Reading and Writing

As a reader I would say that my relationship with books is a positive one. I love to read, but I don’t think that I am reading as much now as I did when I was in high school. I would say my time management has a lot to do with that. 

As a writer I would say that my relationship with it has been refreshed. In high school I never had anyone there to correct me or my mistakes. So when I came to college and had to make tons of revisions to my papers it was kind of a shock to me, but in all that I have learned here in college I can honestly say I still love to write.

Before taking English 100 I can honestly say I read all the time. I was what my high school librarian called a book worm. Any new stories I was always the first to read them. I loved reading I had my specific genre though I love drama, and some mystery but I often get lost when it comes to historical biographies or action books.

I wrote a lot before taking English 100 I kept a journal. I still do actually I’d say that writing in it helps me to focus more on my academic writings as well. It helps me not to ramble about a million topics.

My outlook on both reading and writing has changed in the past three months. I’d say that my concepts on them month have caused me to change. I think that my reading skills have developed and I can actually comprehend what I am reading. My writing skills have developed I think I am a better writer. I not the greatest , I am progressing towards something better than I am now.

Becoming Educated review questions

My early expectations for my college courses are to be some what successful.  I expected life to be easy free spirited and everyone to be super friendly and happy because they are of course in college. My reality was that college is so fucking hard, its stressful, it tiring, and its sad because I think every weekend I have been here I have wanted to go home. I miss my family, and I don’t think I ever thought I would say that because at home I was so ready to leave and never come back. College is so expensive; I don’t think I have had money since the second week. It’s been stressful because I have never gone without a job. I can honestly say that no Jordan’s college experience and mine are nothing alike I think the only thing we have in common is we are both African American females trying to make it in, what society calls a mans field of study, I don’t think that I have ever had to encounter male superiority, or men who think they are superior. I like the fact that the university is semi small and able to equip all the student here.

interview questions

What do you remember most about your public school experience?

Who would you say influenced you the most to be who you are today?

From your experiences what would you say the “lesson learned” was?

What were your biggest obstacles as a student in public school? In College?

Do you have any regrets?

I would ask these questions to my sister, Charrissa, because these would be questions that would most likely bring out deeper answers. Which is what i would need to write my paper. I just feel like these questions would open up a door for good stories and leave me room to write an interesting paper.

Casa

In my family “cautionary tales” are told often. I think they are my most favorite part of the holidays.  My Great Grandma is our family’s ‘mama’ she knows every story so well. There is one story I remember, I think I remember it most because it is my favorite… when my grandmother was a teenager she never really got to date, her mother taught her to be conservative, and to always respect herself. Well my great grandma got the bright idea to have a secret relationship, with a man who was two to three years older than her. In her mind she didn’t think that her mother knew. So my great grandmother got the bright idea that she would run away with this man. Her mother constantly, reminding her “you are a lady, and all men are animals using you for now only to take something else from another willing party later.” My Great Grandmother had got up the courage to pack up all her clothes and move out of her mother’s house at the young age of sixteen. She arrived at her boyfriend’s house to find him in the company of another woman, but not just any woman, but my Great Grandmother’s cousin. She never told her mother that she moved out. She just went home placed her clothes neatly back into her closet and pretended that it never happened.  The story is told to my family to assure the younger girls that even when we think we know just a little bit more than our parents we still should listen because they know more than we do and in the long run it can save us from heartbreak later. I too like my great grandmother thought I could move out, but in my case I did. I ended up learning the same lesson two years after I moved in only I didn’t listen to my mother’s cautioning voice.

