Reflections

Hello all. My name is Anthony Castaneda. This is actually my first year in college, and my third quarter as well. I decided to attend Everett Community College right out of high school since I didn’t feel quite ready to enroll in a university, even though I had a very good chance of getting into one. I’m working part-time (kind of) and outside of work, I work on computers. I’m actually working on my Associates in Information Technology through the college, and I plan on transferring to a university. I’m actually surprised that the class went by in a steady pace. During fall quarter, I felt that all my classes were going by painfully slow and winter quarter going along too fast. Although the class went by smoothly time-wise, I felt that I didn’t do that well of a job. I wasn’t pacing myself correctly, and looking back, it seemed like I wasn’t even trying.

Throughout the course of the quarter, I had to work with identity, community, and tradition. After working with those three major themes, my eyes were more opened about diversity. I never thought about how much those three things were important in our lives. I didn’t care too much about the whole diversity aspect of the class that much and the only thing that was on my mind was just finishing the class and getting it over with. After reading the text and watching the movies, it made me more open to the world around us. I never thought of culture as something that is always changing. I always thought of culture strictly tied to a foreign country, but reading Richard Rodriguez’s essay “’Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans” it made me realize that the three major themes are what build culture and that “culture is fluid. Culture is smoke. You breathe it. You eat it. You can’t help hearing it – Elvis Presley goes in your ear, and you cannot get Elvis Presley out of your mind” (123). With that quote in the back of my head, it gives me a wider and definite view about living in a diverse society.

The four chosen pieces that I’ve chosen for my portfolio are the intermission one movie discussion board post, my community essay, my blog post on my wallet, and the tradition discussion board one post. I decided to choose these four pieces because I think they help me express what I feel about the subject and that it showed my full capabilities of analyzing text and movies assigned to us. More specifically, I chose my intermission one discussion board post since I felt that I demonstrated my critical thinking skills successfully. Choosing a piece that demonstrated my skills as a writer was somewhat difficult, since almost all of the papers I had trouble with sticking to the prompt, but I believe that my community essay displayed that it needed a lot more work than the rest of my papers. I thought that my blog post on my wallet was a good example of awareness of my audience and voice, since it’s something I feel that everyone that will stumble upon my blog can relate to, or to inspire someone to write about their own wallets. Finally, I chose my tradition discussion board one post as my writer’s choice because I feel that answering some of the questions that were presented for that discussion board post helped me answer some questions that I had within myself as well.

Even though taking this class proved to be difficult since I had to work during the day and go to school at nights, I still enjoyed it. I’m also thankful for taking this class, since it opened my eyes more to the world around me.