English 170 taught me a lot about the writing process and how to structure an essay. It also taught me many skills that I can apply in my future classes and my career. In this class we focused on observation and researching ourselves. This will help me in my career because as a teacher you need to constantly be looking for patterns and habits you have and making sure you are doing the best job you can. We also learned about critical thinking through our major paper. This will help me in my future as a math concentration in my classes that require some more in-depth study. Lastly, we learned out of the box thinking which will be important for life in general because it is good to be creative in unexpected or seemingly impossible situations. In the Totally UnWired essay, I learned how to evaluate the people around me. This helped me in my education seminar class when we had to do a mock observation of a classroom. I also used the out of the box critical thinking we were taught when I was helping my mom with her students. She teaches special education and because of funding issues she had to find creative solutions to help her children learn. During class I wish we had covered tracking issues in technology because I thought it was a very interesting line of inquiry. Besides that, I wish we focused more on the planning of an essay because that is something I still struggle with.

I noticed while I was writing my major essay I was a lot less stressed out then I normally am. Usually I procrastinate simply because I do not know where to start but since we broke every step down and wrote our essays over time I have gotten in to that habit for normal writing outside of class. Now, I feel that the writing process is a lot less daunting when I know I can break it down like a math equation. Before this class I had no clue what I was good at and what needed improvement but now I have a clear image. I consider my biggest strengths in writing to be my ability to reach my audience and tell a story, and my ability to critical think. Especially in my main assignments, I feel that my organization and critical thinking really drove the story. I have consistently struggled with my revisions and attention to small details but it has improved greatly throughout the semester. My biggest takeaways from this class were to always be creative and focus on the things around you. This class showed me that most of the world is stuck in their technology and I want to be one of the few people actually living in reality.