Learning and gaining from My Own Experience

All the way through this semester, we read, discussed and learned together a whole list of issues regarding to basic writing, basic writers as well as basic writing pedagogies. I still remembered at the first meeting in English 621 class when Dr. Cadle asked us the question of why we chose to take this class, my answering was “to learn how to write because I’m really interested in writing itself.” At that time I didn’t realize this course is actually aiming at teachers who teach basic writing rather than learning how to write as writers! So starting from kind of an inappropriate direction, I set out! Then throughout this journey, I found out that I indeed have learned a lot!!

Struggling desperately in the hardships of writing down my papers in all the three courses I’m taking this semester, and of preventing my heart from being hurt by all the difficulties I was encountering in this very process, I couldn’t figure out how much I’ve learned and gained! For my poor and sorry performance in my papers in all the three subjects, I experienced the lowest hollow of completely losing my confidence in writing and even feeling I had no hope to improve at all; I experienced the time that I almost decided to give up this course and thought writing was not my thing; I experienced feeling ashamed of myself because of my terrible performances and grades coming out…

I felt like I myself was the representative character in our readings of this course! How could that be??? But IT WAS! I for several times fell into the meditation on why I was what I was that time and how I could make a difference of myself in writing, then the reasons showed up in front of me: I telling myself the truth didn’t pay enough attention to it, didn’t work hard on it and even didn’t have the tendency of trying to make progress! In other words, I didn’t put all my heart to cultivate on it! Not because I didn’t want to improve, but because I totally lost my confidence and had been stuck there for such a long time! Because some objective stuff distracted so much my energy and attention, my work for example.For an exhausted body and heart, no improvement seemed possible!! Further I realized that as a result, I devoted too little time to my study and that’s where the root reason of everything lied! I don’t think I’m too dump to write well and incapable of making progress, and I couldn’t persuade myself to believe that’s where I was supposed to be, so I decided to do something! I spent more time on my study and consulted my classmates—I kind of dared to talk with my professors about my papers, I asked from my classmates to borrow their former papers to learn from, tried to do the readings and assignments more carefully, and by chance I once had a short talk with Dr.Cadle then I found that communications between teachers and students are of great importance and essential! We could get to know what teachers’s standards and requirements for papers and assignments are and what their constructive advices are for you, at the same time, they could know more about you, about what you are thinking and thus have more ideas and accesses to help you to improve!!

Considered as sort of a summary of my study in this semester and also as a deeper understanding of the readings of this course, my own experience helped me realize fairly a lot: I learned to reconstruct my confidence bit by bit, I got good advices and great encouragement from my professors who once wrote down the sentences as “This is a good start of a good paper…”, “good summaries and good comments, if you could work on more your sentences and grammar…”, and said to me in person the simple but powerful words “Thank you!”. I was fully filled with encouragement, motivation and strength! I really want to say to all my professors and my classmates: MANY THANKS TO YOU ALL! WITHOUT YOUR GREAT HELP, I COULDN’T MAKE PROGRESS AND REGAIN MY CONFIDENCE AS A WRITER! ALTHOUGH I STILL LACK OF A LOT IN WRITING, BUT I’LL KEEP GOING AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE OF MYSELF!!! THANK YOU AGAIN!