Reflection

My name is Christina, and I just turned nineteen years old. I don’t have very many hobbies but the ones I do have pretty much all involve my animals. I have a dog named Sierra, two cats Gina and Delilah, two snakes Beetlejuice and Listerfeen, and I also have a horse named Stormy. I spend a lot of time taking care of all of them. I try to ride my horse a few days every week but living in Washington the weather doesn’t always play nicely. My career goal is to someday open my own doggy day care. I am going to get my grooming license and become a certified dog trainer. Other than spending time with my animals I spend my time working, and spending time with my boyfriend of 3 years. This English class is only my third class I’ve taken and EVCC and I am still learning how to properly divide my time so that I am not struggling so much.
Over all I thought that the three themes identity, community, and tradition where all good ways to get myself and other students thinking about opening our eyes to other ways of living. From reading the text and watching the movies it helped me not be so close minded when it comes to other peoples religious beliefs and cultural differences from my own person preferences. For example I am not a religious person and I never really considered why other people chose to believe in what they do; but after learning more about others traditions and communities my eyes where opened up to the fact that not everyone lives and was raised the same way I was.
When asked to chose four assignments to use as examples of my work the main ones that stick out to me are the essays. I feel as though they are the assignments that I out the most time and effort into. The first essay’s topic was what is the biggest factor in developing a sense of self- identity. I chose to use the people we surround ourselves with as the biggest influence on ones self-identity. I feel as though I had a good topic, but I just did not have enough body in my paper and I forgot to add direct quotes from the text I read. The second essay the topic was how do communities affect you and the people around you. I chose to write about the tattooed and pierced community. This was my favorite essay to write because, I felt as though I had a good topic and I was passionate about what I chose. But again I failed to add direct quotes and it was lacking a bit in the body. The third essay the topic was how are traditions challenged. I chose to write about Christmas as one of the most challenged traditions. I thought that this would be the paper with a better body but, it turned out I had less to write about it than I thought. Also my quotes were not very good so I don’t think I did very well on that essay either. The fourth assignment I chose to use was the blog posting about different communities. I chose to write about the dog lovers community because I myself am in love with my dog. I was going to use that topic for my essay but I could not come up with enough ideas to fill the paper. Overall I am okay with the work I did in this class. If I was to do it over again I would definitely apply more time to the class.