Essay 3 reflection

I would like to do more research about what actually causes eating disorders in athletes and what people can do to help. It is obvious and has now been proven that eating disorders in athletes do occur and are common, but I would like to know and explain why. I think it is difficult to find a set answer to this research question because there are so many different things that cause it to occur. It appears that eating disorders are very individualized. Each athlete has a different reason, different cause, and different story. With that said, I would like to do more research on videos and personalized stories that athletes have written about themselves. I feel like if the paper shows more personal stories, people will be more apt to take notice on the issue. I plan to keep my question the same and go into further research on it but I do not want to change what I am researching about. This topic has been very interesting to me because I am an athlete, in a sport that revolves around how much body fat you have and how in shape you are. I like learning about things that I am involved in so this research topic has been very interesting for me. 

Essay #3 opinions

I completely redid my rough draft of essay #3 and chose a new topic for my final draft. As I was writing my rough draft I considered changing my topic several times through out the paper but decided to stick with it and see how it came out in the end. I really like the topic I switched to because it has much more research and it was much more interesting. I rewrote the entire paper into a more beneficial paper to persuade my teacher to approve my topic. I think my final draft was more based on the requirements of the paper unlike my first one which was kind of rushed and I didn’t have enough information to fill out five pages. I feel as if this paper was one of the most difficult ones I have ever written. Only writing about the research question yet not analyzing any of it was very complicated after writing so many papers about analyzing your ideas and questions. 

Essay #2

I still have a lot of corrections to make to my wikipedia essay. I could probably do a little more research on the topi to make my essay sound like a better wikipedia page. So far, I have a lot of high points in my essay, but there are several low points as well. I need to do some rephrasing of words to make it sound like a more professionally written essay. I also seem to have a lot of advertising in my paper rather than simply stating what my paper is about. I need to dull down the advertisement areas and make them seem less appealing to the reader. I also need to correct some of the section headings because I am missing some. The final thing I am going to do is recite my sources, I did not do them in MLA format and to finish my paper I need to find some more areas that can be hyperlinks on the wikipedia website. Overall I feel like I have a good well written essay aside from the few minor errors. 

SpellRead

I chose to write and research about a program called SpellRead. This program is used all across the United States and other close countries. It is a program used in and outside of schools for students who have learning disabilities. I found a lot of research on the program and even more about the background of the program, which I thought was extremely interesting how it got started. I searched several articles all across the web, most being written by government associations because it is a program used nation wide. Although I did find a lot of information on the program I would also like to dig into it a little more to find out exactly what it does and how it works. I would like to watch example videos of the program to get a better understanding. This program is one of those things that you can never fully understand until you try it, because it is in some way like a video game. I plan to look for more information about how it works so I can add it into my paper. 

I am not completely sure what topic I am going to choose, but as of right now I am leaning toward “SpellRead.” I searched for something that has to do with multiculturalism and bilingualism in the classroom because I have been learning about this and already know a lot about it but SpellRead jumped out at me instead. I chose this topic because I am studying elementary education and this specific site has not been written about yet. This topic caught my interest because it has to do with special education and right now I am looking into having an emphasis on special education on top of my major. SpellRead is a site that has to do with teaching children who are in the special education program. It is a website used by teachers to help teach and communicate with their children whom have learning disabilities so I will have subsections about each of the types of teachings on the website. The exact title to this Wikipedia entry will be “SpellRead.”

“Television as Teacher”

Neil Postman writes “Television as Teacher” with the initiative to force people to think about whether watching television is an effective way of learning or not. According to Postman, the big change in the way people viewed television emerged when Sesame Street aired for the first time. This show had both positive and negative effects on peoples lives and how they viewed television and teaching. Postman goes into detail on how new technologies slowly change how people think and learn, and he uses Marshall McLuhan as an example for this specific time period. Postman says we are in and “electronic revolution” where we have to understand McLuhan’s theories in order to understand how the new era is working. McLuhan was the first person to come up with the idea of the media theory. In this article, Postman backs himself up through McLuhan’s idea of how media can benefit education and will slowly begin to take over the role of educating. He says that most of the learning that kids actually take in comes from the television set rather than from their educators in a classroom. Teachers do not have the ability to keep kids attention for as long as necessary because they are not as interesting as a television show. This is why most teachers have resorted to watching educational movies in class rather than teaching it themselves. McLuhan came up with this theory many years ago, it has just taken people way to long to realize what the world has transformed to. 

My Experience as a writer

I have had a lot of experience with writing because I have had several English classes. In both my junior and senior year of high school I took college English classes which involved a lot of reading and writing. These classes each had me writing papers weekly. I wrote about several stories and authors throughout these few years. Before taking these classes I did not enjoy writing at all but after taking these classes it has kind of grown on me. I have become way more confident in the way I write and I am a much more successful writer than I was in the past. I do not mind writing any kinds of papers, although poetry is my favorite. I feel as if authors are able to get their true feelings out through poetry more than any other kind of writing. It can easily be read and analyzed yet it is deep enough to cause the reader to think about what the author wants to get across. I do not mind writing research papers but they are definitely not my favorite form of writing. I struggle with research papers unless it is over a topic that I am very intrested in.