Inglewood: My Hometown

I grew up in California. To be specific I lived in Inglewood. I loved it; many people would call it the ghetto, the hood, or the Wood. To me it was home, Irving drive is the place where I would call my home. Like Maya Angelou I at one point was ashamed. My feelings of being ashamed came from the people who were associated with the city, and what the city was known for. Many people say nothing good could possibly come from Inglewood, and that alone was a big reason for me being ashamed. Inglewood is known for drugs, hookers, fights, shootings, and gangs. When I lived there it was a way of life everybody does drugs, or drinks it’s just what you do in “The Wood”. It wasn’t until I moved away that I became ashamed. Like in “Sister Flowers” I am known to almost everyone to be the nice, respectable, wholesome girl. My thought was how they would look at me if they knew that I was from Inglewood: the hood. Like Maya, I had someone to teach me that that really didn’t matter. That person was my sister, Charrissa, she taught me to be proud of where I came from because that is the only thing in life that I have to be proud of. She taught me to look at it in a different perspective “The people that I knew in Inglewood are still there doing the same things, and you are gone doing different things to better your life. It’s not that I am ashamed of those people because I love them for being them and not changing, just like they love me for being me, and getting out of there.” My home will forever be 14590 Irving drive Inglewood, CA, but just because I don’t live the way the people in Inglewood do doesn’t make me ashamed of them I just love them for who they are and what they taught me with the time I had with them.

Task two

Why are you interested in these subjects?

I am interested in this subject because she is first my sister, and second she is my role model. I have admired her since I was a little girl; she’s very strong and independent and handles business and education well.

What makes him/her interesting and unique?

My sister was here at MO West in her sophomore year she did something that my family frowned upon: she got pregnant, and she wasn’t married. In spite of everything my family and others said about her she made it. She graduated and still had a family.

What sort of questions would you ask and why?

I would ask her first what was your out take on school?

Where did you attend school?

What was your main focus in high school?

How did that focus change when you got to college?

Do you have any experiences that you would change?

Why did you pick the college you did?

Did your major ever change?

What sort of problems do you think may arise for Task Two?

Since I know some of my sister’s story already I think this task two paper could be very emotional.

What do you anticipate? Why?

I anticipate a good outcome, I’m very optimistic at this point anything is possible and I hope to do well.

What questions do you have for Task Two?

I have many but the only logical answer would be trial and error.

Self-Evaluation

What is the thesis for your paper?

The thesis of my paper is: I will no longer have the supporting grandparents that I have come to grow so fond of: Devon Simmons, Carly Simmons, and Richard Paige in my life, and I will be nothing more than a blank face.

List the main points you make in your paper.

 The relationships that I had with my grandparents, the lessons they taught me, and what they meant to me are the main points that I try to stress in my paper.

What was the most helpful advice you received from your peer evaluation?

The most helpful advice I got from my peer review was that even though my paper was extremely too long I stressed my point and got some help with grammatical errors and I got help with my thesis.

What was the most helpful information you received in class for your paper?

Umm… that’s really though because I didn’t feel helped in class I got more help when the feedback was personal.

How many drafts of this paper do you think you wrote and how/when did you write them? For example, did you compose at the keyboard, did you write lots of notes to yourself, did you pre-write or outline, did you write in small chunks of time or sit down and produce an entire draft at one sitting?

For this paper I wrote about four drafts, I wrote a very horrible draft the first week we had the paper, my draft really never came together until the weekend before it was due. There was the draft that I turned in, then I sent a revised copy of that draft to my mother, and then the final copy was my last. Now that I have read through it a million times I kind of wish I had had one more draft.

What would you do differently with this paper to make it more effectively, or what did you try to do that you just don’t think you got a good handle on?

The only thing I would do differently with this draft is try to manage my time more effectively; the amount of time outside of class was very good I just think I could have made my paper just a little bit better. The thing that I didn’t get a good handle on is the length, my over descriptiveness killed me I think in this paper; some parts I felt lacked and others I felt were over explained.

What are most pleased with about this paper?

I was pleased most about when I wrote this paper is my emotions after I was finished. I’ve never once in my life been able to talk about the year 2007 without tears welling up in my eyes, but after I wrote this paper I was in a way relieved that I had actually somewhere in the past three years excepted their deaths, and moved on.

Peer Review discussion

What would you like to see changed?

How would you like for it to be done?

Is there too much time in class that is devoted to peer review?

