Post #4: Self Evaluation and Reflection

Night Falls, Ilustrated by Sam Fores from Complex Media

This week's assignment is to choose a blog which we've already written that we are most proud of. I've chosen blog #2, my assessment of the poem "Funeral Blues" by W H Auden. I picked this blog because I feel this is the one where I fully began to understand the blog assignments and what was asked of us. I completely related to the poem and although I spun it in a different direction than I believe the writer was going I truly believed the feelings were the same. Blog #2 also happened to be the one that I received the most comments on ;-)

While I've loved reading and writing poetry since I was a child, have always had a love of English in school, and became a published writer in High School I thought I had these English classes in the bag. I was definitely wrong. All in all I think I'm doing ok in the class so far but I'm still learning a lot of things I already THOUGHT I knew. In this brief amount of time we've covered topics such as:

1. Poem structure such as stanzas (divided sections), tone (feeling), theme (the main idea),  rhyme schemes (recurring patterns), metaphors (comparison of unlike things), and more. It can be a little frustrating at time but I enjoy the idea that we are being asked to dig deeper into what we see on the surface to find hidden meanings and messages. Breaking down/analyzing the poems also helps me to gain a better understanding of the Author's work.
2. Acts of plagiarism; which I now know is more complex than simply copying someone else's work word for word.
3. Research! Going over the usage of the school's online library and being urged to use outside sources to support our claims as well as paraphrasing and quoting sources.
4. Most importantly, I am too excited over just learning how to create and keep up a blog! I've been wanting to do this for a long time.

I think it was pretty cool to be able to help another class on the poem "I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain" by Emily Dickinson. I'll admit I'm not much of a group person; not just in class but in general. I prefer to work solo or in a very small group because I like control and order and I don't care for dealing with multiple personalities. I also have a tendency to be very shy and find that I don't speak up enough when working with other people. Fortunately, I got lucky with the House mates I was paired with (for the most part). Everyone was eager and kind and we instantly started throwing ideas into the mix. We were all kind of on the same page with slightly different variations of our idea of the poem but were able to quickly piece our thoughts together into one collective idea and get it posted to the group's satisfaction. I wasn't aware that we could see the response of the people we helped. I was however a little disappointed in one person's complete lack of enthusiam and interaction with the group and found it a little unfair that all the work was done without ANY of this person's input but they received credit for it just the same as the rest of us. I don't think I would want to work in groups again if I couldn't work with the members of Morrison House. I feel that I would be forced to work with other classmates that don't share the same passion about the class or drive to succeed that I have causing time to be wasted overall. I am currently experiencing this issue when we dedicate class time to working on our papers.

I did have an opportunity to complete the House evaluations. I'm still pretty pleased with the House mates I have as I felt that the majority of them have done a good job with their blogs. They seem to be on point with their interpretations of the poems and I've even learned some things from a couple of them. They might have missed a few of Dr. X's instructions here and there (and a couple of blog entries- yikes!) but overall I think as the semester progresses their blogs will get even better than they are now and I'm looking forward to reading them.