Description:
- Required to give feedbacks on areas regarding content and language skills of the essays written by my peers
- Work together with other classmates to help provide constructive feedbacks
How I feel about it:
- Peer evaluation will force me to understand other people’s writing styles
- I have never really understood my peers’ essays in the past because I have never paid attention to what they were writing about
- Peer evaluation has thus forced me to think critically
- It has also made me put in more effort in understanding how my peers tried to convey their ideas
- This has allowed me to learn from them and improve on my mistakes
- It can also serve to remind me what I am lacking in
- Giving feedbacks to my peers will force me to be more aware of my own language skills so that I will not tell my peers the wrong information
- Receiving feedbacks will remind me about all the little mistakes I tend to make in my essays
- Teacher’s feedbacks can also allow me to improve on my grammar – the area I am really bad in
- However, I feel that peer evaluation is only crucial in helping me to improve on my content
- All of us are still equally unaware about whether our grammar is correct or not
- We are all still lacking in the ability to correct our peers’ essays
- This is apparent in my essay draft 2 because although my peers felt that the essay was comprehensible, Brad told me that I should reorganise my essay to make it more convincing and suitable for answering the question
- In addition, I did not realised that my thesis statement was too vague
- Thus, although peer evaluation is certainly helpful, I felt that it is only helpful to a certain extent
What will I do as a result of this experience?
- Put in more attention when I read other people’s essays in future
- Continue to proofread my own essays to make sure they are coherent and organised
- Ask my peers to help me out if they are free
- Continue to improve on my grammar and strive to write an essay free of grammar mistakes in future
- Continue to read more and gain more vocabulary for my essays
Hi Weiting,
ReplyDeleteI do not have an identity or alias you already met or know, for a blog reader who for so long now has always had an intermittent curiosity with the way Brad's students mature throughout a single semester. Before I give you my comments about your learning in the classroom and out, you need to know that I am no expert in professional communication.
When you mention in your critical outline that you have designs to read more and gain more vocabulary, I assume a motive to inform the need to get a normal executive job, or perhaps the prized attention of a powerfully ranked senior official in government and many more generally self-serving examples like that in the future. There is certainly absolutely nothing wrong with having an idea like that: you want something badly, so you make the plans that seem logical to help you achieve that goal. If you want to strike a soccer ball accurately into a position of goal, you obviously practice shooting at length, as one of your plans would go, in front of the goal. If you then want to make delicious cakes for dessert, you obviously have a huge amount of cake specimens that go down the mouths of thousands of people before you know from the very same ones whether you finally mastered bakery. In each of this respective ways contains an important caveat: whether you shoot many balls at goal in practice or churn out regular cakes at the oven, you have to love doing them. The more you love so the more you succeed because ever more love keeps bringing you up to go above ever more of your limitations and shortcomings.
My question is: are you already naturally inclined to reading the full breadth of English masterpieces of our history, geography, literature and science? If you had you would probably not be getting any kind of feedbacks like the ones you gotten recently from Brad; if you hadn't, this might just be one factor out of an array of many others explaining the many language or expression errors you made in your blog writings. As I say these, they are part of the main point I am trying to convey to you; you do not generally read more with the goal of gaining more vocabulary; you generally read more so that you can understand---love more, perhaps culturally or in some area of history and science, about the world in which you live.
Once you set the aspect of your goal correctly---to love the environment in which you live, you are never going to lose a day of sleep over mentally being burdened with the amount of vocabularies you only thought you needed to know, something that at worst you might risk insanity for mistakenly thinking they could singlehandedly destroy your life.
Regards
Hi Mark,
DeleteThank you for you honest feedback and I am grateful that you actually took time to read everything I have posted on the blog. I think I get what you are trying to tell me, but I feel that I should clarify my point.
I do agree with you that I have to love what I am doing so that I can improve on my own shortcomings. Sadly, I really do not enjoy reading. I used to find it extremely difficult to read scholarly articles and even published articles on magazines and newspapers because my poor grasp of English made it hard for me to understand the content. I have to constantly highlight unknown words and check the dictionary so that I can fully comprehend the content of the essays. It made reading really tedious and unenjoyable. You might have realised that I used to be a science student (as I have written about it in the blog post “An influential event”), and as such, I do not have a lot of reading and writing experiences. In fact, I even found it redundant to improve on my language skills because I believed that I would not need such skills in future if I were to continue pursuing a Science degree.
