It is now the seventh week of the semester, and things are in motion. Classes are just as stressful as they were from the start, and nothing has really changed in that regard, but everything is falling into a regular rhythm and schedule. This set rhythm makes it easier and familiar to deal with balancing schoolwork, extracurriculars, and selfcare. However, it can still be hard to keep up even with the rhythm.
In English class, we recently wrapped up unit 1, and are underway with unit 2. Last week everyone finalized their research questions and their rough drafts for the feeder 2.1 assignment. This week the final draft of the feeder 2.1 assignment is due, and we are in the middle of unit 2. Unit 2 takes more of a social approach to analyzing and compiling research, and it makes it a lot more unique when compared to unit 1, as unit 1 was more scientific in terms of data that found. This makes finding journals or hybrid websites to gather data from a bit different compared to the first unit. The feeder 2.1 assignment consists of an annotated bibliography. Surprisingly this feeder assignment was the first time I’ve ever been tasked to create an annotated bibliography. It wasn’t the most complicated task and was mostly straightforward. The completion of feeder 2.1 will lead to beginning work on feeder 2.2, which is a presentation proposal. This seems to be slightly more complicated than feeder 2.1, but still manageable.
Personally, I have been learning a lot throughout both of these units. Before this class I had never looked at a journal and cited it, so that itself was a new process. Besides that, I have been finding it very helpful to complete drafts for each assignment and then receive peer review for each. This was a new concept to me as I usually don’t spend time on completing drafts with review, but rather just directly work on the final product. I think I’ll continue this process in the future in order to ensure a solid drafting process for quality work. I have never found the value in completing drafts, and this in class process showed me the benefit of them. I believe I can apply this process not only to my future English assignments, but rather all my academics.
Outside of our Tuesday and Thursday English zoom call, North Carolina seems to be getting everything together in terms of COVID. There has been a downward trendline of new daily COVID cases, and vaccine rollout is ahead of schedule. This is all exciting news because it is almost the one-year mark since North Carolina was put into the stay-at-home order. This is also exciting in terms of my unit 2 research question, as for unit 2 I am researching certain effects of covid on various aspects of ethnic minority populations. A lot of my secondary research shows that these populations have been hit hard, so it is nice to see that the pandemic is looking up and could potentially be over soon.
Overall, the semester seems to be flying by, and before I know it summer will be here again.
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