Reflection+on+the+profile+(MRR)

Melissa Riley I know I have a hard time starting to write. I have had this problem for a while. I could be sitting on a really good idea for months on end before I get it down on paper. I am afraid that once I start I will never finish because I do not have the full idea or story in my head and then the story will trail off to something tedious and boring, having through of the most dramatic part of the story first. When it comes to academic papers, I tend to make a brief and very loose outline about what points I want to be sure to address so people can follow my chain of logic. In most of these genres though, for some reason I did not follow either procedure, so the end results ranges from my low quality story book to my exciting narrative. When looking over my narrative I changed very little. I was very satisfied on how it turned out and also the effect that it had. I sent it to my mother who had been living in a rehabilitation house with other girls who were coming off addictions. There had been a girl who was there who had decided to come clean because she found out she was pregnant. She was unsure about how to handle the situation, not knowing if she could handle the hardship that came along with motherhood. She had been seriously contemplating aborting the child. I had my mother give the girl the piece and I got a call the next day with her sobbing on the other end telling me she had decided to keep her baby. She was scared and she did not know if it would be worth the trouble. After a short but reassuring conversation she was excited for the birth of her baby girl now due in the fall. I was amazed on how much my writing could accomplish. I knew I liked the piece because of the relevance, but I did not realize how much writing can change a person’s life. When writing my inquire and explore piece I chose to originally ask a question and thing about the possible answers to why waiting made people into monsters. While in the final I still do this it is less of an inquire and explore and more a chain of consciousness in that I only really come to one conclusion and I ask questions to get people to think about the implications of the future and have waiting as another all theme to the paper. I see this piece as a work in progress, though I do not know when I will go back to it. I would like to further explore this idea and back it up with experimentation and research from scientific sources. Though I am sure that the data would be inconclusive as to the future patience of individuals, I am sure that there is something to the effect of the rate of change, the expected changes that the temperament of people should change in the generations to come. I also would like to get a better defined conclusion. I know this is something I struggle with and with this class it was only reinforced the notion that I need to work on my conclusions to my work, instead of trailing off or merely restating what I said in an uninteresting way, with little to no conclusion statements as to the reasoning of the piece as a whole.

When working on my five ways to become a better parent essay I originally wanted it to be more of a propose a solution. In some ways it does have a solution to the problem with parents who need a little help in understanding how to help their children, but the format was different than what the idea of that kind of genre proposed. I could have added an opening and closing paragraph that said something along the lines of parents who are less interested in their kids and these steps help the problem, but that just seemed degrading to me. If I were to rename the genre of this piece it would be something like writing tips to help others. When editing this paper I decided that the main body was good for what I was aiming at, but again in my lack of concluding ability I needed to go back and readdress the ending. I had ended it with a quote from my research, and while this was a good quote and fully explained my paper, I felt that I should be the one signing off, rather that some random citation. I fixed this easily and ended the tips with a helping reminder that no one is perfect, which some parents often forget. The project that I had the hardest time working on was the unfamiliar genre. I never knew where to start and once I did get started I did not know how to word things in a book made for little children. Would they understand the bigger words I used and if I did not used the words I had wanted to use would the book be overly simplistic? The stories had to fit in to only a few pages and have only a little bit on each page, because of the child’s lack of interest. I was excited to try this genre even though I had never even read these types of books before, because of my son. I hoped that he would enjoy the books that I had written and learn the lessons that I placed among the words of the story. Even with the words as a barrier I ran into another one with the pictures. I am not the best artist in the world and I did not know how to recreate the same image of the people in my book. I wanted to express what the words could not show. Also the pictures would aid in the understanding to the children who did not understand the words, or to help them correlate the written word to the meaning. I had also decided to make this a draw your own story book after I saw my son so happy with a crayon in his hand. He went nuts when he figured out how to use the tool properly. I figured that this was a good activity that parents and children could do together during the day and then they could read them the story that they had helped create to them at night. I sadly was unable to draw a background for any of the pictures, but this could aid in the child’s creative process in making up a world of their own, like placing the people in the book on the moon, or in a jungle. If I were to go back and finish this project fully I would add a background and better outline the pictures so that there is more of a defined line to color in rather that my sketched lines. I am sad to say that other that a few fixes on my story book and fine tuning on my narrative I probably will never look at any of these pieces again. Each one held a separate struggle for me and I could never follow my basic structure of thought or my pre-writing exercise to help with the development of these essays. I was also unsure on how to finish most of these essays because there were no college examples in the book, as it was written for teaching high school. I liked the idea of following along with the book and writing like it said to in the book so we could get a feel for high school or middle school writing, however there was nothing to base on how mine should look to the work in the book. Obviously it had to be better and longer, but to what extent I was never sure. Overall I found this class to be very helpful and the projects within the profile I am sure I will want to take, along with others, into my class room. I am not sad to say that I have no intention to sell the book. I actually hope to use it one day in creating lesson plans.