Reflection Letter

           It has always been a struggle for me to describe myself when asked. I’m not sure exactly why this is, perhaps it’s because I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging or “tooting my own horn.” As I get older, I realize that this should be one of the easiest things I should be able to do. I am myself, so why is this so hard? I am a person who is constantly changing and trying to better myself day after day. I have been through so much in my life, so many highs and unfortunately so many lows. But these are things everybody as a human being goes through. It’s part of life. When I was young, I considered myself somewhat shy, but as I grew older, I broke out of that mold and became more open and sociable and began to take on new activities and hobbies. Beginning at a fairly young age, my father got me involved in quarter-midget sprint car racing. This was a hobby that I grew to love, year after year until I was about fourteen. At that age, I kind of grew out of my passion for racing and moved in to my high school life. I had a lot of friends in school and started to party a lot. Drinking on the weekends, smoking pot, and basically being hell on wheels for my parents – except these weren’t the wheels on my race car anymore! I have always considered myself smart, with a good head on my shoulders, but I definitely liked to have fun, however I was able to maintain good grades throughout all of this. My senior year of high school, my boyfriend I had at the time and I became addicted to pain killers. This was a journey that lasted well over a year and was a struggle for me to beat. However, after the breakup of my boyfriend and I, I decided it was time to quite screwing around and just do it. By no means, was it easy – but I beat an addiction, that as some of the lowest points of it, I never thought I would. I was one of the lucky ones, I didn’t require rehab – I was strong enough to do it on my own with the proper support of my friends and family around me. I never touched those painkillers again and this is something I take great pride in. Through all of these mistakes that I made, I learned a lot about myself. I had every opportunity to go to a 4 year college out of high school, but because of life I fell into those few years, that wasn’t a priority at the time. After I got clean, I realized I had a passion for helping people and it was then that I decided to go to Everest College to get an education to become a Medical Assistant. It was 8 long, hard months of school but I graduated and was on the Dean’s list most of the months I was there. This is an accomplishment that I am very proud of. Immediately following my graduation from Everest, I was hired on as a Medical Assistant at Everett Clinic and have remained at that job for the last three years. After working there for some time, the doctors I worked for noticed that I was a hard worker and took pride in the work I did and gave me the opportunity to work as a casting technician. I immediately accepted their proposal to not only work as an MA, but also as a casting technician.  I was very proud that I was given this opportunity and a nice raise came with it. Over the course of working for The Everett Clinic, I realized I’d like to pursue my education with the possibility of becoming a registered nurse and recently applied for some classes at Everett Community College to begin some of my prerequisites for the more difficult classes that relate to my career field of choice. So here I am, in English 101.


            English was never my strong suit and was definitely not my favorite of the classes I took in high school; in fact, it was one of my least. I was not looking forward to taking English 101, but now, as I work on the final assignments, I look back and realize it has not been so bad after all. I have enjoyed the way assignments were presented to us and like how it involved reading essays from the book. I’ve actually read many more essays than what were required, because there were so many interesting ones to read. Earlier, when I said it was difficult to define myself, I believe taking this class has made that easier because we worked so much with Identity, Community and Traditions. These are all topics that define who we are as individuals. The first essay we did was on Identity, and while I struggled with this, it really made me think about things I had not thought about before and look at them with different perspectives. After writing the assignment, which I believed at the time was an A+ paper, I received my grade and teachers notes, and now that I’ve completed all of the other essays and have grown as a writer, I can see so many changes that I could’ve made to it and a boat load of new material I could write into it. But like so many other things in life, we grow and progress and it takes time for us to learn new skills and become better at different things. I believe I demonstrated the most critical thinking in this paper.  The second essay I wrote was on Community. I was not sure about this topic as I did not understand what community really was and even when I looked up the definition, it was still very broad. After being given the selection of movies to choose from, I decided to go with one that I normally would not have, hoping to break out of my shell yet again, and possibly learn something additional by doing this. I’m very glad I chose the movie “District 9,” because it opened up my mind a great deal and really did help me understand the meaning behind community and that there are so many different ideas and aspects of one. This movie showed how human beings can treat one another as well as what they consider “outsiders.” It helped me understand that communities are not always accepting of one another and that often times, people search their entire lives to find a community in which they feel accepted. It made me feel blessed that I am a part of a community that I am comfortable in and knowing that I try my very hardest to treat everyone with the same respect I would like to be treated with. I was so surprised that a movie full of special effects and science fiction could have such a strong story built into it; I would have never expected that if I judged the movie by its cover. I definitely feel as though I was able to improve this paper with the help of the peer-edit, as well. Next came Traditions, at this point I had began to feel I had grown significantly as a writer and that I would earn my best grade yet on this paper, but after reading the essays on this topic, I realized that there are so many things that could be considered traditions – that really it was open ended as to what I wrote about. I decide to go with a tradition that has been a passion of my families for as long as I remember – movie night. After creating a thesis that I believe was arguable, I wrote what I considered my best paper of all of them, and was able to write four pages about how a modern innovation such as instant streaming or downloads of movies has positively enhanced our movie nights. While It has positively enhanced ours, I argued both sides, and talked about how it could negatively affect it as well. I had a good time writing this paper, and was very proud to not use the word “I” or “You” throughout the entire paper, and while this was challenging, I could now certainly see how this creates a better paper for a person to read. It flows much easier.


            While the essays were a huge part of English 101, I feel I learned an exceptional amount from our on-going discussion boards and blogs. This was an area in which we were allowed to be more open and expressive and give our opinions about a variety of things, and pose questions as well. I consider myself very open minded, so it was easy for me to read everyone’s views and opinions and accept them, whether I agreed with them or not, and give proper feedback and responses to each individual. Our class had a lot of unique people in it and this made for some awesome discussions week after week. I learned a lot listening and responding to all of the different topics each week and it was awesome to be able to do this on such a personal level. It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone without ever actually having met them or seen them in person. I also enjoyed the blog postings we took place in. This was something that also done at such a personal level and allowed us to be creative in what we wrote about and I often wrote about things that mattered to me. Of the blogs, my favorite was the “What’s In Your Wallet” topic, and it was interesting to look at it from the perspective of someone else looking into it and judging you and making assumptions. It really made me realize that this is something can be done so easily be outer appearances and by not getting to know something or someone. With the essays, blogs and discussion boards, this English 101 class turned out to be a lot more enjoyable than I imagined it to be, and I learned so much from it by doing such a variety of different works.


            Now as I near the completion of English 101, I have been putting together my e-portfolio, while this has been a daunting and time consuming task to say the least; it is also fun to look back at everything I’ve done. I’ve been reading all of the writings I’ve done and it’s interesting to look at the progress I’ve made as writer just over these few short months. As I complete this reflection letter to include in my e-portfolio it really makes me appreciate taking this class as it has really opened my mind about many subjects I might not think about too often. It has given me a clear understanding of Identity, Community and Tradition and has given me the opportunity to learn about and maintain a blog as well as gather feedback and suggestions from the other peers in my class and has helped me grow as a writer, overall. I put a lot of time and effort in to the pieces I’ve created and take pride in presenting them in the e-portfolio.