Thursday, March 5, 2009

The Last Assignment

The first day I got to English was actually the third class meeting because I signed up late thinking that I wasn’t going to be a full time student this year. Missing three classes is like missing almost three weeks of class. So for me, assignments for this class already piled up, because of the days that I missed. Paul was nice enough to give me extensions on the assignments that I have missed. The class, being an eight-week course, instead of a normal sixteen-week course, even though the class was fun and rewarding, it was fast paced with a lot of assignments due one after the other. I have never taken an eight-week course, so the pace was all too new to me.
Paul Gasparo as an instructor was also new to me. I haven’t had a young instructor like him that paid attention to his students with the utmost attention. He understands what everybody is going through. Like he said, he has been there, done that. He understands that English is not the only class that we are taking at TCC (Tidewater Community College), and that most of us do have jobs. He tries to accommodate to everybody’s needs to make English a fun and worthwhile class, not a burden to wear us out every day with exhaustion from doing assignments.
Like I said before, this English class is fun and definitely worthwhile. I wouldn’t recommend taking an eight-week course. I had to take it because it was the only class that could fit in my schedule, as I believe a lot of people in the class did as well, but I am glad I signed up for Paul’s class. Paul kept the class interesting with his methods of teaching that was new to me. With watching films, reading texts, and discussing on what we just watched or what we have just read, everybody in the class was participating.
With assignments due almost each and every week, it was hard to keep up. Yet once again, Paul was nice enough to the class that he pushed the deadlines for some of the assignments and gave more time to everybody to complete the homework assigned. The first assignment I turned in was the prospectus about which topic I was researching and writing for my argument essay, which was due the week before. Two days after the prospectus, I had to turn in a diagnostics essay about my favorite vacation, which was also due the week before. The first day in class, we started writing the Restaurant Review, which was due the week after that. There were many other writing assignments like the Rhetorical Analysis, Annotated Bibliography, Argument Essay, and this blog.
The argument essay took the most time and most energy to complete. We had about four to five weeks to finish it starting from when Paul showed us the prompt. This assignment was a lot of work because there were so many requirements for sources. We needed at least eight sources, two books, two journal reviewed entries, two interviews from both sides of the argument and two other sources of our choice. What made this research paper more difficult for me was that we had to take into account both sides of the argument, in which I never had to do before. This was a challenge in which I‘m glad I am done with.
Writing almost 4,000 words in an eight-week course proved to be challenging. I am sure Paul mentioned that in the first day of class, which I regrettably missed, and he was right. There were many a few people that dropped out of the class because they could not handle it. But I do not regret taking this English class because I have learned so much from it, unbelievably, from a short amount of time. The class was definitely interesting, which Paul did a great job engaging us students to like his class. Feel free to clap because I am sure that everybody feels that same way that Paul Gasparos English class is one of the best English class any of us have taken. (Image courtesy of North Coast Jounal)

1 comment:

  1. I think this is a great account of what it was like to come into the course after the first three class meetings of an 8-week course. Hopefully future 8-weekers will read this and realize what they're in for in terms of workload and classroom experience.

    ReplyDelete