Writing the in-class essay was challenging for me even though I’ve had a lot of practice writing essays in one sitting. I prepared by rereading the story I chose to write about and also by pulling some evidence and quotes that stood out to me from the book while rereading. I chose quotes from the story that I thought I could use to support the points I was making in my essay. I also prepped by writing down thoughts I had about the prompts. I wrote down my claim and supporting points with their respective quotes to match to help me begin my essay. I separated my essay into parts. I sectioned it out so that one paragraph focused on the baby, the other paragraph on Bad and her effect in the narrator and then the last body paragraph about symbolism and what certain things like the baby could’ve stood for in the story to represent the relationship dynamic between the narrator and bad. I had a lot of trouble with time organization. There were a lot of moments when I was frozen and just having a hard time getting anything down, but once I wrote one sentence it was easy to keep going and writing from there. I started panicking a little when I realized that there were only 15 minutes left and that I still had an entire page left to write, but I managed to get the rest of my ideas down in what I believed to be a coherent manner. In the future I think I’d be a little less rigid with the prompt. I think I tried sticking too literally and closely to what the question was asking that I failed to make a really good point about something that was close to what the prompt was asking but not entirely. I would be more abstract with my claim and supporting points in the future.

I really enjoyed leading and being part of discussions led by my classmates. I loved leading the discussion because I studied the story we were assigned very closely and prepared questions about idea I was already knowledgeable about, but once we got up there my classmate’s insights gave me aha moments where I was able to grasp even more concepts and ideas that I didn’t catch when I was thinking about the story on my own. So the exchange of ideas was really helpful and I was able to learn from my classmates. I think the discussion went well. Definitely not the way I was expecting but I think the fact that there was so much to say made it easy to be up there and lead the discussion. On the other hand, I would try to cover more topics and questions if given the chance to do this again. The discussion prepared me for my in class essay by allowing me to see the story from other people’s perspective. Through the discussion I learned new things about the story I didn’t notice myself and also learned about the kind of questions other people had about the story while reading it. This allowed me to find more topics to pull from while writing my essay.