Journal Entry 1

Dear classmate, I am really looking forward to getting good work done in this course. The professor seems to grade harder than any any of my previous english teachers but she seems to be very willing to help her students. I’ve never been enthusiastic towards going to english classes because I always felt that I was not a strong enough writer to do well, but I am hoping to break that fear of mine in this course. Hopefully this course makes me less shy than I already am. Also hopefully this course allows me to improve my writing skills because I will need it for my future.

Journal entry 5

This advertisement is for the Nike fuel band. the advertisement does a good job targeting both its expected audience and unknown audience The way that it does this is by the words “Life is a sport.Make it count”. these words are meant to target people who may be slightly overweight and those who are not in shape. The words life is a sport is meant to boost their moral about their lifestyle and how hard life is. it calling them an athlete because of the difficulties of life. its meant to make them feel good about themselves and feel like the product is meant for them. The expected audience are joggers and other like them. They typically don't have time to work out nor can they afford it so this band is meant to track their hard work for them. This advertisement may also spark the idea for those who don't workout or exercise regularly if not at all start, and a product to help them do it is shown to them to make them want to workout. This advertisement does a good job at targeting their audiences.

Journal Entry 10

I believe that my writing has improved very much throughout the length of this course. i have never like writing I always avoided it and tried to do the minimum necessary to pass. But this semester sought out to improve my writing so that it wouldn't continue to be a problem for me in the future. I started off the semester already hoping for it to end because of how much I hated writing. I always thought that I could find a way to avoid it but I can't I realize that now. I can’t keep avoiding the problem, i had to face it. Thats what I did this semester that's was my greatest accomplishment, I face my fear of being forced to write and I feel that I’ve emerged a better writer and person overall.

What helped with that the most was peer review. I always thought that i was the worst writer in the world and I couldn't, but peer review showed me that There was nothing to be ashamed about my writing and that it was a process and not something you do in 15 minutes and expected to be amazing. It shows me that everybody make mistakes, nobody's perfect, and(what haunted me the most) I wouldn't be scrutinized for my poor writing skills. Another thing that helped me was the reviews from my professor which always made me feel like I was not complete horrible and shows me where I could improve. I really like this writing course because it made me a better writer and taught me thats nobody is perfect and boosted my confidence in the fact that I can actually write well.

Journal Entry 4

 

Beginning my literacy narrative was not hard, but i did come across one obstacle. That obstacle was trying to remember a story that dealt with reading and writing but I always avoided those area in academia because I was very weak in that area( specifically reading). In the beginning I was having trouble remembering what exactly I wanted to talk about and whether enough events occurred that i would be able to meet the minimum page requirements of the paper. When I started writing I began by listing everything i wanted to talk about. after completing that i began to elaborate on every area that I wanted to cover in the literacy narrative. After doing so I began writing them down in the order from which they occurred. I never revised my paper up until that day of peer review and the person that was reviewing pointed out every mistake that i made that could have been easily corrected if i simply revised it. Overall I enjoyed thinking back to my high school days, it brought to mind a lot of fun memories of me hanging out with my friends.

Journal Entry #8

The research paper was good over all. I felt that the delivery was strong and the global structure was good as-well. Her introduction was very interesting because it of how she started it. She began her introduction with a sentence that made the reader think that he/she knew what was she was gonna say but then changed it to what was actually gonna be discussed. Throughout the paper I was unsure whether or not she was looking at human trafficking as a form of or part of slavery, or the author was saying that human trafficking is slavery.

She gave enough background for the reader. I felt that at the end of the paper she started to go down the path of a call to action for the reader but gave up on it in the beginning of her concluding thoughts about the topic. Overall to reiterate I think that the flow of her paper was strong, at no point in the story was I lost because of a lack of information nor the misunderstanding of any information, She stated her view strong ly in the introduction and her introducing sentence was good.  

Proposal

Does religion affect law?

People do not act the same as before, people change and so their view and cultural beliefs. If society has changed so much, do the laws for which we are governed under need a change too? Church and state is supposedly separated under yet we let one of the basic beliefs of a religion that took over a majority of the world affect the way we make laws. Religion or any belief systems at times can often be the foundation of a culture's value and how thing get done. If religion is so powerful shouldn't there be a force to govern its effect on law. Is there an effect on law? Under U.S law all religions are protected, but I feel that some religions are favored more than others. Is it right for a Christian lawmakers to impose the morals that they developed from their belief system to be imposed on you and me? One example I can think is gay marriage. Is it right that law maker can have a say in love. What divine right do they have to do such a thing, and even if they did have a divine right, is it fair that they force it upon us? Such situations like this happen every day that we live. Lawmakers feel that they have the right to impose their religious view onto us.

        I plan to research laws that affect our daily live and evaluate whether or not they are driven by the religious beliefs and how they are driven by religious beliefs. For my research I will use the John jay library. Also I will look at courts cases in which final decisions were affected by religion or any other cultural belief for that matter. I plan to look up law reviews from well-known laws from around the country. I will take a look organization that try to preserve religions and how they do so. The most important question to answer is whether or not laws are affected by religious value and whether or not it is right to do so and why?

