After what I have learned throughout my semester in English 1301, I have connected it to my degree path of education. Going back and thinking about everything I have learned; I came up with some concerns for my future. When working in this class I had to get out of my comfort zone and work with people I wasn’t sure about. It brought me to become a better writer, but it showed me how much I struggle working with others. When working in a classroom with other students and having a small class to be a part of will help me be able to work with other teachers to teach the students what is needed from them in my classroom. Along with my struggles to work with others, I am worried about how I am going to be able to create a rhetorical analysis because of how hard I struggled with John Pekins “A Community College Professor Reflects on First-Year Composition” throughout this class. I will have to write about the different needs the kids will have to learn to do by themselves and I will have to write an evaluation for them on a daily to see how far they become each day. Because of my struggle I learned when and where to contradict myself in a paper and when I need to be straight forward about what is happening and what side I have picked. When writing the evaluations for the students I will have to be firm and honest with how they are doing so I won’t be able to contradict myself on how I am teaching. I am going to have to find what each student needs in order to succeed and take care of the requirements they will have to pass in my class. While I am working with SPED kids, I will have to be able to work with other teachers to teach the students the needs they have to have on a daily basis. With what I have learned from writing in my English 1301 class I should be able to have a set goal on what exactly needs to be said each time on the child evaluation.
Mission Statement
Summary of Pekins Article
https://uttyler.instructure.com/courses/15410/files/2059067/download?download_frd=1
When in a high school writing class, some students don’t know where to start writing. Now a day’s, writers struggle to have the skill they need to match the expectations they are set up for. Students main focus is technology, such as tv, phones, computers, and more. John Pekins points out that our educational system does not prepare high school students for college composition in “A Community College Professor Reflects on First-Year Composition”.
High school students starting a college composition course are not aware of the skills they have. They start to struggle and become unprepared for what is needed from them. Pekins comes up with the theory, most students struggle because of how little they read. The less they read the more they struggle. He continues to say that it causes writing to become more difficult. He points out that if students put time and effort in writing by reading books most of their struggles will end. Reading is more on the technology side; which Pekins refers to as “the electronic age” (233). Reading internet post, e-mails, and vlogs damages the way a person can write based on how formal or informal it is. Pekins’s issue with students in the first-year composition class is that they rely on all types of technology. This proves that students will have a challenge during their time in a first-year composition class with their teachers.
Inconclusion, students and teachers need to put the devices down and pick up a book. High school teachers should teach students how to focus on writing and less about technology. College professors should help students more on what their voices are instead of how to write a whole paper. Pekins wants students that are going to a first-year college composition course, prepare by reading more and being on technology less because it will help both, the professor and the students, in the long run.
Moving Discourse Communities
At least once in everyone’s life they have been a part of a discourse community. Discourse communities are a group of people who share a set of goals in order to understand basic values, assumptions and ways of communication. The discourse community I was involved in high school was the marching band community. Within band I have learned valuable skills that will help me become a SPED teacher. While both of these communities are completely different, they have a lot more in common than you would think. Within these two communities they share having strong communication skills and being able to read people based on their feelings.
Marching band has had a big influence in my life. My freshman year of high school I was a marcher in the Forney Espirit De Corpse Marching Band. During this time, I learned a different, yet simpler way to communicate with others. For example, covering down is when you file behind a person when marching sideways. We use this term when lines need to be cleaned up within the show. Also, our drum majors had a special way to communicate when they needed to switch podiums. It was a special hand movement they did when conducting. They then had to teach the band this movement, so we knew to “find our eyes” to another conductor. With all of our hard work and communication skills people still didn’t consider marching as a “sport”. They don’t believe it should be, but everyone who has marched consistently would like to disagree. Parents included, believed with our hard work and dedication, our many contests we place first in, and our different ways of communication has improved the way we are in today’s society. We have a better connection with how music is laid out and with the how we have a stricter way of acting. Marching band acted like a military base way of training. We run .5 miles within our twelve-hour week. That’s why we, in the marching community, believe it’s a sport because of how we use our hard work and dedication fight for what we want.
