Author: revans1

With the Pollan and Singer paper, I watched all my bad habits come into play. I started off the paper and wrote what I thought to be a good productive paper. The day before it was due, I went to my writing lab thinking it would be good to go and to present before my meeting. I was sadly mistaken. I found out I was struggling with paragraphing, introductions, and using voice markers. Megan and I ended up coming up with a plan for me to redo my entire essay and due to my poor planning skills, I was not able to finish all the draft by my final due date, but I learned how to seek constructive feedback and criticism that I learned was later in my rubric.  I found my largest area of growth from that paper was learning how to introduce others in my argument in order to prove my opinion. I learned from Pollan on his ability to add people into his conversation to get as many perspectives as possible before making a conclusion. I also learned that these conversations do not have to start with people being on opposite sides of things. In high school, when we were introduced with choices for an essay, we might have the option to agree or disagree with our reading. This gave me the perception that there were only two ways to go about my writing and I now understand that this didn’t give me a deeper way of thinking about my essays. I found improvement in learning that there isn’t always a right and wrong and that looking at writings as sort of black and white wasn’t going to benefit me in my future writings. In the question stem essay is where I found my most beneficial for me personally in all my classes. I learned the value of annotating and fully engaging myself in my readings while seeking questions about what I am curious about. I learned how to integrate that especially in my other classes such as my ENV 104 class because we are given a lot of reading to do. I learned how to keep myself engaged in these readings and annotating and when my annotations were questions seeking answers which led to me leading discussions when talking about the readings. Also, in that essay I feel like I learned to how help my classmates. When giving feedback I helped Kieran understand more of his essay while keeping him motivated and developing new strategies for him to accomplish his goals. In my meetings with Megan, we continued to get better at setting goals and figuring out ways to accomplish what I needed to do understand and accomplish the learning outcomes of this course. In the creative reading paper, I found my biggest growth in seeking more questions as well as including what I found out while seeking for answers in my essay. I also learned the benefits of learning to focus when doing my work and not being distracted from my phone or other things. When doing this, I found out that I could exceed the word counts in my papers while also doing it in the allotted time given. In all, I found this class to be the most beneficial to me and adjusting to college, it gave me the most criticism while forcing me to constantly reflect on my habits as well as giving me tools to be successful in every single class. I look forward to what I can do with my very refined learning skills as well as learning more about myself and learning next semester.  

During the stretch of this course, I have had to learn relearn and even unlearn a lot of different skills in order to be successful. It was made clear that what I learned in high school was not only wrong but just not enough be a successful writer and even learner. I learned how to gain an interest in what I am doing to write more thoughtful essays.  After reading habits of the creative mind It has created some very different perspectives and has opened my mind up to new things that I could bring into the next semester. At first, I knew learning how to reread and write at the college level would be hard. One skill I would like to bring into the new semester is the skill of revision. All my writings could be a constant work in progress and will always could get better. When revising I can now see what I need to add or let go to make my writing more comprehensive to the reader. Another skill is what I learned about curiosity. I shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions and more importantly seek out answers for my questions. This skill helped me stay attentive and engaged in my reading and writing so that essays could be more creative and fuller of information. I will bring more time management next semester for my work. In our outcomes paper one of the templates is learning from my mistakes. I have learned to get better at not procrastinating my work and to try and not be distracted working.  In the beginning of the semester we talked in class about what could be done when focused. I quickly realized I have always chosen to work while distracted therefore never used my full mind when working. I tried it for the first time when doing one of my first drafts for the Pollan essay and I could not believe what I accomplished when just working focused. Next semester I will need to bring more intensity when focusing on all my work and figure out a better time management table to get things done in. I think that this class gave me a great reflection of where I was at as a writer but more importantly as a learner. English has helped me in more classes than just this and has helped me adapt to learning in college.  Next semester I look forward to putting all of what I learned in this course to better action.  

At the beginning of the semester, I was looking forward to learning how to express my critical thinking analysis into my writing. I thought that the course would be very challenging and pose a lot of complicated writing assignments with very critical analysis in the readings. I was worried about not keeping the same pace as the rest of the class with the reading. When I entered this class, my reading habits were not at the college level and I was not good at structuring essays and always focused on writing amount instead of writing quality. I needed to relearn as well as unlearn a lot of different skills on order to change my writing to be more effective. I needed to learn how to implicate with curiosity, attentiveness, openness to new ideas, persistence, flexibility, and reflectiveness. I thought that I had a good idea of reflectiveness and I am always open to new things, but I knew the rest of those habits would be heard to come by. Since the first essay I learned how much revision is required to write a good essay. I learned that we always have more to write and attacking something one time one way would not help anything. I liked that what I learned in this class I could translate to any of my other classes especially the flexibility aspect. I learned how to read better with subjects that might not necessarily be interesting to me and found curiosity. I learned to ask questions and that searching for the answers will help me find new questions and will engage me into what I am doing in my work. Having to unlearn my old habits was very tough. It’s kind of made me reflect on the times that I didn’t know how to shoot a basketball and needed to learn again. It is very difficult being taught something your entire life and having to learn it again. I think that the course did a good job of applying sort of training wheels until we got better at it and still created great assignments to get better at the skills that we need.  

Looking at the prehistory of humans may sometimes come as weird and confusing because if we look at the way society lives today it’s hard to think we started from hunter gathering. Especially from a technological standpoint; we have technologies today that we rely on as survival when the only type of thing they relied on was the controlling of fire. From this, we got a shift in to Farming and the use of crops are our stability. Our stability couldn’t have ever come from a life of hunter gathering because there was no physical guarantee everyone could survive. In my opinion if you look at the societal way of hunter gathering; the best hunters eat. There is no way to create a social community let alone a civilization doing that. Civilizations were started by the use of crops because it was a supply for everyone. Grains and cereal grains were a steady source of food visual to all. “Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationale.” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.” This quote shows the way civilizations get started. A select few were allowed to come, get their share, tax crops for their own gain, and distribute it to the others. It allowed for things such as writing and common language and people could live peacefully in no competition. They for sure didn’t have to run around yearly chasing animals. These advancements in technology such as writing and a common language made it possible for people to start settling in states and helped grow civilizations. But these communities always seemed to be controlled by a certain few.

 

The shift from hunter gathering to agriculture resulted in societies being controlled by a certain few. Also, our advancements in technology in a sense trap us. If you go back and take a look at how societies came to be they had to have the following; a common language, a general need for stability: food and water supply etc., and everyone has to sacrifice something such as taxes. My first question was what defined technology. The literal definition has changed over the years. It now is “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry”. Well our ancestors had no clue of school or a subject of science. So I dwindled the definition down to anything made by man that makes life easier. A society who all understand each other makes life a large bit easier than a group of people who don’t. But these societies always have a leader. Just as our technological leaders are kind of in control today. They control what we pay as well as how the world works. We will pay for an iPhone to be able to communicate to our loved ones via facetime with that convenience. We will pay for an advanced laptop that has a fast processor just because it makes our lives easier. They offer us stability and dependence on the technology we use.

The compelling problem  that I am arriving at is what would be considered technology in prehistory and why does that view change over time. People who should be compelled because history is all around us. Things as simple as the buildings that we live in and the way we look at advancing was contributed to by our prehistoric ancestors. They provided the original baseline of life

 

 

The shift from hunter gathering to agriculture resulted in societies being controlled by a certain few. Also our advancements in technology in a sense trap us.