Reflection of the class

What I learned in English 214 was that writing could actually be fun if you were writing about something you were passionate about or writing in your own discourse. When I first started this class I thought it was going to be just like every other English class I had taken before, boring and hard. Especially because I have never been a fan of writing essays or reading long stories. My English 114 class was very different than this class, and my professor would tell us that her class was easy and that English 214 was going to be way harder and you would have to write long essays every week. She basically scared us and told us to be prepared for hell. So when we started to talk about discourses and invisible narratives rather than talk about grammar or paragraph structure, I was very shocked.

I couldn’t believe that my professor was telling us that it was okay to write in our own discourse. Just because all my life I was taught to write a certain way and taught that if it didn’t follow the format they wanted it wasn’t correct. I’m not going to lie, it was kind of hard to not write in the academic way just because last semester my professor had been very strict on us about writing that way. But as time went by I became a little better at it.

I was able to learn something new about myself in each class. I enjoyed the lectures we would have about life and the society we live in. We talked about things that we normally would have never talked about in any other English class. One important topic we talked about was invisible narratives. I learned that we are surrounded by many invisible narratives/stereotypes. I learned that the invisible narrative of someone who will be successful is not someone of color. We have falling into that belief and actually believe it’s true. We create invisible narratives about ourselves without even noticing we do, we fall into a trap that the media and society place for us.

This class has really made me think about the way our media and society portrays people of color. I had talked about these issues in other classes but not in this way. It just made me feel more upset about the way we live in and the way we treat other and ourselves. It has pushed me more to succeed in life and not fall into the invisible narratives that society has created for me. I have learned that I have to do what makes me happy and not what makes other happy, I have to live each day to the fullest and enjoy what life has given me.