Mackenzie's Site

The end of this semester has definitely been unusual to say the least. Having to transition onto online learning was a struggle at first. It was hard because I started out the year with on campus living, having a set schedule, swimming and seeing all my friends everyday. All of a sudden, we transitioned to being at home, having some zoom classes and all online assignments, only being in the company of my family. Even summer classes are now online. I had to completely readjust my schedule on how I go about my school work and how I learn. One aspect that I still find very challenging is meeting with teaches when I have a question. Normally, if I had a question, I would set up a meeting, talk to the teacher after class or go to office hours. Now that we cannot do that, even though I can still email, I feel like I am not learning as much as I could compared to when I am talking in person.Luckily, as the more the weeks have gone by, the more I have been able to adjust my learning habits setting certain hours during the day to do my homework and trying to get assignments done ahead of time. I have seen positive outcomes in my classes because of it.

I have really enjoyed my first year here at UNE. I was happy with all of my classes and felt that I have learned so much. With the unfortunate turn we took in March to online learning, I still felt like I was able to learn information that will be useful for me in the future. With me liking all of these classes, it is making me positive that I am on the right career path. I am very excited to learn more about pharmacy and what it takes to become a pharmacist. I was unsure coming into college if I was going to stick with pharmacy, but I feel confident in my decision to stay in the field now that I know all of my classes suit me.

Some of my goals that I have for the future is to work on my communication skills and to stay organized. I feel that in crowds I can be introverted. Coming into this English class, I feel like I was able to expand on my communications skills by talking a lot in our group dissuasions. I hope to do this more so in the more classes I have, and this will help me in the long run as my career path includes lots of communication. With organization, I tend to be disorganized with my belongings. I feel this e-portfolio really helped with my organizational habits because I was able to learn how to make folders and tabs, organizing it in different categories making the whole thing in order. I hope to continue with e-portfolio in other classes, so I can stay organized.

Even though it is a sad way to end my first year of college being at home, I am so happy about coming to UNE. I cannot wait to continue my years here, hopefully going back to school in the fall. I know I made the right choice coming here and I will always remember my first year being here, being the time during one of the craziest pandemics ever.

For the annotations I did in Robin Marantz Henig’s, “What Is It about 20-something?”, the three types of annotations that were the most evident during the coding process were understanding annotations, questions, and drawing relationships. For the majority of my annotations, I like to write understanding annotations because it allows me to write what I read in my own terms. This helps because I can comprehend the information better. One specific section I did this in Henig’s writing was when she was talking about the Yellow brick comprehensive residential program. On page 213, it talks about an example about a young woman, C., and how she had many struggles like drinking and anorexia. Coming to Yellow brook, she was able to pull herself together. Through the whole passage, I wrote two blurbs summarizing what the passage said and pulling out the key information. This was able to aid me in grasping what was going on.

For question annotations, I always read a section and see if I understand what it is saying or if I can question what it is saying. I do this often because I feel like they are questions of value that I can ask my professor or a friend. One area that I did this was on page 202 where he was talking about children take so long to grow up, and I asked the question why is it that children take so long to grow up? I even tied my question with a relation as I talked about how in Twenge writing, she too talked about how it takes children so long to grow up, and she said it was because of technology. This book talked about different factors such as we just have developed this way overtime.

For the drawing relations annotations, I mainly look over a passage and see if I’ve heard anything prior to the reading that relates to what had been written or if I have my own experience that are like what have been written about. In this texts, I can relate to what was talked about on page 209 where they talked about the New Yorker, Julie, and how she was coddled her whole life. She was happy to be so privileged but felt she had not grown up yet. I compared to her because I was given a lot of help growing up and now I feel like I still have so much to learn on my own.

With all these annotations, I was able to understand what Henig was writing about in this text. Without the annotations, I would still be confused about some of her ideas.

