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Reflection Oh how to explain Charlotte's class, hmm. I will tell you this, you will not find another teacher like Mrs. Howe. She doesn't believe in a textbook (to a point) because they limit her ability to teach her class in "her" style. Most teachers will receive a copy of the textbook at the beginning of the year and for the rest of the semester the textbook becomes more of a schedule than a guideline. This style of teaching lets the teachers put the class in cruise control. Whereas, Charlotte has to update several websites a day to let us (the students) know exactly what is going on. Yes, this creates more work for her but it also makes her class that much better!
When one thinks, English, the first thought to pop in their head is usually, reading, writing, reading, writing, more writing, some reading and oh yeah, more writing. In Mrs. Howe's English 2010 class there are only 5 assignment throughout the whole semester. Now, one might think that they are not going to learn anything in a class like that. And now I will prove that wrong. |
Should the u.s be the world police? (Our problem)
Group PaperIn the beginning of the class we all had to choose a "World Problem" and persuade others that your problem was important. This would be the theme a group would write about the entire semester. Finally everyone was grouped up and we began to write our group report. As the semester wore on we went over every part of the paper, intro, body, conclusion and everything in between. Progressively we worked till we finally had a group report. This was only one assignment but we were working on it for a couple months.
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ProfileAfter the group project was done we were told to write a profile paper on someone and it had to relate to our problem. This was difficult because all the people that I knew in the military are in the military right now, luckily I was able to interview by buddy Gareth. He was stationed in Afghanistan for a little under a month. He provided an ample amount of information that I used in my profile paper. The paper was not as good as I wanted when it was first written but, Charlotte has a policy of, revise, revise, revise. In other words you can turn your paper in over and over again until the end of the semester.
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MemoirThe third assignment was a 2nd genre paper, chosen between, a memoir, a review or a commentary. I chose a memoir. A memoir is a small story of your own life, that means something to you in some way. I really liked this paper because it showed me how much I actually cared about the events that happened on 9/11, which is what I wrote my memoir on, the memories I have of that day.
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Above and beyondThis assignment was assigned throughout the entire semester. We had to write about 5 different above and beyond activities. These could consist of, getting your paper looked over by one of the tutors in the writing lab, reading the book "Painless Grammar" and writing three things about what you learned (which was worth two activities). There were many other choices for the above and beyond activities. This was probably my favorite part of the class because it forced us as students to go beyond the classroom and do something for ourselves, instead of just sitting in class day after day.
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Online magazine project
This was the big assignment and the funnest. We had to create an online magazine displaying all of our papers (group, profiles and 2nd genre papers) and some visual translations to those papers. It was a great experience creating the magazine but don't take my word for it, take a look for yourself! |