1. Look back at your first blog post assignment where you were asked to make inquiries.

For this question, answer one of the questions you posed in that post. Pick a "meaty" question to work with here, and draw on your experiences to help you thoroughly explain how you've reached your answer.

My Question was When we are talking about giving and receiving feedback; is it going to primarily come from you, or our peers? I chose this question because I have never been in a peer guided class like this one before, so I was interested in what the class would be like in terms of feedback. Would it be fruitless or uneducated slop from my peers or would it be of the same caliber as that from my former teachers, endless pages of grammatical corrections and things that made no sense to me. The answer to my question is quite simple really; this class is a peer oriented, teacher guided workshop. It allows for students to interact with one another and help each other build stronger papers with the teacher acting more like a moderator than an actual teacher. There are no real lectures that you sit through. Moreover, you are engaged fully each and every class period with some sort of activity designed to make you leave your comfort zone and find out something new about yourself. My personal biggest experience thus far has been the first literacy narrative. It completely opened my eyes as to what I would be doing in this class: providing feedback and receiving feedback mainly from my peers.

2. Look at the syllabus, at the "Central Questions" of this course. Now that you've been a college student for a while, how do you answer the 2nd question? The differences between High School competency and college success are more time

management skills, reading ahead, initiative, and a real desire to learn. With time management, you have to know your schedule, know when things are due, broker some time for yourself to study and whatnot, and make every effort to go to all of your classes. With reading ahead, this is crucial to knowing the material before class and making sure that youre familiar with the topic being lectured on in classes. It makes sure that if a pop quiz shows up, youre not going to flat out fail it. Initiative is paramount to success because if you do not have initiative, you wont have the drive to finish homework at 1 am, you wont want to go to class, and you wont want to study. All of these are issues if you want to pass college level courses. Lastly, the desire to learn, this is important because if you do no want to learn, then you dont listen in class and you dont know what you have to know for tests and you will ultimately fail.

3. Still looking at the "Central Questions," at the 3rd and 4th questions specifically -What advice would you give to a current high school senior who is preparing for college academics? When transitioning to college, be sure not to have too much free time. It sounds great in theory, but it will lead to laziness and intense boredom. You wont make time to do homework and you wont want to go to class because youre enjoying yourself too much. The actual transition between high school and college in terms of classes is also very different. Gone is the small class of 20 or so and in comes the class of 200 other kids like you bored out of their minds and wanting to get out of the stupid lecture. Its easy to lose sight of your goal and your focus in class. Just push through one class at a time and eventually it will become a habit you wont have to stress about. Also, take some time to

learn the campus, thats crucial to you getting to your classes on time. All of these things are completely crucial to your success.

4. Now look at the list of Key Concepts on the syllabus. Pick one of the concepts that you think you're engaging with really well and explain how you're doing that. You can use specific examples from your work in the course. I think Im doing very well with the critical thinking portion of the key concepts. I believe myself to be a very critically minded individual and I am also good at thinking outside the box when it comes to things in literature. I believe I can put myself in the writers mind most times and see the way they were writing it, because that is how I most easily engage in the writing itself. Often times I get lost in the thinking part of literature, wandering around inside the authors head asking questions about why they put certain elements here or there and thinking about the historical and sociological context in which they were influenced at the time of the writing. What were the social norms, what were the religious views prevalent during that ear, that sort of thing.

5. Now pick a key concept that you're struggling with (or, if you're not struggling with any of them, pick the one that's most challenging). What's confusing or challenging about that concept, and how might you strive, in the second half of this semester, to better engage with it? I dont think Im doing very well with the risk-taking key concept. It scares me to take risks in writing and on top of that, Ive never had any class like this one. It worries me that I will take a risk and end up on the wrong side of bad and then I will be penalized

for missing either the topic or the prompt of the essay. I need to trust in my ability as a writer and make myself be able to take those bumps if necessary. I want to improve as a writer and this is how I think I can do best. Overall, I think this isnt necessarily a bad thing to be bad at, but I do agree that I need to be more of a risk taker in this class, as well as other classes. This also is an issue because I get stressed out about taking risks on something I will be graded on and it makes me freeze up when Im writing because Im scared I will say the wrong thing, and get points off or even an zero for trying to do what I was told. It has happened in my classes before and it really hurt my grade when it did, so Im wary of risk-taking.

6. What connections can you make between any of your answers for questions 1-5? That is, how do the issues you've addressed relate to each other? I think the challenges that I am facing are interrelated with each other because my biggest issues are time management and getting things done on time. Therefore, I think that taking risks is an issue for me, and that is related to the fact that I dont budget enough time for my classes and need to change that. I really hope that I can be better about that and make sure that I get things done on time, allowing me to have more time to take risks and polish my works more often. Other than that, I really dont know what to say about this. My biggest problems are time management and risk taking. But these are big issues I have had with myself for a very long time. I try and spread myself way too thin with all of my other extracurricular activities, and I need to be sure that I get all of my schoolwork done before going to do any of these other things.

7. What questions do you still have? What do you still really want to inquire about in this course? I really want to know if we will b looking into the philosophy of writing in this course at all, I know you have mentioned Aristotle before and that piqued my interest. So if we are going to study that, I would be really interested to hearing what you had to say about these philosophers views on writing and what it can do. I studied Aristotle and Plato mainly in terms of their philosophy of writing and what they believed a well-written work could do to people based on their ages and even what they think if they read it again 10 years later. I really think my peers would learn a lot about the power of their writing and that with great power comes great responsibility! This is important to me when Im writing because if Im writing something of this nature, Im not necessarily trying to invoke an emotion, but if Im writing, say, my literacy narrative, I am trying to put you directly in the moment and make you see directly through my eyes.