Things definitely changed when I decided to major in Geography instead. Everyone around me can skilfully make use of their knowledge of English to express their thoughts. I was again the only one who found it difficult to finish my assigned readings as fast as I could because most of the time was spent trying to decipher the meanings of certain words. However, I really did saw an improvement in my vocabulary because I can actually apply what I have learnt onto my assignments.
I do realise the importance of reading as I have indeed benefitted from it. Thus, I hope to continue to read more because I see it as a personal goal. I feel that if I can read more, I will understand things easier, and then I will start to love reading. The problem with me now is that whenever I read things that I am passionate about, I tend to skim through the whole essay and ignore difficult words because I just want to know the content. This will certainly not allow me to improve on my language skills. I need to differentiate between reading for improvement and reading for passion.
I believe that the greatest achievement for me would be to enjoy and understand what I am reading. But for now, it is more vital that I read broadly to expand my knowledge of the English language.
I am certain that I have made a lot of language and expression errors in this reply, and I am definitely aware that I am lacking in many aspects. As such, I really do not have a desire to get a job that requires me to write. I hope to build up on my vocabulary because I want to express my thoughts and ideas easily through the essays I write for my modules. I hate it when I have to stop and recall the words that can perfectly convey the message I am trying to bring across. Writing is a life skill, but I am not going to use this skill for survival in future. In fact, I am more interested in the field of research (even though I might still have to write reports for research).
Nevertheless, I am really thankful that you tried to direct me in the correct path of learning. I might not be the best example to reflect on Brad’s teaching, but I can assure you that Brad is really a good teacher and I believe my classmates and I have learnt a lot from him throughout the whole semester.
Is it actually possible that you pick out the language and expression errors I have made in my blog writings? I hope that I can learn from my mistakes and improve on it the next time.
Hi Weiting, thanks for your reply.
ReplyDeleteI could sense that you had been in Brad's class not by chance after how much you made it clear to me that you believe you will find usefulness for clear and concise communication in the future. But I do not quite get how you decide that reading for improvement should be done apart from reading for passion. If you meant to say reading for improvement consists of boring reads, you might be asking for trouble here because improvement isn't likely to come at all. I have no idea of Brad's stance, but I would simplify things and read dignified materials that bring me maximum pleasure. Then I would have made my improvement without question!
Still, I wanted to say also the missing piece in my original post was my failure to admit, by design, you could still gradually increase in your love of what you do upon time, if you had misfortune of not having such a blessing. Nobody ever naturally loved everything they brushed into, and different people with diverse talents would love an even more diverse set of living experiences. Some ancient power of philosophy held it more balanced morally to love what you do and do what you love at the same time, in harmonious equilibrium. Your big Me gets served its daily fix, while the rightfully bigger society and hopefully the global community at large get their fix as well.
But I’m glad you made mention of what virtue I had been hoping you would mention, which will serve you very well down the road. Do remember that the culture of learning at NUS is still relatively goal rather than process oriented, and this referring to the heavy burden of getting a scholarly grade as far as possible in every subject you touch. Under such circumstances, the inevitable in your learning happens----you will be lured to lose your heart and passion for anything by the spirits of the dark----your own weak flesh, and read for improvement or read for vocabulary rather than to read for the love of edifying knowledge and spiritual growth. A clear sign you could be going down the wrong path------you start to calculate even about those things you are passionate reading about, weighing cost and benefits in a far too frequent way.
Some mistakes you made that I had randomly pointed out below:
2nd last para: “………tried to direct me onto the path of righteousness.”
“…..might not be the best example that reflects Brad’s upbringing in the classroom…”
3rd last para: “ I hate that I have to stop…..”
“…..for survival…..” (survival seems to be a professional job here, not quite proper. You mean for bread-making I think)
4th last para: “It is more vital for me to read broadly….”
You are poised to find the rest by yourself then?
Regards
Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteActually I think I am quite lucky to be majoring in Geography. My assigned readings are really interesting and I have really learnt a lot from reading all those scholarly articles. I agree with what you said about weighing the cost and benefit of the readings I am passionate about after some time. I will make it a point to not only read for the exams; I will try to read more of these articles during my free time in the summer break.
Thank you for pointing this out to me and I will certainly remind myself in future. I do agree that I should not only learn for the grades; I want to learn more to expand my knowledge.
I will also try to improve on my expression errors and hopefully my writing will get better in future!