I plan to begin my research with finding out how much man is influenced by religion. I will find out just how powerful religion is and how I got to be very powerful. The question I plan to answer is whether or not law is affected by religion and if so how. Another question I will pose is does the US protect law making from influence from law. Are there any currents laws state and/or federal that seem to be resemble or look like morals or have some sort of religious belief as its foundation. And whether or not these laws can be justified?

It is important that we make sure that law is not influenced heavily by religion and or any belief system, the world has changed greatly from what it was a century ago. Not all people believe in the same god or gods you do. Nor do they wish to have your moral value pushed on to them. Is our job as those who are affected by law directly? It’s our job to make sure that law is fair, just, and pure.

Literacy Narrative

                                                       Dealing with reading

  

I never thought that I would read this much in such little time. I had a dreamed about it and It was all I could think about as I entered the room. I've never really liked reading books nor writing for that fact. I just could never force myself to sit down for an hour or two and read a book that I didn't find interesting in the slightest. This was my life growing up, I was always told or pushed by either my father or teachers on what to do. This is why I hated reading. I almost always found a way to around having to read. I remember sitting in class in middle school looking at all the students read the books that the teacher let us pick out from the shelves of books. I remember sitting down making it look like I was reading when what I was really doing was watching the other students mouth the words of the book. I remember always asking myself “ what the hell do they find interesting in these damn books”. Around the 8th grade I found websites that analyzed pieces of literature and gave the key points of the stories. Websites like this is what kept me from failing a lot of my english classes. This process began to fail when I attended High School.

 Before entering high school I was petrified of it because of all the things past students of my middle school said about it. In short they made high school sound like college. Shortly into freshman year I found out that what they said was not true. The teachers do cared about your thoughts and they were nice. I got assigned the very first book I found interesting The House on Mango street. Another plus is that I got to make friends with very nice people. One of my close friends who I met in freshman year of high school used to go down to the school library where we would hang out. He introduced me to anime series such as One Piece and Bleach. But these books weren’t what teachers wanted students for school. I started to enjoy till I was introduced Critical Lens essays. Boy, did I hate this. Not reading the books that I should have put me in a situation in which I was unable to complete my assignments and was facing failing 9th grade english.

The only reading I did in school was the time I spent in the school library during lunch even though they didn't help me much but it did help me deal with the issue of sitting down for an hour or two of reading. I didn't have to do this much in my sophomore year because the reading were enjoyable and overall very interesting. 11th grade is where the challenges began, where everything got boring again I just couldn't take it anymore and resorted back to my old ways. When the regents came around I learned that my old habits were not paying off. All the books that I should have read and didn't would have been helpful for me during the regents because I had to do something that I haven’t done it in a long time, A critical lens essay. When I reached that part of the exam, naturally I was able to complete the first paragraph which was my own understanding and interpretation of the quote, but that was as far as 9I could get. after that point I struggled to remember what I had read from class. My palms got sweaty, I looked around nervously for a spark of ingenuity but nothing. I remember asking myself, what parts of the books connected to my interpretation of the quote?  After spending what felt like 2 hours on the exam. I handed in my paper and i walked out hoping that I passed but knowing that I had failed.

The last day of school came and all students were handed their report cards. I looked over my shoulder in the my homeroom class looking at all the students happily trading report cards to compare it to theirs. I remember the happy faces of students who thought they failed their classes but passed. It was like time slowed down and my unsettling mood got worse as I saw all others students happy. In all my report card was good. I had good grades in all my classes and i knew that my parents would be proud. When I  looked at the exam back bowed my head in shame ready to see the failing grade. BUT I PASSED. When I got home later that day my mother yanked to report card out of my hand she was happy that I did well in my classes and was surprised to see that i had a low grade for the English exam. She handed me the house phone and I was a bit puzzled until I said hello and my father immediately told me to read the report card to him over the phone. When i got to the exam I had gotten  a low grade on I hesitated to speak. he said Is that all, i replied no and told him that I got a 69 on the English exam. He asked me to explain to him what made me get the grade. I told everything about using websites to learn about the books assigned by teachers in order to avoid having to actually read them.h told me that I had to retake the exam because it would affect me being accepted to any college.  

That following summer leading into the first semester of twelve grade I started to read all the books that I needed to read. In twelve grade English I learned how to properly take notes on a book and this helped me a lot. The day of the exam I questioned whether I could remember what I read or will I just forget it and repeat what happened to me. As entered the room I was scared and worried about what would happen when I reached the part of the test that lower my grade the first time. When I reached the Critical lens essay I started to write and write. Remembering the books were not hard for me. I left the feeling confident and that I passed with a very high grade. I was wrong my grade only 6 points.

Even though I didn't score a very high grade I learned several things. The first being that those sites weren't as helpful as I thought it might be when it came to the state exam. The second being that, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.