JB's+Portfolio+Reflection+Essay

As a young child I grew up feeling unwanted and underestimated. I was born to teen-aged parents who divorced when I was just six or seven. My mother left us and moved to Michigan, but my younger sister and brother and I stayed in Virginia with our father and his mother (who had to leave school in the sixth grade to help out at home). My father abused alcohol and drugs and there were many nights when my sister and I huddled together listening to his rants about being rejected by God or about witches and demons following him and invading our apartment or church. As a teenager, I shuffled back-and-forth between Michigan and Virginia, losing high school credits and friends in the process. I never felt like I had anyone who really cared or understood enough about me to offer encouragement or nurture any talents or dreams I might have had—or even bothered to ask about them. I internalized the feeling that I was a nuisance and began keeping my genuine thoughts and feelings to myself; no one really was interested in what I had to say anyway. As a result, I developed a rich fantasy life and vivid imagination. I dropped out of high school and left home at the age of sixteen and never looked back. On my own I studied for and passed the high school equivalency exam in 1988, the same year my high school class graduated. On my own I went to a community college and then to Oakland University. On my own I made a life and progressed in a lucrative career, out-earning by far either of my parents. However, my attitude toward writing was not formed on my own; I can thank my parents for that.

I write carefully and deliberately. Every word is thought-out and chosen. My writing is purposeful. If I did not have to write, I wouldn’t write. This is not because I hate it, exactly, but because I have a hard time physically getting it out of my head. If the topic and purpose is work-related, for example, I don’t seem to have issues. In fact, I held a position where I had to write defense letters supporting our underwriting decisions against investor demands for repurchase or indemnification of loans we sold. I love the way the English language can be manipulated in so many different ways with so many near-synonyms that only slightly alter semantic contexts. My problem is in my ability to write essays, to share what I’m personally thinking, which I suspect is a learned behavior that developed as a consequence to the way I was raised. I formulate arguments. I construct and re-word sentences. I write: I just do it in my head; then when it comes time to putting it on paper, I balk.

There are two reasons for this, I think. First, I’ve never really shaken off the feeling that people reading or listening to my opinions are only being polite. This (possibly unfair) assumption sucks the motivation right out of me. This is why I am able to write technical or professional works—the audience does care about what I am writing. My evidence or analysis matters in a practical sense. Second, my habit of writing in my head makes me feel like I’ve “said” all there is to “say” on a topic, so putting it on paper is a redundant exercise that I find boring and tedious. Additionally, thinking and thinking and thinking about a topic before writing it makes the writing process feel like a game of //re-//creation rather than creation. Meaning, I feel like I’m always playing a game of catch-up or making a comparison with what I originally “wrote” in my head. Case-in-point: Last semester I had an assignment that required me to imitate John Milton’s writing style and write a passage connected to //Paradise Lost//. I loved this assignment, actually, because it was structured, and I was writing in someone else’s voice. I spent countless hours writing lines like, “And Belial alone transforméd sat”—it was great and I was very proud of my effort and result. What turned out not so great was losing all of my work the day before it was due. I left my flash drive in a computer in Halle’s basement computer commons. I checked back for a week and no one turned it in. I tried to remember what I had written and spent what little time I had left trying to re-write it rather than just starting over. But this is the point: I c//ouldn’t// start over because I had already used up my mental energy and enthusiasm. I remembered enough of the lines to intersperse them in the reflection paper so I earned a grade, but this hardly sufficed for the complete piece of writing I originally produced. This happened in this class, too, in a different way. My evaluative writing piece was a movie review on //Bad Teacher.// I wrote it and thought I uploaded it to my cloud account with Dropbox (no more flash drives!). I could have sworn I did this before leaving school, but I couldn’t find it. I have the severely incomplete version, the one with notes and quotes, but not the one I actually turned into an essay. I never turned it in, but I still had to re-write it because I had to write a short essay on a movie about or with an educational setting for ENG 409. It was very difficult to do because I was thoroughly unmotivated.

What I need, I think, is [|brain computer technology] so that I can have the best of both worlds. I don’t know that I would start psychologically feeling good about sharing my thoughts through writing unless I had to, but at least the process of writing would be easier for me!

With respect to this portfolio, I included pieces that are representative of my writing style. I like organization and structure and I tend to be more comfortable with professional correspondence, so I included my student profile report and my teaching philosophy. Both infuse color and graphics that enhance their respective messages and intent. I also included the product of my unfamiliar genre project. This piece represents a risk for me because as I’ve stated, I generally guard my creativity and personal expressions. Writing this poem was at once fun, frustrating, challenging, and exciting. I liked thinking about how to express the feeling of getting older and subtly marginalized by a youth-obsessed culture perpetuated by television and print media. I don’t know if I succeeded with a mixed metaphor of flowers and junipers since flowers to not turn into junipers the way people stay people. Hopefully what comes across is the idea that change is in society’s //perception// facilitated by commercials, magazines, and films so that in our youth we are seen as beautifully fragrant flowers, but as we age we are increasingly seen as prickly needles. The irony, of course, is that junipers are hearty perennials and able to withstand the winter season. Finally, I included my express/reflect essay and drafts (notice the nice safe subject matter) to show my revising /editing process. Your comments to me said you appreciated the thought-shots and I revised to include a few more to keep the piece more uniform. In addition, I cut out a significant number of sentences that describe the way the MTTC is graded because I felt it was boring and distracting. I replaced these parts with more about how I felt. I also changed the tone so that it was more conversational and casual because ultimately I am trying to get the reader to identify with me as if I am telling a story, not delivering a news report.

All-in-all, this was a very difficult class for me. I am not a person who sits down and writes for the sake of writing. I don’t think I’m particularly good at it. I do, however, recognize its importance in society and am satisfied that I possess the ability to concisely make a point through writing and to analyze the writing of my students. I also am grateful for being introduced to the two textbooks we read in this course. They are valuable resources that I will refer back to if I am lucky enough to be in front of a classroom one day. Finally, I enjoyed having the opportunity to meet and observe Sarah Andrew-Vaughn. In my observation experiences I saw her empower students by giving them a voice and a chance to lead, challenge students to examine their choices, instruct students on essay writing including forming a thesis statement and using the technique of talking to the text, require students to write in class for five minutes straight without revising and participate in peer-reviews, encourage students to take risks by focusing on the positive attributes of their writing with verbal feedback during sharing, and model risk-taking herself by reading one of her own poems. It was a terrific learning opportunity, as has been this entire course (despite my mental challenges).