When it came to Peer reviews I liked the way we approached our papers because getting different peers opinions about our own papers is a plus, but what I didn’t like was the amount of time given to review each paper, and that my peers didn’t really write down or give back any thoughts as to what I needed to improve. In the future I would like to just have extra time to really read the papers and not just skim through and look at grammatical errors… maybe a little more than one peer review would help. After, we receive feedback from the professor it would be nice for someone else to review it before we turned in a final draft. I feel like our process is rushed. I disagree that we have too much time in class I feel that the time that we do have in class is very limited and I sometimes feel rushed to complete just one paper.

For the most part I liked the peer reviews. I thought that it was different because in high school my teacher would always hand us papers that had no relevance to the papers we were writing and make us review those and gave us the option to review our peers papers outside of class. So the in class review is new to me I like the process I just wish we had more time.

"On becoming a Chicano"

After reading “On Becoming a Chicano” by Richard Rodriguez I went to sleep. When I awoke this morning I looked in the mirror and asked myself who am I. What do I call myself? I didn’t come up with my own answer so I called my mother and asked her what she thought of me… her reply was “you’re my daughter, quiet, strong, stubborn, meek, gentle, and sweet.” I thought about it but I wasn’t sure if I agreed so I called my sister and she replied “you’re smart, funny, easy going, strong willed, perfectionist, my sister, your loving, too nice, and easy to get along with.” I still wasn’t sure if that’s what I was because my family has known me forever so I asked my newest friends Erika and Melanie and they’re reply was “ nice, good friend, trustworthy, loyal, strong, shy, stubborn, and very content.”


So after evaluating everything they said I did a self evaluation. I never look at myself in the way of race because I am so many things I am Samoan, Mexican, African American, and Caucasian. I never really talk about my race much because there are so many parts about it that still confuse me.

So when I look at me I see a woman who is strong because she has been through so much, an independent person, smart educated person, sweet but sometimes way too nice, and I see that I can be stubborn.

In my life I have faced many struggles which include issues with the languages in California.

My issue per say wasn’t with learning English it was learning Spanish. Most of my friends in California are Mexican, Latin, or Chicano. They had trouble with English and I had trouble understanding them. So I developed this, so I thought, unfaultable plan to learn Spanish. I was a quick learn at sixteen, and I went just about everywhere with them we would walk into small stores and people would turn their noses up at us because they would speak Spanish and I would be trying to understand and respond back in Spanish.

I also had African American friends who would call me the trader because I would try to learn Spanish, they would talk about me calling me a phony, they called me names like, Senorita Fernandez, all because I want to better my understand.

As a nineteen year old woman who now lives in Missouri I look back on those days in California and wish that I had learned more from my Spanish speaking friends. I can say causal greetings in Spanish and start a conversation, and understand just about anything but I can never form the words to reply in Spanish. I think that “On Becoming a Chicano” is an eye opener for me because even though Rodriguez faced ridicule he still became a man who he today still respects.

How it Feels to be Colored Me

Zora Neale Hurston is a black woman who lived in an all black town until she was thirteen and never knew she was any different than anybody else until she moved to a town in the heart of the south, even though slavery is over people still referred to African Americans as the colored people or still thought of them as less superior.


The thesis would be the first sentence in the essay “ I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only negro in the united states whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”

As this essay progress I love the way Hurston talks about how she became colored, because first no one just becomes colored and no one just wakes up colored. We are born who we are Hurston already knows she’s African American but to come into the realization that racism and discrimination is still present brings you into the knowledge that “ Yes, I am colored.”

Hurston understands that yes she is the granddaughter of slaves, but she says that was sixty some years ago she’s moved on that damage is already done, and we as a race are progressing from it. It relates to the history of slavery and how the slaves and their future generations have progressed from it.

Hurston’s outlook on her race is that of I never really realize my race until I am faced with it. I would say I agree because I think of myself as no different from anybody else in this would I only start to think different when I am faced with different words of aggression.

Rite of Passage

Anthony Brandt is of course the author, but to me he is just a boy between the ages eleven and fourteen who has just begun to develop and start puberty. I can sympathize with him because he is facing something that could remarkably affect his whole life. It changes the way a person would look at old age and death.