From the different skills that I have learned within the marching discourse community, I will be able to communicate and interact with special needs kids. In the course of my life, special needs kids have played a big part in becoming who I am. My senior year of high school I shadowed a special needs teacher at Johnson Elementary that taught me how to have a better understanding behind what autism really is. She told me, “Everyone’s the same in my eyes no matter the mental capacity. They each have different personalities but bounce off one another in amazing ways. Autism isn’t a bad thing, It’s honestly a good thing.” That has stayed with me ever since and personally, I believe it. I will be working my way to be a SPED teacher throughout my college career because of how this teacher impacted me. Throughout the SPED program, I will be majorly improving my communication skills and learning how to conform to different kinds of personalities. Over at Johnson my patience was tested to my limits, but I wouldn’t have traded the opportunity to be with those kids in a heartbeat. Being able to learn with them and teach them how to do simple tasks in life like counting and what the different colors were warmed my heart. Going into this course I will need a background of education and special education. I will have to learn have to do child assessments, educational psychology, behavior support, communication techniques and disabled student instruction to understand the different students. In college, I will have to start preparing with instructional strategy, classroom management, social-emotional learning, and assessments.
Marching band and SPED are alike in many different ways. If my body language is dull then my part in the show will look like I am unprepared, and the march is completely forced. Being in marching band allowed me to learn how to read other people based off their body language and adapt to the situation. While being a SPED teacher I will have to read the child’s attitude and how they react to certain situations. For example, when a SPED kid has a bad attitude, an unexpected situation can lead to a detrimental reaction to and they can lash out. A SPED teacher needs to be able to tell when their child is going to have a bad day so they can readjust what is planned throughout the day for them. Having a strong voice in both communities is a major aspect because when in band, I had to state where I was having struggles and being able to keep count throughout the show to help others to remember where we are. Becoming a SPED teacher, having a stern voice to calm the students down and helping to fix where they are struggling is a major part of teaching the kids to learn from their mistakes.
All of the differences in SPED and marching band come together to make a big discourse community based off of the ways they are similar. Fighting for a position in band to be a marcher and putting on a show within the community is just like fighting for a SPED spot at a school. Having to learn different types of body language, having a stern voice but knowing when to be silly, and being able to push for hard work and dedication shows that I am willing to do what it takes.
Pekins Analysis
Intro to first-year college struggles
I am currently in a first-year English composition and it isn’t all what you think it is. I struggled going from high school to college English like most students but more of how I never really read a book before college. Throughout my high school experience, I read between 2 and 4 books if even that. Not reading and then coming into a first-year composition makes it even harder. I didn’t understand a lot of what was happening and to be honest it’s still a struggle to this day, but I’ve figured out how to handle it. With how my first-year experience is going, we have done a lot of work with John Pekins and his work has helped me realize that reading a book and having communication with my professor can increase the ways of my learning ability in my first-year English composition.
In the article “A Community College Professor Reflects on First-Year Composition,” John Pekins is effective in his argument of showing professors the struggle of students in first-year composition classes. In my opinion, he has created this chapter to persuade his beliefs of his first-year composition classes in his eyes. He shows us that he has talked to multiple colleagues to prove that reading less causes less comprehension throughout the first-year English composition class for students. Pekins took polls from his own students of how often they read which comes back as a low score.
Pekins organizes his chapter by introducing his classes and carrying on with his concern of first-year composition class. He adds in his research of polls he has taken and his communication with his former colleagues to enhance what he believes. Pekins continues with how basic English classes have been for students and teachers to not be prepared for their new experience in a first-year composition class. He articulates his concerns and beliefs on how reading a book will help students and teachers. He moves on to project his worries on how technology has changed and doesn’t help students in the long run.
Pekins major section has to be how his concerns of technology and not reading for students is the hardest way to get through a first-year composition student doesn’t help the professors. He provides examples to show how his concerns are true. He takes to his previous colleagues and asks them multiple questions on how they teach, how much they read, and how much they make their students read. He states, “I find this point reinforced…” (233) to show that he took the time to go and talk to them. He takes polls on how much and how regular his students read which turns out to not be as much as he thought, “I have polled my classes…” (232). These examples make him more effective based on his life experience. He has been doing the same things for the past eighteen years and wants change throughout the program and with what he has provided he will find the change he is looking for.
