Xuan Le

Writing 39B
Professor Haas
June 2, 2014
Reflective Essay
Colin Powell once had stated, There is no secret to success. It is the result of
preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. Time flies fast, its already near the end of
the quarter. I feel a mixture of happiness and sadness because this class has given me a lot of
knowledge to be a prospective writer as well as a lot of memories with my group mates
throughout our many projects. Surely, this class is and always will be one of my favorite courses
in UCI.
I still clearly remember the first week I attended this class, I was so excited for the up
coming journey that I would have in this class; at the same time. I was nervous because of the
class level of difficulty. The first self-introduction project gave me a chance to present myself in
front of my classmates so they can get to know me better. I felt happy because I got to know
everybody and got a better feeling of friendship towards everybody. After Professor Haas
introduced the topic of this writing class, the Mystery Genre, the first Habit of Mind that I
developed that week was Curiosity. I started to watch some of the Sherlock Holmes episodes
on Netflix and those episodes inspired my curiosity because of Sherlock Holmes ways of
solving problems as well as his critical thinking. Week 1 was also the week that I got to meet my
first group The Detective Agency with Qiwei, Vivian and Tin.
Throughout this course I have learned many valuable lessons from reading and analyzing
the scholars texts that enriched my knowledge about the Victorian Era as well as provided a way
to have a deeper understanding about the Detective/ Mystery genre. First, Professor Haas
assigned many different scholar readings such as How to think like Sherlock Holmes by Maria
Konnikova, Beginning and Dove by Panek and Heroism, Culture and Dread by
Kirbyetc. Each groups mission was to present the main idea that the scholar implies within
the text. My group was selected to do Kirbys reading. Since I always strive for the best, I knew
that I had to meet up with my group in order to collaborate on the project because online
communication is not as effective. I used a piece of paper and wrote down different days and
times in that week; then, I let my group mates fill out their availabilities. After that, we selected a
time interval that everybody can meet up to work on the project. There was a time conflict, so I
had to keep asking my group mates if they could make it at any different time. Finally, we found
out a perfect time to meet up and then we decided to divide the work evenly. Because of this
project, it helps me develop my new habit of mind Openness. I paid attentions to my team
matesideas and considered more ways to present our projects. While working on my part of the
project, I struggled on understanding the reading due to the multiple under-laying meanings and
allegories. It took me a while to search online for any articles that explained the authors main
purpose in a better way. On the presentation day, Professor Haas patiently went through the
whole reading with each groups presentation in order to enhance the groups knowledge. This
helped my analyzing skills a lot because as she kept pointing out little details in the readings that
I missed, I started to think harder about its purpose and how it was relevant to other texts or
ideas. From now on, Ive learned to read more careful and pay more attention to little details.
Another assignment for our group was presenting Crime and Criminology in the
Victorian Era. I set up the meeting at school so we can all work on it. We researched together
and put the project together on Google doc. We went over the power point to see any changes
that we needed to fix. We made the slides along with the question that Professor Haas suggested
us to answer in order to fulfill the main purpose of our project. At the end of this project, I
learned another aspect of the Victorian Era., The last assignment also helped improve my reading
and analyzing genre skills. For this project, I was the storyteller of one of Sherlock Holmess
adventure The Priory School. I invested a lot of work for this project since I love public
speaking and story telling, I read the story twice just to ensure that I dont miss any details. Then,
I made a timeline of the story while looked up pictures that matched the content. It took me all
night just to put all the slides of pictures together. Later on, I practiced presenting the summary
of the story many times in front of my friends until I was sure that I got everything. I was so
happy that the presentation was a great success.
There are two analysis essays that I wrote in this class. One is a literature review on
scholar texts and the other one is about modern day texts, which involves cinematic effects
analysis. It was a tough decision to choose which text I wanted to keep as my final draft.
However, I finally decided to fully revise the modern day text as my final draft. Since I got to
pick two scenes that represent the convention that I chose, it was easier for me to analyze the
scenes. It was also my greatest strength for this essay because I got to analyze what I saw in the
movie while reading texts; sometimes I got confused due to the language barrier. I couldnt
obtain a very strong grasp of the main idea from the author. On the contrary, there are still some
weaknesses in my final essay. Due to the second scene not really showing the convention of the
mash-up between the superhero and the detective genre, my final essay had flaws. Therefore, I
need to choose another scene or I have to clarify my ideas so that the readers can see my point of
view clearer. Furthermore, I have to incorporate the cinematic effects during my analysis to
make my convention more appealing to the readers. At that time, I also developed another habit
of mind Metacognition.
