Luis Batista
Self Assessment Draft
As a student forced to learn English after migrating to America, I have always had a sour taste in my mouth when doing English work. I struggled repetitively to learn Standard English throughout my childhood; things were just not clicking well, and I was too used to reading and writing in Spanish. One of the main issues was the topics at hand. Still, unlike most English classes I’ve had, Professor Andrew Heerah’s English 210 class had very intriguing and important topics we wrote about.
During phase one, I was assigned to write an argumentative essay on Standard English and if it should be the grading metric for English classes. Unlike most people, I wanted to challenge myself and oppose popular opinions. In this phase, I learned that while forcing students to follow Standard English can seem harsh and discriminatory at times, there are many good reasons why Standard English is the preferred grading criterion. It made me understand that there is no one real solution to solve the differences in the classroom. However, the best way to deal with
those differences is to accept everyone for who they are but still have a Standard where everyone is graded equally. As you can see this is what my final tiny summary ended up being, while I couldn’t find a perfect solution for everyone I suggested my best thoughts. This first phase helped me with my revising and started to get me used to perfect citations, which I used to struggle with before.
During phase two, I was assigned to write a critical analysis essay with a topic involving linguistic, racial, or gender-based issues. For phase two I chose to analyze racism, involving stereotypes and structural discrimination. In this essay, I learned how to critically analyze more efficiently than I ever have before, instead of writing 250 words with a lot of filler, I learned to write a compact 200 words with cleaner sentences while keeping everything important to the analysis. Something that can’t go unnoticed was the author choices for this class, I had chosen to go with Brent Staples and James Baldwin for this essay. Both James Baldwin and Brent Staples felt like amazing author choices for the class; for me, it’s not an overstatement. A big key thing I learned in phase 2 was to view one reading through the lens of the other reading, at first I was a bit confused but once I got it down it felt like a genius idea. For example, the highlighted quote from my conclusion of the essay shows me an understanding of the meaning of a lens.
And finally, for my third phase of this spring semester class, we were given the choice to research any reading and topic we wanted. I chose to research Immigrants and Discrimination because as an immigrant myself, I wanted to involve my last paper with an issue I could really relate to. During this phase, I learned to look for sources/authors/books very efficiently, I learned how to tell a good source from a bad source. I also perfected the art of citing, as funny as that might sound, it goes further than just citing. I have improved my grammar, quoting, and citing significantly throughout these 3 phases.
Overall, I can confidently say that this course has helped me improve every one of my writing attributes. Thanks to Professor Andrew Heerah and his English 210 class, from informative, to argumentative, and then rhetorical, all my writing strategies have significantly improved in quality
