Class has been busy, and with the completing of our last major presentation
assignment, and just before the beginning of our magazine project, it seemed
like a good point to look back and see how this class has shaped up so far.
English 102 started out as a class of decent size, it soon started
shrinking, and after our first essay assignment, past October 9th which was our
last day to drop, the class had equalized its self with only a core of upper
class men remaining. Being a freshmen, I cannot deny that this was quite
intimidating for me, I was often left feeling like I’m not ready to handle such
a speaking and presentation oriented course at this point of my education.
Although I've always enjoyed debate, and consider myself somebody that is very
much in touch with today’s global issues, the individual part to this course,
like preparing effective high level presentations had me struggling. My first
essay left me very disappointed, as even though I worked considerably long on
writing it, it still never came together and felt incoherent to me. This was
also very apparent in my confidence when presenting my LRRH comparison. After
this project, I was confused and frustrated to an extent, as I felt that I just
was not able to produce quality work on this topic even though I worked much
longer on this presentation than usual. This left me motivated to do better
next time on one hand, but also intimidated, as the overall quality of
presentations given in class was very high from what I could tell, and
presenters like Joseph, Gwyn and Matt left me questioning myself in whether I
would ever be able to produce something with that level of quality and
thoughtfulness. Luckily I was not facing this trouble in my participation in
group discussion, the generally high level of education and understanding that
our whole class often displayed during our discussions was impressive and had
me very eager to join in on any topic at hand. This was my favorite part to
this class, the fact that we would be able to reach a very high level of
analytical and interpretational understanding of any given discussion, and
always left us short for time in our detailed perspectives of the topic. My
greatest achievements so far would have to be my gaining in confidence when it
comes to presentation skills, I feel that although I am far from perfect, I
managed to improve and now feel as though I can connect with an audience better
than before. I also feel that our rigorous attempts to uncover what lies
beneath any given subtlety has allowed me to be generally much more analytical
when it comes to televised and other forms of media, I constantly find myself
interpreting even the most undertone commercials and clips, something I really didn’t
do before taking this course.
With that said, although the course has not ended, and my grade is probably
far from what I would like it to be, I still feel a good sense of
accomplishment, and it’s easy for me to say that English 102 was by no means a
waste of my time, teaching me many new analytical and presentation concepts.
No comments:
Post a Comment