Reflection Letter

I am a factual thinker and writer. I do not like to write about warm and fuzzy things such as identity. I do not like to analyze fictional characters in movies or discuss my writing with others so what did I have to learn in English 101D? A lot! I am going back to school after being out for over ten years. I am a professional dancer, the ballet kind, and a dance teacher. I decided it was a good time to go back to school to pursue my second career which will hopefully be as a lawyer. My ultimate goal is to become a judge. I love politics and reading law books. You see there is no room for fiction here. I have always enjoyed reading biographies about people who are successful in the world of politics. I watch TV shows like Law and Order or even Judge Judy but you would not catch me watching something like Sex and the City or Survivor.

My goal is to put criminals away behind bars where they can not harm the innocent especially children. I used to finding academics easy and I have come to the realization that pregnancy kills brain cells. I have three children and with every one I had I could feel my brain cells being sucked out of my head. So this class was harder for me than I thought it was going to be. If I could have been given an assignment to research and write a paper on anything political or law based this class would have been a breeze for me.

The group discussions were a challenge for me in this class because I do not feel like I have the right to tell anyone else how to write or what they are doing wrong. But I learned a lot from the thinking process and this I assume is the reason that we are assigned to these types of tasks, not to tell each other what to do with our writing but to engage in a way of thinking that expands our minds and if I am lucky restores brain cells. The timed writes were my least favorite as I did not feel like I even came close to my best work. I think that they were a good challenge though and it is something we need to get used to, pressure that is. My favorite challenges were the paper assignments. I felt like I improved in my skills which is exciting and I am proud but humble at the same time of these essays that I am including in my portfolio.

To my amazement I actually learned a lot from the topics of identity, community, and tradition. Before this class these topics were more abstract than real and tangible to me. I have always looked at identity for myself to mean who I am and where I came from as far as my parents and grandparents go. Reading the essays in this chapter and especially the essay by Lucy Grealy titled Masks really struck me hard. It made me think about those who are having their identity shaped by external factors and the contributions that we all make to each others identity. I am not a crier but this particular essay really touched me and I felt it change me while I was reading it. When Lucy was talking in her essay about how people should stop wanting what everyone else has got and realize how lucky they are it really hit home to me. I took it personally when Lucy said “I wanted them to stop, to see how much they had already, how they had their health and their strength”. I got more out of this essay than just completing an English assignment I actually got a life lesson in appreciating what I do have. That is huge!

The community unit was the most motivating topic in this course for me because I felt like it had the biggest impact on my perception of what community is. My group’s discussion of the movie “Off the Map” was one of the pieces that challenged my thoughts on community. The characters in this movie were very different from mainstream Americans and while analyzing the characters in the discussion I was amazed at the difference in opinion on matters in the movie that I thought would be public opinion. As an example in the movie one of the characters walks around the house nude in front of his daughter who is old enough to be embarrassed about it. I thought that my group would agree that this was the character stepping over the boundaries of public decency but they did not. There were comments like “I am a mother, and nudity does only have to do with one person's comfort level. We need to teach our children to be proud of their bodies, not ashamed” and “All that means is that they are comfortable with themselves and their surroundings. Realizing how different we all view things made me think more deeply about community and what that word means to me. In reality communities are all around us in practically everything we do. We are made up of little groups that make up our family, our neighborhood, our city, our state, our country, and ultimately our whole world. All these communities are created because of our need to feel like we belong and are important in the lives of others. I was amazed to find out that people dealing with anorexia have a community where they support each other in their disease and not necessarily in a way to get help to get away from the disorder but to give advice on how to do it right. This essay by Mim Udovitch titled “A Secret Society of the Starving” opened my eyes to what people think of as communities. This community even had its own set of commandments called the Thin Commandments where one of them said “Thou shall not eat without feeling guilty”. This information is out there on the World Wide Web where any young girl could come across it and find that there is a community that understands and accepts her and enables her, in effect, to kill herself. This is frightening as a mother!

Tradition was an easier subject for me to relate to as my family has many traditions; my favorite tradition is making my family French toast, bacon, eggs, and hash browns every Sunday. My kids love to help me and are experts at cracking eggs without getting the shell in the mixture. The bonding that we feel when we engage in traditions is priceless. We are creatures of habit and I have always believed that traditions do promote unity and that’s why we hold on to them. I feel like I understood from the poem by Rosario Morales and her daughter Aurora Levins Morales that where we come from matters but it matters just as much that we find our own way and not let ourselves be held down by the same traditions. When I think of the impact that tradition can have my hope is that my children and grandchildren and so on will remember some of our family traditions but I hope that they will also do what makes them complete, like it says at the end of the Morales’s poem “And we are whole.” That is what I want for my family is the rare feeling of being whole.

All of the assignments in this class were a challenge for me and I found myself actually feeling my brain work out. It even hurt at times to think because it has been so long since I have had to use it an academic manner but I do feel a sense of accomplishment as we near the end of the class. The pieces that I have chosen to display in my portfolio are, in my opinion, my best work. I think that even my revision piece was good it just needed some reconstructive surgery to give it a face lift and make it look appealing. I enjoyed getting feedback from my class mates and also from the instructors. I appreciate the “can do” attitude that radiated from the instructors postings and the encouragement was very helpful for me to stay motivated. I hope that you enjoy reading my portfolio as much as I enjoyed writing it!