Arredondo 1

Jose Luis Arredondo

Instructor. McCann

English 1302 – 201

6 May 2024

Even Cooler Title Goes Here

We’re finally here, my long and vicious rampage over academic writing is almost

officially over. There’s one challenge for me to still face, and now all that’s left for me to do is to

ramble about my own essays for the next *insert word count here* words. However, before I do

that, let me at least fill you in on what I’ve been up to in between my last essay. So, for English

1302 my last essay written was the reflection essay for my third essay all about researched

positions. In between then, I’ve just been really focused on presentations, debates, and

organizing all my writing for the portfolio in this class. This essay is also one of the main things

that has to be up there along with the portfolio, so as you can expect that’s probably why I’m

writing it in the first place. Apart from schoolwork, I’ve also been pretty busy working on

hobbies as well. I’m super focused on learning figure drawing right now. I’m taking some free

online courses to learn it, and one of the assignments or exercises for it I have to do that’s been

really bugging me is having to draw 100 human ribs in many different angles. I’ve been having

to do this in order to get familiar with the shape of them, so I started doing the exercise in late

March, literally the 31st, and to be entirely honest, the dude in the videos makes it look so

effortless. The instructors over here talkin’ about drawing like 20 a day along with working on

other exercises, and also working on full pieces as well, while I’m over here struggling to draw

like 4 or 5 a day along with drawing fun stuff as well. I’m pretty sure that this just has a lot to do

with time, and, evidently, this instructor has a lot of it. As of now, I managed to actually finish all
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100, and yeah it was tough, but drawing ribs is definitely second hand to me now as the course

expected. Still I’m not even done with the course, I have maybe five more lessons to go, and

those lessons have a lot to do with other parts of the body like the pelvis and different limbs and

whatnot. But, as long as I push through and keep working on it, by the end of the course I should

at least have some familiarity with the form of the human body and drawing it.

On the same note of pushing through the odds, I have done the same in this very course.

For English 1302, I had to complete three essays. The first was all about making my own

research experiment with a topic of my choice. For that topic, I decided to go with the first thing

I thought about when brainstorming essay 1, which was if exercising could make stair climbing

easier. Choosing this topic largely came from I and my friend’s experience with stairs. Any time

we’d be going to class or any time we’d go and hang out at the TAMIU Library we’d usually

need to go up a couple of flights of stairs. By the time we’d reach the top, all of us were almost

always out of breath. I thought maybe that’s just due to the fact that we are not physically active.

So, in turn, I decided to base my first essay on this as I thought it would make for an interesting

and original read given that it involves somewhat of an irrelevant subject matter. As such, I went

straight to working on my essay and immediately fell into a major problem. How do I even

conduct and write a research paper? The answer may seem obvious now, just read the essay

prompt, but at the time I was oblivious to how helpful the essay prompts would be, and I simply

figured it out on my own. In doing so, I treated essay 1 as a science experiment, with a

hypothesis and all. In my experiment, I predicted that exercising would make climbing the stairs

at the TAMIU Library easier. However, I needed to have some form of methodology and results

to test that theory, so I decided to create a workout plan for myself. The workout plan mainly

consisted of calisthenics like pushups, crunches, lunges, and planks, as well as running. I didn’t
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have to make anything new for the experiment, since I already was actively using the plan before

the experiment for personal reasons, but this experiment did give me the chance to at least

workout consistently, especially given that I was super inconsistent when following my workout

plans. During the experiment, I’d wake up early in the mornings and I’d complete the workouts

for the day. Afterwards, I’d go about my day, and by the time I was out of school, I’d go the

library and would climb five flights of stairs, making sure to mark down my heart rate

afterwards. In doing so, I found out that from each day to the next, after I did the stair climbing,

my heart was slightly decreasing due to the exercises I was performing. With the results

gathered from the experiment I was able to compare them with articles I had found in order to

see if the results supported my argument or not. I was able to find out that physical activity did

had an effect on the physical needs of many daily tasks by decreasing those needs. All of those

articles had to do with stairclimbing being one of those tasks and so my hypothesis was actually

right. However, given that I’m literally a highschooler performing a glorified science experiment,

it was evident that my results and analysis probably weren’t to be taken as accurate. This did not

bother me, though, as I knew very well that I wasn’t a scientist, I’m simply just a dude who’s

doing this for a grade. Despite knowing this, one factor tested these beliefs: the dreaded ace tutor.

