“How have you experienced learning through your own writing? Write an essay in which you identify two different learning moments that happened for you through writing. Be sure to quote yourself (and link to the quote where it appears on the blog, if possible.) For each moment you choose, explain how this represents learning to you, and define or categorize the learning. What can you conclude about the relationship between writing and learning?”
- Does the learning content have to be explicitly from the blog? or can it be from our other articles of writing from the school year?
- Can we use writing samples from other classes that may contribute or be used to identify supposed learning moments?
- Can we describe or utilize previous writings from BEFORE the class and use them to compare with our current selves? Or utilize past learning moments that we have experienced through writing that might have occurred before the class began?
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For the first essay, are we able to use our writing from another class and talk about how it helped us learn that material as well?
‘Learning’ itself seems like such a vague term as used in the first prompt of the midterm portfolio reflective essay. “Experienced learning,” “learning moments,” “how this represents learning,” and “define and categorize the learning” are all used in the same paragraph and paint what learning is to be some concept open to interpretation. If this is the case, and we should in fact explore what learning means to us through writing an essay, then that’s good enough of an answer to me. If not, could the explanation of what we should really include in the essay be narrowed down a bit?
I found it interesting how the slave jail was so close to the main house and hotel/tavern. It seems almost psychopathic for people to be enjoying themselves at the tavern or relaxing in the house knowing the horrible conditions the slaves are living in only a few feet away. How could the white slave owners not have a shred of humanity even as the slaves were suffering in Lumpkin’s Jail? The more we learn about Richmond’s history and the history of slavery in this country, the more I’m starting to see that slavery was not just a system to provide labor. It was a system for white people to express their complete hatred for black people.
Question:
- For the first prompt, are there any parameters for what we can say we learned through writing? Does it have to be something we learned about writing itself or can it be anything?
- How long should our essays be?
I have a couple questions about the midterm portfolio. Do we have to write the two essays on two separate documents, or can we squish it all into one document? Also, how would we separate the two essays if it is all in one document? My last question is if we have to do in-text citations if we’re just quoting ourselves.
My questions about the midterm portfolio are:
- How long should the two reflective essays be?
- How should we “quote ourselves”? Or should be add a quote from our writing and say how we would change it?
One question I have about our Midterm Portfolio essay is how much summary we should have. For prompt two, should we recount a summary of the whole story we are discussing, or should we just talk about certain points that are the most important to our essay?
One thing that stood out to me while working on the annotated bibliography assignment was the importance of picking an interesting topic. I chose the topic of the burial ground for African-Americans, which was absolutely fascinating to me from the beginning! In my research for my sources, I found that it felt less like an assignment and more like a personal passion project. (Although, writing the annotated bibliography did feel like an assignment – albeit a pretty cool one.) I think we might be visiting the burial ground in our field trip tomorrow, which would be so cool to see in person. In my research, I found out that the burial ground had been destroyed and developed into a parking lot, and there were some notes on attempts to reclaim the land, but they didn’t mention if the efforts were successful (or fully realized – my peer-reviewed sources were both published within the last three years).
When first starting the annotated bibliography assignment I was unsure of what I wanted to focus on from RIH. When beginning my search I found it hard to pinpoint a primary source that I could really dive into. My first few choices were hard to locate on line and the library didn’t have copies of some of the books I would need, so I had to do even more digging. But when I finally found what I wanted to work on it was a lot easier to start building my bibliography. After class on Thursday I went through my resources trying to find secondary sources that would match with my primary one. This also took a little long because some of the sources were not available online, or I could not find information about the author(s). Thankfully, I did finally find two academic peer-reviewed sources that aligned with my research question and I was able to pull the whole assignment together. Overall, there were some rough patches while trying to find a topic and primary source and making sure there were enough secondary sources, but once things started to flow it was much easier to pull ideas together.