A Reflection on Lessons Learned While Attending College Level English Classes and Their Transference into Other Areas of Academics
The very first words my English professor spoke to our class was a yes or no question. “Do you like writing?” He asked, and he stood there, pulled out his IPhone and set a timer for ten minutes. He asked us to write a paragraph with reasoning on why we did or didn’t like writing. I sat there, wrote my paragraph and waited. When the ten minutes was over he put us in groups and had us discuss our answer with each other.
After that activity was over he explained to us the reasoning behind that activity. He wanted us to formulate a paragraph answer to a question that could be answered in one word. Then, he wanted us to be able to not only explain the answer in depth, but also understand other students perspective and reasoning behind their answer. Through taking the most simplistic English course, a student can attain the skillset needed to express their thoughts in an upper level manner.
When first attending my English 1301 class I had the mindset of “Ok. Let’s get this over with…” However, I had no idea what I was about to learn from that course. In that semester I realized that in order to be a successful student, you need to be able to formulate ideas and organize and arrange them in the proper and appropriate manner.
That idea was not only applicable to my English class, but also seemed very relevant to my engineering and math classes. That semester I found myself taking 14 hours. My time was consumed with engineering graphics, calculus 2, chemistry 2, and English. I just wanted to float by in English. However, the ideas and concepts that I had learned from that class were easily transferable to my upper lever classes, and still applicable today.
The first thing I had learned (other than organizing my thoughts in an organized and clean manner) was how to formulate those ideas in to well-written paragraphs and essays. I found this to be a transferable idea in my Chemistry lab. We had pre lab assignments due the day before our lab met, and we had post lab assignments, which were due the day our lab met. Every week our lab group would get together the day before our lab and complete both assignments.
Our post lab assignment had to be a well-written essay of the topic we were assigned in our previous lab meeting. Because I had been in my English class I knew exactly how to formulate the essay into something our lab TA would want to read. Not only did we successfully write (and receive an A or B) on every post-lab assignment, our lab TA also told us that he appreciated the effort that we had put into writing these essays. He told us that most groups wouldn’t know how to fully answer the question in an appropriate length, and that’s why other groups weren’t receiving the grades they had wanted.
Taking English classes are a great way to reconnect your brain and your mouth (or fingers in this case). English classes help redevelop your thoughts and ideas and make them become something you can put on paper. English classes help polish your everyday thoughts and help people become more eloquent speakers, writers, or even artists. Becoming a better writer or speaker helps an individual in more ways they can imagine, and the world we live in today is driven by English. In order to succeed in the real world you must understand that just about everything we do on a day-to-day basis requires the most simplistic form of English background.