Even though, I chose not to revise my Literature Review essay, I chose to revise one
paragraph that I believe I could make sound better. Its the second to the last paragraph in my
essay. I selected this paragraph from my first essay due to the fact that I didn't do a very good job
in synthesizing the scholars in conversation. Moreover, the main idea about Holmes being a hero
is vague; thus, I need to clarify it more by providing more examples. I also need to give a brief
introduction to each scholar that I used as a reference in this paragraph. Thus, I'll revise this
paragraph to create a discussion between these scholars about each other's ideas. Since this
paragraph also relates to my RA essay, I believe that revising this paragraph will also provide me
with insight on more ideas that I can use for my RA essay as well.
The art of collaboration is beautiful. I always love to work with other people because
working by myself prevents me from exchanging new ideas and knowledge. While doing peer
reviews for my group mates, I also received the benefit of having peer review sections. These
sections not only contain advice from my peers, I also get to read other peoples essays as a way
for me to learn from others. As well as the comments from the blog, those comments brought me
a lot of happiness every time I checked my blog site because it gave me a sense of bonding, a
sense of friendship that is happening in this class. In addition, at mid quarter, I got another
chance to meet up with my new group The Detectives Instrument; we got to work together
and created many unforgettable memories.
In the RIP Seminar, I played the role of the storyteller/host who approaches the audience
to introduce the skit. I introduced every character in the play as well as set up everything for the
play. During the play, I controlled the power point slides as the background for the skit. I tried to
make the audience active by asking them to solve the case and asking them to vote through a
poll. Since I was a script advisor, there were a lot of things that I had to prepare to make sure
everything went well for our part. Overall, I think our classs presentation went well. It seemed
that the other two groups were well prepared for their presentations as well. However, I was
expecting everybody to be more confident about presenting for the RIP seminar by not looking at
the paper because it made it a bit less professional. There were a lot of pictures for every slide,
which showed that the groups did understand their materials by not reading off the slides. One
of things that I didnt see in the presentations was communication. There was not a lot of
communication between the teammates. Every person just does his or her own part. Over all,
everybody did show his or her effort on the RIP project.
Since the other classs projects were videos, there was not much information or
explanation about the Horror Genre. However, their movies did scare me a lot since I am not the
type of person who is interested in the horror genre. The movies showed a lot of work and effort
that they had put in to complete their projects. However, I was a bit disappointed by the fact that
not everybody was involved in the movie. Since there were a lot of people per group, there
shouldve been more actors/ actresses in the movie. After watching their presentations, Ive
learned that scary monsters are not only a result of superpower, magic but they appear in the
natural life as well. They dont have to be a vampire, ghostbut they could be a soul or a
mysterious curse. I think they could have done better if they worked on their scripts more. The
camera recording should be more stable and less shaky. More people should be involved in the
movie to show team unity.
While preparing for the RIP Seminar, I ve learned so many different things as well as to
exercise my skills. I used my artistic skills from the Creativity habit of mind, to make the
materials that we needed for the skit. I helped my teammates act more natural as well as gave
them advice regarding their emotions in the each scene. Throughout the RIP practices and
writing scripts, Ive learned that its difficult for everybody to agree on the same matter. Its hard
to cooperate with everybody and show each person your perspective, because everybody has his
or her own ideas. During this time, I developed the habit Engagement, I started to listen to
more ideas and to invest myself more in this project. Im so glad that my group overcame this
problem and we united our ideas in the end. The other three habits of mind that I have learned
and developed in the last few weeks were persistence, responsibility and flexibility. For
persistence, I kept myself interested on all of the projects I had done in class. I believe that
maintaining my interest for the subject will help me work and present my ideas better. For a
long-term project as the RIP project, though there was time I was confused and struggled in
finding a unique way to present our ideas, I continued keeping myself from losing interest in the
project. For responsibility, I postponed my meeting from another organization in order to work
on the project with my group. I dont regret my decision because my group-mates worked as
hard as I did to make this play a fantastic one. Therefore, Im proud to be working with them and
to be able to be responsible for my task. Throughout this course, Ive been working in many
different groups. Since Im a flexible person, I was able to adapt to new environments to be able
to work with new people.
Now that Im looking back at what I have done, Im so glad that I enrolled in this class. It
was a great experience full of joy, communication, work and friendship. I will continue to use all
the skills that I have learned in this class and apply them to my daily life. I will read more
carefully and analyze the details that I read. As well as when I watch movies, I will see it in a
better perspective while analyzing its cinematic effects and the convention of that movie. To sum
up, I am so glad that I was able to participate in this class through many different projects.