At the first of the semester, I had not written in over 15 years. I still wrote as I had learned in high school. I had seriously considered dropping this course. I knew it would require a lot of homework. Many times during this semester, I felt unable to keep up with assignments from this class and other classes at the same time. At the first part of the semester there were over ten hours of homework for this class, plus the required homework for other classes. There were the required 15 hours of service learning hours. I worked as many full time students do. And last, but not least, I have children.
I have struggled through this course and I have complained about the excessive amount of work required by this course. But all in all, I have learned that I can complete everything that is required of me by the due date. I have also learned that I can accomplish a lot more than I thought that I could. Although, I may have lacked sleep as many college student do. As the workload in this course lightened a little, I was able to apply myself more to this course as well as other courses and other areas of my life.
I have learned that helping others as in service learning alleviated the stress level a little. This helps give a little more energy to accomplish more. Helping others makes me feel good because I was doing what I could to improve someone else's life. And by helping a non profit organization a government ran program, I was helping my country.
I am no longer terrified of trying new things even if it sounds overwhelming. I just have to make a start instead of procrastinating a perceived unobtainable goal. I have learned that many things are in fact not an unobtainable goal at all. The website was one of these so called, "unobtainable goals" that was obtained by starting and working through the steps needed to obtain this goal. I thought I would need help in creating this website. In fact, I created and worked on the entire site by myself, http://play-basedlearning.weebly.com/index.html.
Research also seemed impossible to accomplish because I was very busy in other areas of my life. At the beginning of this semester, research took a lot longer because I did not realize I should narrow my searches. One hundred percent of my research was done on the internet to save time, also most of my research was conducted at three or four AM. Search engines and narrow searches helped me to minimize my time spent on research.
Because all of my sources were all saying the same thing, that play-based learning is best for children, I really had to do a lot of research to find someone who opposed this idea. This opposing source did not directly disagree with the other sources, this source wrote about a different prospective than the other sources.
I had decided in the beginning of the semester, to write for people wanting information about Head Start, such as potential target families. People with a high school education. Since creating the website, my decision had evolved for my audience to only include people trying to obtain a college education. This was to create a quality product.
In the beginning of the semester, I had a difficult time beginning my writing because I was writing as I was taught to write in high school. This is not how you write in college. This instructor, I had learned wanted writings as if it was a conversation, which is difficult at first, only because it is directly opposite to how I learned to write. But becomes easier as I practiced writing in this way. Also, while performing my service learning, this gave me my own perspective on my subject, I have my own opinion.
I plan on using what I learned in this course in other courses with any written assignments that I am assigned in my college career. Also, I will use my knowledge on how to conduct effective research while minimizing the time used on research for these written assignments by narrowing my searches. I will consider my audience, which will usually be my instructor, and occasionally my fellow students and on rare occasions the general public. Revision is very important because writing, reading what you wrote then rewriting helps to clarify what was originally written. I have learned finally that a perceived unobtainable goal is obtainable with proper planning, research, writing and revision.
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