15) Student Choice: 500 words or 5-minute video. You author content that includes a title, category, and a reflection about your experiences in this class. Consider specific assignments, specific readings/films, specific conversations, and/or specific processes that helped you learn and grow. On the scale of one to ten, I would give this English Composition I by Professor Mangini to ten. There are few reasons why. “College Level” English made me nervous and worry if I could catch up the course as English is my second language. At the first day of class, I was surprised because the classroom is full of computers unlike other traditional classes! We did not need any textbook for this course but instead he provided his own digital portfolio as a source for this course. He also allowed us to build our own digital portfolios for the entire semester. On the portfolio, we posted blogs as our informal assignments, designed our pages, and gave comments on each other blogs. I think it is really innovative approach to get more attention from the students. Moreover, every classes were meaningful, and we never got bored. This is because we were in the process of writing. At first two or three weeks, he gave multiple short texts about writing process to read while other classes got one thick book to read. From the multiple texts, we could see all the good writers made “shitty” drafts before finals. Thus, instead of handing in the assignment and getting the grades back, we reviewed more drafts which developed our writing process.
Once we got the flow of this course, we started working on life choice: making connection. Every week, we read a short story about life choice and discussed it in the class. After getting the knowledge from the assignments, we were asked to recall the time when we made major decisions and put them into our informal assignments. Finally, it came the time to write a formal assignment, “Life Choice Memoir”. Since we had already got the rhythm of writing process, it was not that difficult to do a formal assignment. Plus, he encouraged us to revise more drafts as we all knew that the more we revise our work, the better drafts we will get. Besides, we scheduled one to one conference to discuss about the assignments and give helpful comments for individuals. We also watched “Where to Invade Next" documentary, summarized the film, made short arguments, searched the relevant sources and coauthored the titles for the research paper. This approach changed my perspective on research paper. I thought writing a research paper is a scary dream. But since we had already got what we needed for the paper, all we had to do was following the guide line of how to write the thesis statement and research paper structure provided by our Professor Mangini. How convenience it was! All other teachers from the English classes I had taken before never gave the detailed explanation and lecture about the research paper. Furthermore, he also provided the game shows and gave the meaningful prizes like extending the due dates or eliminating some blog posts in the class. This was a wonderful part of this class. To conclude, this English Composition I by Professor Mangini gave the meaningful time and experiences that I can apply them in the future. Again, I would recommend all the students to take this class.
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Zun Phyu ThantOn this blog, I will explore concepts in my English class and the world. Archives
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