Over the past two week, there has been a lot of change to how I go about my day. Educationally, this virus has effected where I do my work. Most of the time, I feel like I get my work done more proficiently in the library or the commons. With being at home, I am still able to find space to get my work completed, I just have more distractions. However, so far those have not gotten in the way. The one thing that is majorly different with my learning is that everything is online. I am used to worksheet, but I will just have to adjust.

In my daily life, we have had to adjust majorly. Our family ended up going to visit family in a Florida for a few day, which was a trip we have planned for a long time. We ended up cutting it short, and are now quarantined in our house for 2 weeks. We have found ways to keep busy such as playing card games and watching movies, but it does not feel normal because our family is so used to moving around a lot and traveling. My mom did end up going to the store once since we’ve been back, and she said it was crazy because there was barely anything left. It is just such a change that this generation is going through.

Over the next few weeks, the only concerns I have are with my internet at home, hoping it does not crash, and whether I will be able to do all my work on time. Hopefully, we have a family computer as well as my laptop so hopefully with the combination of the two, I should be able to get everything done at the right time.

Compared to my first essay, I have been able to make a lot more global revisions that has improved my writing. For the first essay, my global revisions mainly consisted of fixing my thesis and having a more deep explaination of my quotes and being precise as to why I chose them. When it came to this essay, however, I feel like there were other areas in need of focus because I did well on those other aspect. For this essay, I made sure my thesis was very clear as to what I was trying to say because I know this has been a struggle of mine in the past. I also made sure that I was specific in my paragraphs when explaining the quotes and how they relate to my thesis. The things that I need to change in this essay mainly focus on seeing if there are places where I can add in texts from different authors. When writing my first draft, I made sure I had at least one author in each paragraph and I even tried to compare their writing to other authors writings. However, I feel like I can even add more examples to strengthen the piece of writing. I know in the first essay, this was a comment I got from my professor when he sent us back our essays once they were graded, and even though I tried to do this on my first draft of this essay, I know that, after taking the advice of my peers, I can do this even more so. I feel like since I spent more time on my first draft, I was able to make it more organized and flow together. This is something that I feel is important because it makes the essay easier to revise. I did not take as much time on my first draft of the happiness essay, which made it harder to fix.

While reading the comments from my last essay, I can see a few ideas where I can show improvement on my next essay. One thing that I can focus on is the intro paragraph. In my last essay, I sped up the intro and did not do a full introduction to the authors and text’s that I was discussing in the essay. I am going to make sure I lengthen the first paragraph by adding in each author and a short section about what they wrote about in their text’s.

Another aspect I am going to approach differently in this essay is making sure I work with the authors more deeply. I know, especially in my last paragraph, I talked most able me, and did not relate many ideas to other authors. I want to make sure in this essay, every time I hear an idea that reminds me of one of the readings, I will mention it and make sure I talk about it in detail.

The last thing I want to do different in this is to express my idea more fully. In my last essay, I would mention happiness, but would not mention the different types of happiness. In this essay, where I am taking about empathy, I will make sure to go into detail about what empathy is and how people do not show it.

When it comes to me, I use technology when it comes to the majority of my classes. Every class, except for one, requires me to use my computer either to write essays, keep data, or do online homework. My psych class is the one time of the day where I do not use any form of technology because my professor prefers us writing our notes in class because that way, we can processes the information more. When it comes to having to be on my computer, I rarely to never try to go outside of my school work unless I have to look something up. I feel like my computer is more of my educational network, whereas, my phone is where I get most of my entertainment from. For the classes that require the computer, I am mostly on it the bulk of the period. My classes range from 50 minutes to 2 hours and 50 minutes, and for having multiple classes a day and having to be on my computer during that time, it supports the fact that I use technology a lot during the day. Even outside of class, all my homework assignments are on blackboard, which means I have to spend even more time on a screen. This sometimes leads to me having headaches at the end of the day.