Pekins uses his polls and conversations with his colleagues to support his argument throughout his paper. His polls were a mixture of qualitative and quantitative while his conversations with his colleagues was completely qualitative. His data comes from his both sides of his poll and conversations for first-year students. They are reliable because of his works cited page. The people Pekin talked to have many published works which also contribute to Pekins work. Pekins draws a conclusion from specific data by showing the less that students read the less prepared they are for first-year writing composition classes. The conclusion is reasonably based on how a decline in reading shows a decline of comprehension in first-year English composition students. Within Pekins conclusion he does not cause a misleading or overreaching conclusion. Pekins conclusions are very logical based off of the data he presents. While reading this chapter he is trying to reach out to his different audiences which can be difficult to pinpoint right away.
Pekins gives us two different audiences to look at. The primary audience is the professors and the secondary are the students. In the introduction, Pekins creates a common ground by the students not meeting a college expectation and are very unfamiliar with the level of work expected from the professor. He uses this to show how professors are expecting too much from the unfamiliar student. His goal throughout the chapter is that he wants to establish a firm foundation for the students, “helps bring their dreams to reality”. Bringing their dreams to reality is found by finding their voice when writing. When Pekins moves from one claim to another, he uses effective transitions by connecting his last few sentences from the previous paragraph to what he is trying to say in the next paragraph. His overall structure of this paper was pretty well and does give the readers information as to what it’s like in a first-year composition, how students and teachers could improve in their reading skills and what professors could do to help the students in situations.
Pekins uses his tone to show professors how strongly he feels about this topic. He shows them how serious the problem with students not reading actually is. Within his tone Pekins uses jargon to provide how he feels about the topic. Pekins creates a student teacher relationship throughout his chapter to help other professors teach their students in their first-year composition classes. He treats his readers as ongoing inquiry to continue his developing data to prove how students need to spend more time reading than on technology.
Pekins concludes his argument with telling the professors how they could help make what they teach more effective. He wants professors to take from this paper how they could bring a better understanding to students through their assessments and their teaching disciplines. Pekins ends his chapter with a restatement of main points to allow the readers to know what is needed from them. He shortens what he states throughout the chapter to make it easier to understand what professors could do to help their students in achieving their goals of passing the first-year English composition. He then wishes everyone success in their first year classes and hopes this paper helps them achieve their goals.
Drawing Connections
For English 1301 we had to write about John Pekins and about a discourse community we were a part of and one we wanted to be in. Within John Pekins’ chapter we had to pick a side if we believed in what he was doing and show the proof behind it. For his paper I chose his side of how students could better their studies by reading more instead of being on the internet or on any type of electronic. While writing about my discourse communities I had to pick something that had a big part of and where I want to go in my life. In high school I was what some people would consider a band nerd. Marching band was a big portion of my high school career. It helped me step up my actions to others. The other part for the discourse community is where I want my future to be. Stepping up in band should me I could become a leader of some sort, so I am choosing to become a SPED teacher. With this I will show my leader skills and it deals with something I love, children.
While I was writing my learning unit 2 for this class, I had to identify different key points from John Pekins article “A Community College Professor Reflects on First-Year Composition”. Within these key points I had to find a side to agree with. Pekins’ article showed me specific areas of studying I have passed on for most of my high school education but had to change for my 1301 English Composition class. It gave data to prove where he was coming from and what he believed he could fix with years to come. He took polls from his classes on how much the students read and grab advice from other colleagues to enhance what his main plan was. Before I could have started this essay, I had to write building blocks to put all of my thoughts of certain questions on a paper. When writing these answers, I had to pinpoint my thought behind it. With that becoming paragraphs I had comments behind what I could have fixed with my writing. For example, in my Pekins building blocks I couldn’t pick a side. I had to go through and fix that and add in fluff to make it all flow throughout the final draft. Writing this learning unit over Pekins helped me establish key points within my learning unit 3.
