Topic #8 - What Did You Learn?

Hi Class!  We have finally come to week eight, the last week of our summer semester.

We have had a very busy class, learning about seven different writing styles: Narrative, Descriptive, Process, Compare/Contrast, Argument, Business Letter, and Cause & Effect.  We also learned about formatting: heading, title, double-space, margins, indent, font size, superscript citations, etc.  Perhaps some of you used Word and Google Docs for the first time, attaching and sharing your essays.  With all the typing you did, hopefully you are using about 9 fingers, instead of 2 fingers to type, and you are typing faster than before.  We also had a class blog which allowed all of you to share a little bit about yourself and your opinions and experiences.  When you read and comment on your classmates' blogs, you can feel a little more connected to each other, and a little more of a sense of community.  If you took advantage of completing all the drafts I assigned and read all of my comments, I believe your writing will have greatly improved through this summer class.  In our grammar lessons, the key areas we covered were compound and complex sentences.  Hopefully, it was review for you.  If it was new, then you need to make sure you fully understand these types of sentence structures.

I certainly learned a lot from all of you this summer.  Three of you told me how to make Kabseh.  I also found out that camel meat is delicious.  One day I must try these dishes.  I learned that the Han River and the Alforat Rivers are beautiful rivers in Korea and Iraq.  Also, three of you described the spectacular city of Dubai.  I discovered that there is a lovely black sand beach in China.  Maybe I will put all these places on my bucket list as places to visit before I die.  Besides this, I learned that Muslims may not eat or drink during the daytime in the month of Ramadan.  All of my Muslim students have had to overcome a great challenge to their regular eating and sleeping patterns and still get to class on time.  Finally, I learned about the strong family relationships most of you come from, and I admire and appreciate that kind of close, loving family structure.  It is a weakness in America.  Many of you have high aspirations to get undergraduate and graduate degrees.  I wish all of you success in all of your future endeavors.

Well, what did you learn this summer?  What will you take away with you when our class is over?