When going to the ace tutor to peer review my essay, I was just expecting the guy to do what my

last ace tutor did, which was to say everything was good and get the meeting over with as soon

as possible. This tutor was built different though, I guess he actually cared enough about his job,

or just loves to put down the hopes and dreams of teenagers, and so he genuinely gave good

criticism about my essay. He told me that I was essentially saying through some terrible

examples that exercise makes exercising easier. Every second of that meeting afterwards was just

painful, cause not only was this guy euthanizing my first attempt at a research paper, but he also
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was reading the paper out loud at the same time. I don’t know if he had adhd or something,

which I honestly doubt cause why would someone with adhd take a library job, but he asked me

if he could read my paper out load maybe so he could understand it better? I didn’t really see the

point in it, since you could just read it in your head, but I just let him since I thought he’d be like

whispering or mouthing the essay as he read, but no, bro was reading it out loud like his life

depended on it. He should’ve taken a job as a sports commentator or something because he took

reading it out loud a little too litterally, I mean it was like he just won a presidential election and

was giving his inauguration speech right then and there. Despite the secondhand embarrassment

that the ace tutor, Matthew, caused me, I couldn’t even be sore about it, since I genuinely agreed

with everything that he said was wrong with my essay. However, did I go ahead and edit all of

those problems with my essay? Nope, I had the essay due that very same day, and deadlines

don’t wait for the lazy, so I just submitted it right after I was done with the session. If it makes

anyone feel any better, his time was not wasted since I went back to that first essay and revised it

for my portfolio, which also happens to be final exam for this course.

After finishing my first essay for English 1302 I decided to slack off and completely

neglect any assignments that had to do with the class. Really all the work I had done was just one

assignment which was this annotated bibliography, which I finished as quickly as possible

without any second thought as to if it was important for me to write it out properly .My spiral

into laziness continued on until one day when I went to school my support class teacher Ms.

Villanueva had us submit the draft for essay 2 as a test grade by end of the period. Evidently by

that time I had nothing typed out for essay 2 and I didn’t have a clue what the essay was even

about. However, for whatever reason my brain only works under pressure, so despite the fact that

I had no idea what I was doing, I was still able to speed read the prompt for essay 2 and was able
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to write out a shotty draft consisting of repetitive excerpts from my annotated bib. It worked out,

it didn’t matter if it was bad or not, because it was a draft, so I had plausible deniability in my

favor. Since I sped through the prompt for essay 2 I know knew what it was about. For essay 2 I

needed to conduct a literature review on articles related to my topic of stair climbing. However, I

made the choice to change up some things regarding my topic as the feedback from Matthew the

ace tutor helped me realize that maybe my topic wasn’t really that comprehensible. So in turn I

chose to sort of remake my topic and changing from how exercising can make stair climbing

easier to how

Originally, when starting all the way back in English 1301, I was but a novice to writing

and literature: less than a novice actually, it was more like I had literally no idea what I was

doing. Up until then, the most amount of writing experience I have was writing those TELPAS

short response essays, and even then I was terrible at that too. Back then, I hated writing,

obviously because I wasn’t really decent at it. Honestly, thank God that I was able to take this

course, because, oh my god, a lot of the stuff I love do now has a lot to do with writing. English

1301 lit this fire and passion for writing in me that I didn’t even know was there. It started

unconciously with comics, then it went to novels, and eventually whole movie scripts. From

there, due to my love for all of those forms of writing, or mainly storytelling, I’ve started to write

my own stuff as well, and I actually enjoy writing now. I’ve been writing dumb synopses for

comics, I’ve been writing funny stuff regarding random characters, and hopefully once I get

pretty good at art I’ll be able to visualize this stuff and put it in a more consumable format.

Really the only thing that kept me doing this was just feedback I received from my friends. It’s

addicting watching them read my stuff seeing them actually enjoying it and laughing along with
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it telling me “when are you gonna make the next one?”, maybe they’ll be a part 2 to this

reflection. Actually I think I’ve had my fill of academic writing for the semester.