Self-Evaluation

This semester I learned a lot about Penn State, its community, and my part in its community. Our class took multiple field trips to different locations on campus and I got to know University Park and State College better because of it. We visited the Palmer Museum of Art, the Arboretum, and took a field trip to go see Kiss Me Kate at the Playhouse Theatre. I got to see many different forms of talent all having to do with art.

One of the most important things I learned is that art can be found in places one wouldn’t think to look. The obvious place is the art museum but it was also found in the arboretum, the playhouse theatre, and even just walking around campus. The nature, building, and the tight knit community is artistic in that there is passion and involvement everywhere. When I looked up a definition for art, I found this: “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination”. From this and from taking English 15 this semester, I concluded that art and humanity are very closely related. In many ways, humanity is art and vice versa.

My writing also improved over the course of the semester. We wrote four essays focusing on rhetoric and overall, they helped me improve my persuasion in my essays. I learned about pathos, ethos, and logos persuasion and incorporated them into my essays. Peer reviews and the teacher’s comments helped me improve my essays as well, and I think the days where we took a class period to read over each other’s essays helped me too. Having an opinion from not only my professor but also my peers was very helpful because there was more than just one reader looking at my paper.

I wrote a lot about Penn State in this course and I really enjoyed exploring my school and its affiliation with the arts. However, I also liked being able to expand my horizons at the end of the semester and write about something outside of Penn State.

A nice break from persuasive essays and essays about Penn State was the memoir we wrote half way through the semester. This was an essay that took longer to write because I had to think back in my memory to a time in my life I wanted to record and share with others. This was an essay that I definitely spent time on and wrote from the heart.

The blogs were another creative way to express our opinions in a more informal way. They were not stressful like the bigger papers, and I felt I could write what I wanted and how I wanted. I liked being able to record my thoughts after seeing the musical, after visiting the museum and after going to the Arboretum. It was a nice way for us to record our thoughts and I would definitely recommend this in all English courses.

Overall, this was one of my favorite courses I took this semester because I learned a lot and had fun doing it. The class was pretty laidback, which was nice and I really got to explore the campus, my writing, and myself.

Thank you so much for everything! J