examples as to why

its allegory was isolation, so I made that my theme and argued against the allegory being about

the holocaust. Over all the clarification was blurry, and I only had a couple of real evidence that

established my argument. I wanted to keep improving so for my next essay I wanted to focus on

my structure from sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph.

Starting Project Media I was expecting another reading based of political figures and

their action on social media and the news. That is what I was assigned last semester during our

third project. I was quickly delighted when it was announce that our primary evidence would be

a movie. I am a movie fanatic and I had already seen a godzilla film and was familiar with his

context. The film alone was very interesting, I had never seen a film from that time and seeing

the culture of its time fascinated me. This was my last essay for this class and I wanted to go all

out in order to boost my grade. I started of by completing all exercises and creating an essay

outline. We watched the movie during class and I made sure I absorbed all the information I

could because I would not have access to the film at home. I first had to choose an argument for
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my essay and I thought it would be simplest to argue that the movie is symbolically reflecting

events from the H-bomb testings and how japan viewed the United States. The movie had

multiple sources of evidence that were incorporated into my essay. I did not only want to stick to

the original movie, I thought bringing evidence from other films Godzilla has appeared in would

create a stronger credibility as well as a better relation to current day society. All my arguments

had valid evidence to support and I created each paragraph to structure off eachother. I really

love my counter argument and refutation because it proves that Godzilla is not a monster ending

my essay on a high note.

Overall I have learned a lot through this course and hope to keep improving. My essays

have improve after one another and I aspire to be a better writer. I wish I did learn more

definitions and structure of sentences/paragraphs since this is a course intended for incoming

freshman. Most of what was being taught in the begging of the class having to do with rhetoric

blew right through my mind. I had no understanding or clarification of those first couple lessons.

My classmates all seemed like they were isolating themselves from each other which is usual in

freshman and in courses that don't really encourage group work. I was losing my grade so

starting April I changed my work ethic around in every class. I had been focused everyday for

the last two months trying to make myself into a better person emotionally , mentally, and

academically and I really hope that shows. Thank you for teaching this course.