03 December 2009- Blog

College Composition 111 was not at all the class I expected. Hundreds of writing assignments, overly critical grammar-focused professors and boring lectures was how I envisioned the course. This was not how my first college level English course revealed itself. The amount of actual graded writing was amazingly few, the instructor Paul Gasparo was very knowledgeable but less than focused and the classes were often too lively to effectively achieve true learning.

Maybe because I waited so long to attend college or maybe because of horror stories friends told, apprehension filled my guts when thinking of English 111. Frantically typing trying to finish a twenty page paper every week is the way the course looked in my mind. This image is the furthest from actuality that I possibly could have created. With a total of ten graded writing assignments and only one with a length exceeding one thousand words, I truly had nothing to worry about.

With only ten graded writing assignments I actually feel cheated by this class. The amount of assignments did not allow me to develop my writing skills during this semester. If twenty papers are graded and each paper quality checked by a professor, a pattern of development would be apparent. Having only ten papers to review, I feel that no marked improvement is visible.

With at least ten assignments each from over forty students, my instructor Paul Gasparo is always busy. Too add to that work, Paul developed an extensive list of thought provoking out-of-course material, maintains class assignments on Blackboard, moderates a class discussion forum, attends classes to improve his online teaching and also works at the Tidewater Community College Online Writing Lab. His plate is overly full.

This “fullness” might affect the flow of our class learning. In my opinion Paul is an excellent teacher. His lessons are created to bolster a sense of independence in the students and understand our individual creative writing process. In the effort to incorporate as much creative learning as possible sometimes we only glaze over important fundamental concepts. As Paul is learning of new methods and ideas, they are being incorporated into our lessons. While this is an attempt to help energize our learning, often our lessons seem scattered and rarely are all of the students on the same page.

The students in Paul Gasparo’s 111-60 College Composition course are extremely varied: short, tall, skinny, fat, black, white, tan, young, old, quiet, loud, pleasant and overly obnoxious. These are just some of the traits of my classmates. Growing up in a diverse city I learned to coexist peacefully with nearly all types of people. This aided my transition into the military, the most culturally diverse environment I ever belonged to. Nothing could have totally prepared me for this class. Every week I looked forward to the new lesson but not learning it with my classmates.

Most people are taught that learning is a privilege and everyone should give respect to your teacher for allowing you that privilege. I doubt many in this class learned that lesson. Talking back to a teacher, interrupting a teacher or other students and refusing to listen to instructions were common place all semester. My classmates have taught me that a mob mentality can be completely infectious and I have joined in with their commotion. For those times I apologize to Paul and all of my classmates. My parents and former teachers taught me better classroom etiquette and would have been ashamed to watch a single class.

As this semester nears the climax I realize that this class taught me many things that will assist me throughout my higher education. Understanding the course workload in advance caused me to seek other people to review and critique my writing. Having a teacher offer as much information from all available sources, has allowed me to better understand my capacity for research. My classmates taught me learning should be done in quiet and I should not add to their noise. Though this class was not perfect I am glad that I attended and I would recommend that only independent learners enroll in the future.