My Second Essay: Family

               I was thinking about my second essay and how it comes with difficulties knowing that I can run out of facts and opinions to say. My research essay is about single parent homes versus two parent households. Many people believe that it is much better that children are raised between a mother and a father, but in some cases one of the parents can be abusive and not help their children at all versus a very responsible single parent that will do anything for their children. This topic is very controversial to the fact that everyone has a different opinion on it. Since I had to do a lot of research for this essay I found out that there are 13.7 single parents in the United States and each one of them has to take the responsibility to raise 21.8 kids. That is more than twenty five percent of the children today in the whole country. This number will just keep increasing since the divorce rate keeps rising as well. So people should be more understanding and respect these single parents since they have double the work and most of them do a great job. 

Missing Class

                Our English 101 class probably contains around 25 students but that was only the first week of the semester. Most individuals in that class think its okay to skip class almost every class period. Mr. Sweeney cannot think of something to get people’s attention in order for them to have the interest to come to class. He believes that it is our responsibility to come to class and learn all the knowledge he pours into our brains. After the first week of class only five to ten people decided to show up each day. It was a bit disappointing because some people really don’t care for their own education. I also feel like when one of us has a real excuse of why we can’t go to class our professor doesn't believe us, and honestly anyone would react this way. I just hope that people will eventually realize that they’re spending their money on this class and they should be responsible enough to show up and learn. 

Guest Speaker

Today coming into class the first thing I see was a suited man with a very thick accent coming out of his mouth. I decided to have a seat and listen to this interesting man that was speaking of education. I was more fascinated with his accent so I was listening very carefully trying to repeat the words he said. I thought it was an English accent but then I quickly heard him say something about Australian schools; so right there and then I thought it made perfect sense. He explained the importance of being in college and how it was a great idea that we started in a two year institution because we get to save loads of money when we’re learning the same material. He perfectly understood and knew all about our situation because he had experienced a two year college when he was young. A few minutes later he asked if we had any general questions about anything.  So a brave girl in the back raised her hand up high and asked “Do you have any koalas as pets?” He responded with a quick giggle and said “No I don’t have any myself, but my neighbor once owned one, and you can also go to the zoo and pick one up and even take a picture with it! Yes they are very cute!”  We all laughed and whispered amongst each other saying we wanted to touch one! Having this speaker was a great opportunity to learn about a different culture and how it works. Hopefully we’ll get to experience different speakers by the end of this semester since everyone seemed to be enjoying it. 

Research Papers

              Mr. Sweeney decided that for our research essay drafts we should do some type of Peer Reviews in groups in order for us to check each other’s writing. We got into groups of four, and we had to read our papers out loud. I started reading mine and by the time I was on the last sentence of the first page I saw people dozing off and not listening anymore. I felt like the whole part of reading our paper out loud didn’t really work since I didn’t get much feedback from any of the group members. As soon as we started passing around our essay to correct grammatical errors or any errors in general; I saw every individual putting marks all over my essay like I had a ton of mistakes. But I thought to myself that it was a great way to make my paper better and get an admirable grade. I also did the same to the essays that were handed to me. I felt like the peer review was a great way to improve our essays but reading them out loud was just a waste of time. So hopefully next time we’ll only get to read them to ourselves since it actually helped us.

Brainstorming

             Today arriving into class we decided that it would be a great idea to think of relevant ideas for our first topic; Sexuality. Mr. Sweeney decided to write on the board and told us that if we filled up the whole board then we would get out of class early. Everyone of course got ecstatic and started shouting ideas out to the point where Mr. Sweeny could not write fast enough. The first idea I thought of was adoption among homosexuals, since this is exactly what I want to write my controversial essay about. Our brainstorming continued and random ideas were being said such as STD’s, gay rights, nurture vs. nature, transgender people, music videos, child molesters, bullying…etc. We had so many ideas which completely seemed to help everyone because some people had no clue what they were going to write about. Mr. Sweeney’s brainstorming concept was perfect because it helped me think of so many other topics I didn’t even think would fit into the sexuality category. Brainstorming was the last step we needed to help us and we all ended up leaving class a few minutes early.

Arguing

Going into class after missing a class period due to being sick I realized that I missed so much of the “choosing” our topics process. I noticed that the whole class had already picked our three topics and I was very unhappy with two of them. Our topics ended up being sexuality, pop culture and family. The first thing that came straight to my head was “What am I supposed to write about for pop culture….or family?” I had no idea what I was going to write about, but then our professor helped us on deciding what some argumentative issues we could write about for each topic. A few minutes later he told us to decide what order we wanted them in. So the first essay would only be ten percent of our grade, the second one would be twenty five percent and finally the third one would be the most, reaching at thirty five percent of our grade. Since I only liked one of our topics being Sexuality I really, really wanted this topic to be our thirty five percent because I knew I would enjoy writing about it the most. So we argued and argued to the point where we couldn’t decide on any particular order. Certain classmates just did not want to give up their opinions on any of the topics. I at least wanted Sexuality to be twenty five percent but nothing worked in order for other people to be considerate of others and let them have at least the second spot for our favorite topic. Our arguing did not work at all because we ended up just randomly choosing each topic since Mr. Sweeney decided that we would never decided on anything. Next time I feel like people need to be more mature and less stubborn in order for everyone to end happy with the topics or even just the order.  

Indecisiveness

                 Walking into class made me wonder what we were doing for the day but knowing Mr. Sweeney our English professor I knew we were going to talk as a class like we've done for the past few days. He handed out a packet that contained relevant information on argumentative essays that we are going to write in the near future. A few minutes later we were all arguing about what topic to choose from so we could write about it. The three topics we needed to choose from included Crime & Punishment, Sexuality, Family, Environment, Religion, Race/Ethnicity, Pop Culture, Gender and Education. We immediately decided that Education needed to be eliminated from our list since none of us were interested in the slightest. Then my roommate and I decided to be the brave ones and write down ideas on the board in order for the everyone's indecisiveness to stabilize on three topics. We agreed on our first topic; "Sexuality" which was a great topic since there is so much to write about and we felt like we wouldn't run out of ideas to write about. We kept going onto the next topic; Environment that we thought was just as great except for one person. She felt like it was just simply a boring topic to talk about or even less to write a four page essay on. We all gave her different ideas such as recycling, global warming, gas prices, toxic waste....etc. But she still wasn't convinced. We were all running out of ideas to tell her and then I thought that we should just commit to this topic because every single person was interested about writing on the environment except for one person so maybe it would been a good idea for the majority to win. Hopefully we will decide on two more topics that will make every single one of us confident enough to write our English essays.