Right vs. rite is something I had trouble with, but now I fully understand now that I have read this for the third time. Right is something we teach for example this is the right way to do something. So right would sort of be an action. A rite is something that it is granted unto you with the becoming of age.

In the country that we live in we have many rites that are granted to us with the becoming of age. For instance at twenty one you are granted the rite to drink, the rite to drive, the rite to be an adult those would have to be a small number of rites we have here in America.

The thesis for this passage would be “Some things that happen to us can’t be borne, with paradoxical result that we carry them on our backs the rest of our lives.”

Brandt’s mother before

Strong, loving, caring , nurturing, bold, family oriented, not self absorbed, brave for her admiration to want to care for her mother, honest when she knew she could care for her mother, and soft spoken like her name, bunny.

As I self evaluate myself I wonder what I will initially write about for this assignment. Many people may find it easy to find something to write about, but for me I continue to draw a blank. I look into the mirror every day and wonder what the world thinks of me, and essentially I draw the same conclusion day in and day out I honestly don’t give a damn any more. I have oh so many things on my mind at this point, the honest fact that I feel like crap right now, the oh so many ideas I have for my paper, and the fact that I have typed this same self evaluation six times in the past three days.


I have an idea and some supporting ideas for this paper. I think I want to write about the year thousand seven and the many highs and lows I faced that year. In that year I lost three grandparents who made up a very sufficient part of my life, and the same year it seemed like all my dreams were finally coming true. That year was very strange for me I started the year out very different it was the year I began to party more, I had developed a new love for the sport of boxing, I gain one hundred pounds in three months all for something I thought I loved. I lost my fraternal grandfather who was my rock which then caused me to essentially strive harder in my fighting, I then lost my grandmother, who was my number one fan in everything I did, I rebelled against my family because I though they didn’t believe in my dream, and which ended in the lost of my maternal grandfather. In the end which made me feel like I had lost everything.

Writing this paper about that topic will be very hard for me because this will be the first time I have ever faced this reality in words and there for on paper. It has been three years and I still find it hard to believe that in all actuality this really did happen and it happened to me.

As a thesis for this paper I will have to think a little more about before I can actually form it to words because right now I just have so much I want to say about this topic.

With this paper I hope to develop and enhance some of the skills I know I already have. With this paper I just hope to be able to read and fully process the events that I want to write about without becoming too emotional.

Introductory Letter

          My name is Samantha Johnson, I am nineteen years old. I will be honest I am scared as hell about this whole new experience of college. I mean I would guess that everyone is pretty afraid. I am an incoming freshman my major is Physical Therapy/ Biology. Many people just assume that I am really smart. I can agree that I am pretty smart and I can grasp on to almost any topic really easy. As you are asking us to explain what are our weaknesses and strong points as a reader and a writer.

I would have to say that as a reader I can stand strong and annunciate my words and pronounce almost any word even if it is the first time I have seen it, but when it comes to the actual comprehending what I am reading I am what you would call illiterate. I can read but when it comes to comprehending what I have read I’m not so good at. Don’t get me wrong I love to read and I can give you an analysis about almost any book I have read. But when it comes to short works and essays that’s where I began to pose a problem. I’ve loved to read since I was in kindergarten, I love the way books could capture my attention and make all my problems seem so small. At one point I wanted to be a writer, because I thought I love the way the stories just flow and move so freely and travel to the next issue so smoothly, but as I tried so hard to do what my favorite authors did I realized that I had a problem. I could not make a story flow freely or even a paper.

As a writer I am what you would call more of a freelance. I love to write but only about things that I care about. I really am not good at formatting and I never really grasped the citation process. I will be honest my high school English teacher was very good but she never took the time to actually teach my senior class the process of citation she just assumed that we all already knew. So when we did write a paper and we all failed we figured that she would then eventually go over it, but she didn’t and her remarks were “you will eventually learn it in college.” So as a high school senior I was just skimming the surface when it came down to the actually English mechanics, and writing strategies. I knew that I didn’t know them and honestly at this point and time I still don’t know them very well, but I know that and I am trying to work on it.

So I am not very strong at reading or writing I know some basics and im just looking to enhance and broaden those skills.