Course Reflective Essay

Deciding to take English 1010 in high school was a great decision to make. I really
enjoyed coming to this class and felt as if the assignments we were given were jumping far out of
the range that a regular high school student would be doing. This was the push that I needed this
school year. The few major projects that we worked on in this course were our flash narrative,
rhetorical analysis, annotated bibliography, and the civic engagement project. The topic I chose
to do all these major projects on is cyberbullying and the effects it has on young children and
teens. This is what my topic started out as but as time went on throughout the course I decided to
add to it. I added what signs parents should look for if their child is experiencing cyberbullying. I
found this to be fit because there are a lot of things most parents wouldn’t be looking out for if
their children were the victim of cyberbullying.
The first assignment I want to reflect on is my flash narrative. My flash narrative is
written on the reality of cyberbullying. My goal with writing this flash narrative was to draw
people in with a fun beginning storyline. I tried to make this story relatable to children who are
mainly experiencing cyberbullying. When I started working on revisions I got feedback from
some of my peers. They loved the story line but just had some small things that I should add or
delete that weren’t useful. All in all they loved it. Before publishing this piece I made the final
revisions and submitted it into canvas to be reviewed by Haslam. This flash narrative started as a
fun thing for me to write but over the weeks on this course, and as I started to research more, I
realized that this flash narrative is not just a fun story anymore. Cyberbullying needs to be
brought more awareness to everyone, parents and children. It is a problem that needs to be solved
and I am glad I chose to talk about this topic over the few course weeks. link
The next assignment I want to reflect on is my rhetorical analysis. In this assignment I
picked an article that best reflected what I was doing my civic engagement project on. The article
was called “ "The Real Life Effects of Cyberbullying on Children." written by Sherri Gordon. In
this article it expands on the effects that cyberbullying has and what parents should be on the
lookout for. It coincides very well with the topic of my civic engagement project. A had a lot of
peer reviews for this assignment which really helped me make well throughout our revisions.
With as many things they said I need to improve on, they also had a lot of things that I did really
well. After revising the assignment I submitted it on canvas to again be final reviewed by
Haslam for a grade. This assignment was very important to the rest of my work because I used
this article for information throughout the rest of the course. link
My next assignment is my annotated bibliography. This assignment happened throughout
a course of 3 submissions. In each submission I had to find articles that related to my civic
engagement topic. We had to find 6 different articles which would seem pretty easy, but it
wasn’t. Trying to find articles that coincide perfectly with my topic was challenging, but with a
lot of digging I found the perfect fits. After finding the articles I reflected on them. I wrote why I
chose the certain article, I wrote how the article made me feel, who wrote the article, and added
direct quotes to fit the topic of cyberbullying. I was only given revisions on the first three
because we were only assigned peer reviews for the 1 out of 3 submissions. I used the advice I
got from my first three and applied it to the last 3 that I needed to complete. This assignment
helped with my final project because it gave me places to look for information to include in my
project.
My last assignment that I need to reflect on is my civic engagement project. Deciding the
project that I wanted to do was very challenging. At first I thought I wanted to write a children’s
book on cyberbullying and create a story line of a young child being cyberbullied and how their
parents helped. After consideration it felt unoriginal and I wanted to think out of the box. Instead
I chose to make a handheld project of a phone. The phone was made out of styrofoam and
wrapped in felt. I created my own text strand of a child cyberbullying another child. In the
middle of the phone is a sign that says no cyberbullying. I made this in hopes that people will
read the mean text strand and realize how cruel children can be. I hope that parents will take
more responsibility and start to monitor their children's access to the internet. I ended up
adapting this project into a PSA for one of my major adaptations. I created a poster with pictures,
information, and statistics on cyberbullying. I decided to do this as an adaptation because it
includes more information about cyberbullying than the handheld project does. I really enjoyed
doing both of these projects and I don’t have a favorite.
 I see myself using the skills that I have learned in this course throughout all my years of
schooling and life. Not necessarily the certain projects that we did but the steps that went along
with submitting those projects. Almost each project required 2-3 peer reviews which is
something that a lot of people find hard to do. Giving criticism to your peers is sometimes
uncomfortable but it is a good lesson to learn to be able to take with you. One day at my big girl
job I am going to be placed in a position where I will be needed to give critiques about
something and this course has taught me how to do so. This course was wonderful and I learned
a lot.