I can’t believe it’s been seven weeks! As I dive deeper into my college experience, this place is starting to feel more and more like home. Although it seems like a ghost town some days, my familiarity at Chapel Hill is building, making me eager for these next four years. Despite the unfortunate circumstances and lack of face-to-face encounters, it’s becoming easier to make connections and relationships with fellow students. It’s safe to say all freshmen are more comfortable navigating new course websites since some were quite confusing at the beginning of the year. This week in English 105, we submitted our final unit projects, which was considerably less work than I presumed since our previous feeders held so much of the information, but overall the course has been moderate and organized, making it easy to submit assignments on times.
On Monday, we received are feedback from Thursday’s workshop to revise our Unit Projects. In my opinion, peer-reviewing has been much more helpful than past experiences, and it’s nice to hear others’ opinions and criticisms about your work.
On Tuesday’s class, we started with our classic in-class check-up, which I believe people find very accommodating in these stressful times. We then discussed the discrepancies of Eglish 105 with and without Covid-19, had a brief recap on grammar, punctuation, and syntax from the previous lesson, and examined paragraph structure, formatting, and transitions. Later in class, we went into breakout rooms to address where paragraphs should and shouldn’t be in a text. The activity was to read an article with no paragraphs and then place the indents in the suitable place while discussing with classmates. The activity was definitely beneficial, considering my breakout room got into some disputes, which prompted more in-depth thinking. Overall, one of the better in-class activities, for me at least, because I like to engage in conversation with others.
We transitioned into our second unit on Thursday’s class, writing in the natural sciences, and discussed this part of the course while brainstorming some ideas for our second unit project. We had our regular class check-in, but this one actually surprised me, unlike some of the others. It seemed my classmates are doing significantly better than the chaotic start to the year. After we briefly talked, we went into breakout rooms to discuss our topics with our group. We answered some basic questions regarding our topic, then finished the class, touching on a few notes and unit 2.
The purpose of the activities was to prepare us for the more rigorous aspects of future assignments. At some point, Paul mentioned he was going to be understanding and lenient on our first few assignments as we begin college in such unfortunate times, so I think the extra preparation and time to prepare for our next unit was crucial. This past week wasn’t a stressful one for English 105, so it was quite nice being able to sit back and catch up in some of my other classes. Overall, we focused on the course’s future and material soon to be covered, and with not much due, it was certainly a triumphant week for me.
References
McConnell, Bridgeton. “4 COVID-19 Clusters Identified at UNC Residence Halls, Fraternity House.” Chapelboro.com, 16 Aug. 2020. chapelboro.com/news/coronavirus-covid-19/unc-students-alerted-of-covid-19-clusters-in-2-residence-halls.