When I was writing my third learning unit, I had to connect a discourse community I have been a part of and where I would see myself in the future. For these topics I picked marching band as my discourse community and becoming a SPED teacher for where I would see myself. For many these two things are completely different but when you really look for the deeper meaning behind it all they are actually more alike than you would think. For marching band, I was forced to learn how to read people’s attitudes throughout the fall semester to make sure that our show would flow better with the music. If a person was having a rough day then their show would be even worse than expected. I would have to make sure that their body language was reading the show with energy and excitement before we could move on to run full shows. With SPED it is almost the same thing. I have to be able to read the kids to see if their day will be tough or not. When teaching SPED, I would have to see when a kid is having a bad day and see how I could help fix their day to make their attitudes better. While figuring this out, I wrote building blocks just like I did back for LU2. With these building blocks I had to write about two different objectives. for the first building block I wrote about my process in band and how it impacted my life. With this I had to go back and find what it was I wanted to say about my experience in band. I had to tell different techniques I learned and how learning the ways people’s attitudes are can tie together with what I want to do in my future. With being a SPED teacher in my future reading the way kids are is the most important aspect. Writing my other building block for this unit I had to look up different aspects to be a teacher and working with special needs kids.
My Pekins’s analysis has characterized my discourse community essay by making me understand what angles I had to come from. When I was writing both of these, I wasn’t sure where I should have started but they both just flowed out on me. From writing the analysis over Pekins it helped my writing over the discourse community by setting up steps on how I could have written it. My discourse community essay was better fit than my Pekins analysis because I knew from the analysis what I needed to add to the learning unit 3. It was an easier set up after I knew where I went wrong on the Pekins essay. Using the building blocks as a way to write my thoughts is a great way to start my essays. We have used these throughout the whole semester, and it has helped me write all of my learning units in a better way. These building blocks have tied over with the same objective. They have a criterion of certain questions that we have to answer to have our readers understand the points we are trying to come across. Each one of them has been a set up for what our final draft would be like without the “fluff”. After adding the “fluff” to the building blocks our draft for our final has been completed.
Mission Statement
Having a bio helps to introduce the author to the audience. It tells what the author is writing about and what is going on in their life. The bio is one of the most important structures for the website. Having posts tells the reader what is happening and helps the structure of the website. It connects the pages together. It should structure throughout the website so it can be easier for the reader. Pages on the website show the reader the different types of writing from the author. They put the context into what is needed on the website. It also puts the whole website together. The menu bar on the website helps to show the reader what all is on the site. It helps them locate what is on the website.
The purpose of my website is to provide examples of what I have learned over the past semester in my 1301 English class. Provided on my website is a summary of John Pekins “A Community College Professor Reflects on First-Year Composition”, a Rhetorical Analysis of Pekins’s article, and a Discourse Community between marching band and a SPED teacher. My Pekins summary shows how students will succeed in a 1301 English composition class with students’ hard work. It also tells the reader how reading books will help better with hard work instead of reading on technology or watching tv. The rhetorical analysis helps the reader show what side the writer is on for the Pekins chapter. While writing the analysis over John Pekins I had developed a form of a writing process that helped me discover a new way of writing. I had to do more of a critical thinking on how not to be “wishy washy” throughout my paper. The first time I did not succeed in this and I wasn’t sure where to go but going back through and rereading my paper, Pekins’s chapter, and asking question with my teacher the process become clearer for me. When I wrote the discourse community, I compare marching band and becoming a SPED teacher. I explain how marching band and SPED are completely different but yet are alike in many different ways.
The main idea behind my website is to show a generalized plan of how English 1301 is going to be for incoming students. This will help to show what our assignments were about and what was expected of us on a monthly basis. On a weekly basis we submitted building blocks to help build the structure for our final submissions, which is what you are reading on this page. With that being said, English 1301 has helped me become a better writer in many ways. I have improved my writing skills by adding more details in what I have to say and having the “fluff” instead of just the main ideas. When writing in 1301 it is more challenging but once you understand the writing idea, it flows out on the page in an almost perfect draft.
Amanda Grant 