Mid-Session Check In

Dear Mrs. Cline,

Being more than halfway through the class, I feel like I have gotten quite a bit out of the coursework. I enjoy this class because we get to read material and respond to it, whereas my last english class was a lot of writing to persuade. I really enjoyed the novel that we read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien as well as the play by Sean Huze. I read O’Brien’s novel in high school, but I feel by reading it again and responding to your prompts and papers, I have seen an even deeper meaning than the first time. I feel that the writing you have assigned for these works and throughout the course have been helpful in analyzing the material instead of just summarizing like I have done in the past. The readings really affected me because they were tied to true events, and being that I am living through the same time that the men in Huze’s play are, I felt even more connected to his characters. 

       The additional assignments such as “Shitty First Drafts”, “The Necessity to Speak” by Sam Hamill , and the extra credit Operation Homecoming were great assignments to help me as a student grow in the areas that they focused on. They connected well to what we were studying at the time, and helped give just a little bit of a deeper understanding. I also really enjoyed the poetry of witness assignments. I am usually not a fan of poetry, but these pieces were interesting and written in a way that I was really unfamiliar with, but connected with quickly. It was a great introduction to the reading of O’Brien’s novel. My biggest challenge this far in the class would probably be learning to analyze rather than just summarize, but I think at this point I am getting much better at it. My greatest success in this class would be learning to blog and to create an interesting post for my reader. 

        One of my favorite parts of your class is the way you make it feel like you are actually in a class even though it is all online. With the videos and the blogs we are able to get to know our classmates and our instructor better. As an instructor, I like that you make yourself available for our questions and have office hours so we are able to see you if we need anything cleared up. The lecture material that you post is also really helpful instead of just giving us text to read.  For my second half of the class, I hope to improve my writing skills even more. I also hope to master analyzing a text. Analyzing rather than summarizing has helped me in a few of my other classes this semester as well. I think it is a really good skill to have and will be helpful throughout my college career. Overall, I have really enjoyed the class up to this point!

Sincerely,

Kelsey Drake