End-of-term Reflection and Review

Fall Reflection and Review

This assignment takes the place of a final exam and asks you to reflect on all of your work this term. The reflections and self-evaluations you perform here will largely determine your final grade.

My rationale for this assignment is explained somewhat in question #6 in the FAQ.

Step 1: Review your writing

After submitting all of your work for the term, gather together all of the drafts from the three major writing assignments. (You are saving all your work, right?) Carefully examine the drafts for each of the main essay assignments in order, from first draft to final draft. Take time to compare the pieces and notice how they evolved due to your own process of revision and in response to the commentary you received from your professor, teaching assistant, and fellow students.

  • For each of the three essays, write down a response to the following questions:
  1. How did your essay change from first draft to final form?
  2. What was particularly strong about this revised, final version?
  3. What things could you still improve upon in this final draft?
  4. What were you particularly proud of in the final draft?
  5. Considering the whole process of writing this essay, what did you learn?
Step 2: Review your learning
  • Write a short response to the following questions:
  1. Thinking about your experience of the class as a whole, what have you learned?
  2. Was there something you expected to learn, but didn’t?
  3. Are there specific things you would like to work on in the winter term?
  4. What do you struggle with as a writer and student?
Step 3: Review your participation
  • Write a short response to the following questions:
  1. How many classes or TA sessions did you miss?
  2. How engaged were you in the class?
  3. Did you complete all the assignments?
  4. Were all the assignments turned in on time?
  5. Did you give your best effort on each assignment?
  6. Expressed as a percentage, how much of the reading did you do?
  7. How much did you contribute to peer review? Was this your best effort at sharing/helping others?
  8. How often did you contribute on discussion days? Could you have contributed more to the conversation?
Step 4: Final grade

Taking into account all of these reflections and self-evaluations, what final grade would you suggest for yourself?

Step 5: Changes of Mind

In our first course reading by Nicholson Baker, we encountered an inquiry into an everyday human phenomenon: the changing of our minds. Since changes of mind are such common and universal human experiences, we tend to write them off as easily explicable events that neither invite nor merit critical analysis, skepticism, or wonder. However, Baker’s analysis utterly defamiliarizes these mental revisions, revealing that beneath this ordinary and seemingly banal experience lies something unexpected, strange, unsettling, and complex. While it is not the explicit focus of his piece, Baker’s argument exposes how our habitual experience often produces a false sense of certainty that actively prevents us from discovery. In an odd way, our positive knowledge and understanding may become a kind of handicap that prevents us from seeing with clarity.

With this idea as a backdrop, I would like you to write a short response to the argument and ideas that your previous self wrote in the first draft of Essay 1. Ten weeks later, and after all our course readings and discussions, have you changed your mind about the purpose of education?

Due