Reflective Essay

Our assignment for Mr. Sutherland is simple. Create a blog, write about a topic, and post it in our blogs. So far I think I’m doing okay, it’s never really something I stress about throughout the week. I have posted a total of thirteen assignments on my blog. Most of the things I post are basically thoughts and feelings towards the different perspectives people have about society and religion. Other topics I write about are topics I can relate to, ideas, thoughts, and feelings I have encountered throughout my life so far. I wrote two songs, one of them is about religion and the other one is about the girls I knew in middle school. A couple posts in my blog are responses to what other people post and my thoughts about it. I also have responded to quick writes from the class that I wrote about in my journal. I find responding and talking about the quick writes a lot easier than writing about other topics of my own because I have already written about them in my journal. I would have already heard ideas from the people in the class who discuss about them, so I don’t really have to think much, just organize. Of course there are plenty of challenges I always struggle with, some of them are easy to overcome, but other obstacles make it hard for me to continue writing about the topic. But despite all the struggles I face, I still enjoy having a blog.

In middle school, I thought I was a great writer. Well, at least according to what my 8^th grade teacher said, but I believed her. She made us write essays, paragraphs, and poetry, which is my favorite type of writing. However, it’s not like she made us write paragraphs every day, not even every week. I was never used to writing more than 350 words every week. Every time my English teacher would tell us to write a five paragraph essay I would immediately freak out, I would stress a ton over five paragraphs. It was very rare to me when I was told to do such thing, and that’s probably why I would freak out so much. But now that I go to ASTI, I feel like I can write a five paragraph essay with   no trouble at all. Of course, it would take a while to get my ideas straight, but it’s just not as hard as it used to be. I can’t believe how I could have so much to worry about a wimpy five paragraph essay. Yesterday I read this essay I wrote in 8^th grade, we basically had to write a story, in five paragraphs or more. I remember it took me days to finish my first draft. Weeks later, when I finally published my essay I felt like it was the best thing I ever written, I put so much effort in it. The whole story was about eight pages long, double spaced. My teacher was so proud of me; she showed it as an example to the entire 8^th grade. But anyways, I look at it now, and it’s crap! It’s a good story, but it has no theme, a ton of errors in grammar, and a couple parts aren't essential and don’t make sense. It was the best because two thirds of the 8^th grade sucked at writing. But that was the past, now I find it easier to write five paragraphs. All thanks to Mr. Sutherland’s magnificent blog idea.

            My blog ideas come from different places. Sometimes they come straight out of Mr. Sutherland’s classroom, but other times they come from my own personal experiences. Some things that come from school are the quick writes; I wrote and responded to about a couple. One post in my blog that I consider to be fairly successful was the quick write: Is Bob Still a Person? It was basically asking if there was a limit or a point where a human is no longer a human. Music is also one of the things that inspires me to write. I listen to music every day, so I am familiar with the process of writing lyrics for a song; which leads me to another post I wrote in my blog. It’s a song about a tragic event in my life that affected everyone in my family. A tear jerking event that not only teared me apart, it also made me who I am now, an atheist. I guess the best line from that is when it says, “Hurricane God, Caused so much destruction.” This line is for the people who say that God works in mysterious ways, or that God is good. It’s talking back to those people and saying, “No, God is a deadly storm.” These are some of the ways I come up with things to write about, and the results.

            Because I get suck on a variety of things, I have a couple goals I set up for myself for the next quarter. One of my goals is to STOP PROCRASTINATING. I always do my blog typing on Thursdays and Fridays, but mostly Fridays. I even procrastinated while doing this essay. I want to be able to finish all my blog posts on Monday if possible or during the weekends, this way I would have more time to read The Kite Runner and finish with all my other homework. Another goal I have is try to make my blog posts longer; I noticed that the word count barely meets the requirements. I am so obsessed get assignment done that I don’t even bother looking over it; I just calculate the number of words and then post it. Sometimes I do this when I run out of ideas, which means that the topic I choose to write about is not something I know a whole lot about or I don’t have a strong relationship with it. So my third goal would be to pick the topic carefully, to brainstorm and make sure that I have a lot to say about that topic. Otherwise it would be short and repetitive. These are the goals I plan on achieving for the next quarter of blog posting.