Pondering My Big Picture

          
       

          Welcome to my bigger picture.  My name is Amy Copelin.  I’m 27 years old, a pregnant mother of a 2 ½ year old son, married to a military man, and a brand new student at Everett Community College.  I am a hardworking person who does everything she can to help other people, usually putting myself on the lower end of my priority list.  Everything I do is for my family and to help better us in the chaotic ever changing society we live in.  I tend to bite off more than I can chew at times, leading to burnouts and re-evaluations of my life every so often.  During one of those evaluations, I realized I needed to get serious about school after 9 years of going on and off.  I decided to go back to college to try and get my nursing degree, so I could continue my pursuit of helping others.  It has been a difficult task to say the least.  Not only am I a stay at home pregnant mother, taking care of my husband, and babysitting 2 young kids on the side but I also have a full time school schedule that is overwhelming and a little ambitious right off the bat.

          English 101 proved to be not the easier of my classes like I thought it would be.  Since my husband is gone a lot of the time in the USCG (United States Coast Guard), I chose to take online courses so I could still stay at home with our son.  In high school, I got straight A’s in English, always receiving praise for my knowledge and assessment of the assignments I was given and the analysis of those assignments.  This did not start out as the case in English 101.  I found myself thrown into a whirlwind when I realized I no longer understood what analysis meant.  The idea to “think outside the box” was a foreign concept to me since I hadn’t pushed my thinking farther than what type of cereal my toddler wanted for breakfast in years.  I was increasingly afraid I wouldn’t be able to do well in this class.   It is one thing to write a paper on what I think about something; it is something completely different to write about how and why the causes of those thoughts occur. Feelings of being too old to go back to school and of being a failure began to take over my soul.  In the end, I chose to rise above it all and power on through the class.

          When I first chose to take English 101D, it didn’t really dawn on me what the “D” actually stood for.  Yes, I knew what diversity meant, as in we are all different, but I never thought about what exactly made us all different, the how factor.  Through our readings, the movie we watched, and all the discussions, I changed my definition of what diversity is.  I was shown that while we are different and do not need to consent each other’s differences as our own, we do need to respectfully accept them for what they are, agreeing with them or not.  Diversity is also changing our ideas if need be by flipping the coin over and looking at the other side,  pushing ones thinking even further.  For instance, in the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldua showed me there is more to a Spanish speaking American then I had made original generalizations about.  She says, “If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me” (82).  Starting to have more sympathy for the pressure she received from her own culture, I changed my one-sided thoughts about how one should conform to the “American” way of life.   Now I realized that to be an American there was no need to get rid of your identity by eliminating your culture from your life, a thought I don’t think I would have recognized if not for this class.

          During this class we touched on three major aspects of life: Identity, Community, and Tradition.  In the Identity unit, the clear message I took away from it was that our identities are shaped not only by what we look like and where we live and how we perceive ourselves, but also by the judgments and perceptions of others.  This idea was followed up with the unit on Community, and the disproof that community was just the places where we all live.  Community revealed to be more than that, to be a group of likeminded individuals with common goals, whether it is people who go to the gym, people who collect Barbie dolls, or people who attend a weekly quilting class.   After all this, what brought it all together was the unit on Traditions.  We dived into the mindsets that traditions change with changing of the seasons, not only in our own families, but also in society.  It was interesting to see how all 3 units tied together and kept going around in a circle of change.  Traditions can start the process by changing what someone’s true identity ends up becoming, affecting the community that they eventually belong to, and then watching as that community can ultimately influence the traditions that can come about from being a part of that community.

 

          At the end of the quarter, we were asked to pick 4 pieces we wrote that demonstrated our critical thinking skills, our revising skills, our audience and voice skills, and a piece of our choosing that we would be lost without having in the portfolio.  I chose the following:

          Critical Analysis: The piece I picked was my timed writing on the viewing of RabbitProof Fence, a movie about persecution of Aborigines by the Australian government.  I felt that I really pushed my thinking and tried to really analyze the idea of people living in the “status quo” just to not rock the boat.

          Revision and Re-Seeing: I chose my first paper on Identity to revise.  After being out of school for so long, I jumped into this paper feet first, not really trying to stay focused and kind of losing my ideas while I typed.  After all I have learned I feel like this paper could grow from my newly discovered tender love and attention.

          Awareness of Audience and Voice: For this piece, I have chosen my first blog assignment “What’s In Your Wallet?”, describing what someone might think about your identity built solely on what was inside your purse or wallet.  I loved writing this piece because it allowed me to have fun with what I was writing and tell a story of how each piece found its way into my purse.

          My Choice: For this portion I picked my blog on Communities.  Blogging is something I really enjoy and to share what being a military wife is for me is something very personal and was a great reflection on my feelings about the ladies I share this community with.

          My hope after reading this is that you are left with not only a true sense of who I was before English 101, but also the writer I have evolved into after learning so many different skills.  This course has helped me to critically think about things that I never would have before, and makes me feel confident in being effective in college writing in the future.