For my personal preference, I wish that this was limited. I understand that for classes, teachers want us to be on technology, but I wish that the homework we were given was more on paper. I know in high school, I barely had any online assignments, which I wish was the same for college. There are even sometimes where a teacher gives us the option to print or read online, and a mostly choose to print because it gives me time away from technology for a little while. With the world being so devoted to this technology era, I feel that the amount of screen time is only going to surge, but I hope that the more articles that are put online and the more news about phone and computers taking us over will show some of the educator that this is a serious issue and they will start to respond by having less online work.

From this all, there are sometimes that I do feel like computers are beneficial during classes. They keep us organized, it keeps our information save, and it allows us to look up information we do not know. I do think that we should keep using them, but I think the amount of time to use them is the factor that should be revised.

As we move on to writing more essays, the one aspect that I want to work on when it comes to peer review is how to give people examples of how to improve. From the workshops we did, I thought that I was better when working on the the local review rather than the global review. On the local review, I was able to point out sentences and talk about specific sentences that can be re-written. However, when it came to global review, when I had to talk about specific sections that could be moved around and what could be added, I had trouble coming up with ways that each essay could do my suggestions. I would always write what they did that seemed off or too long or short, but I would never say that because it needed revision, how they could do it. If I can start doing this, I feel that it will be more beneficial to my peers and their writing will be enhanced. One way I can do this is to think more critically about their writing and make sure I understand what I am suggesting. This way I will know how to come up with the examples. Plus, I can pull information from my own writing and incorporate it into my classmates pieces.

Throughout my essay, I would use Barclays formula to integrate each of my quotes. I found it useful to do so because it would help me organize my ideas within my paragraphs. The formula also had little explanations as to how each of the sections will help my writing, which made it easier to use. First, I would start with my claim, to state my topic of the paragraph. Then I would go to my introduction, and made sure I introduced my quotes and what I want people to know about it. Next I would state the quote and cite the author. After, I would explain the quote and how it relates to my overall idea. Last I would transition into the next idea. One section of my writing that I used Barclays formula in was when I talked about Cathrine Sanderson. In Sanderson’s video, I demonstrated that she was on the same side of Gilbert in saying that children do bring you pleasure but not overall happiness. I introduced what she was was going to talk about, I integrated a quote, I explained it and then transitioned into what she wrote and connected it to what Gilbert wrote. An example of how I did so is shown below.

Before the class started, I had a few techniques from high school that had to do with annotating. I mostly knew how to point out ideas in paragraphs and maybe ask a few questions along the way. In the beginning of this semester, I knew I had room for improvement. Starting out, the types of annotations that I would write were mostly under the category of understanding. I would mostly summarize paragraphs to put the concepts into my own words and I would define a few terms. It is definitely evident here in the first reading we had to do, from page 1-32, on how I would only shortly paraphrase the paragraphs.

Once we moved onto more readings, this is when I started to look at the other types of categories and start to incorporate them. Going onto Gilberts, “Reporting Live From Tomorrow”, I made sure that I not only summarized, by I would also mark questions and point out areas where I would disagree. I would also make connections to personal experiences. As seen here on page 176 where I stared, I made a connection to the text from a past experience I had in high school. In the text, it talked about how money cannot buy you happiness, and I remembered in high school we had a debate whether money was the true scores of happiness and why we felt the way we did. I agreed and disagreed with Gilbert, because although I feel having a stable income can make you happy, when you have too much, it does not make you much happier than you were with the stable outcome. I made sure to mark this in the text.

Today, I feel like I have a strong grasp on how to annotate but there are some areas to work on. When it comes to Brooks and Wadlinger, I made sure that I pointed out understanding annotations, connections, and questions. In “The Moral Bucket List”, I made a connection from Gilberts to Brooks wrting. In Gilbert’s writing, he spoke about how women would rather go shopping or watch tv rather than taking care of their kids. Brooks, however, talked about how Dorthy day became a better person from having children. I made sure I marked this as you can see from the star. Even with all my annotations, the two that I have the most trouble with are challenging and rhetorical. As we move onto more readings, I am hoping that I can start pointing out these out.