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[jamieotooleportfolio]

Portfolio letter

It’s quite simple honestly, I have always hated English class. Don’t get me wrong I loved to read, but then we had to annotate, write summaries, then essays it made my favorite thing a boring chore. I used to read books all the time, my parents used to have to take me to Barnes and Nobles weekly to get new books. Now it wasn’t that I was bad at English I did well, but I didn’t feel comfortable writing. See I’m more of a Type A person I like structured classes where there can only be one answer. So, an important part of this portfolio to me was showing people who might hate English that all it takes is one good class to change that.

“The last thing I think about when I think about English is writing, and that’s probably because I hate writing. I hate writing essays and book reports on topics that don’t interest me. I think that the goals of a composition class should to make people fall in love with writing and to teach people how they can use their creativity and write things that will interest them.”

Then I had to pick where I want to do it. I loved using Tumblr for my research project because it is easy to customize and make your own. So, I decided to use it again. Then I had my method, but I needed to pick what to put in my portfolio. I really liked everything I wrote for this class so, I tried to add as much as I could into the portfolio. First, I put my research project as it was my favorite piece. It was something I always wanted to do and the thing I was most proud of. Then I picked my revised writing pieces. I wanted to show my journey in writing, so I started with my first piece where I explained how I did not like to write at all.

I picked my Self-Draft as it was a really emotional piece that I felt spoke about me as a person which also explained to me as a writer. I also decided to use the first draft of this piece to show the growth I made. My first draft I feel really shows my growth as a writer because I wrote a little less than 3 pages because I couldn’t think of anything else and kind of gave up. I was really frustrated while writing this piece because most writing I have ever done was about books, poems, or history. I never had the opportunity to write about myself, so it was a really different experience for me. Then when you read the final draft, I feel that it seems like a completely different person wrote it and it goes into so much more detail.

Now that I liked writing I decided to have fun with it. So, I picked a children’s book, I loved reading children’s books when I was younger. I had started school when I was 1½ years old so I went to pre-k and kindergarten twice. 

Here’s a picture of me at my first Kindergarten Graduation

The school I went to for grade school wouldn’t accept me till I was 3 so I had 2 years of schooling under my belt when I got into Pre-K again. In my second Kindergarten, I was the only kid who could read so I would read the books out loud to my class. My favorite book was Strawberry Shortcake. 

Here’s me at my second Kindergarten graduation at my grade school.

I decided to write a Christmas book because it is my favorite time of the year. I wanted to have a good message, so I wrote a story that had a secular meaning of Christmas. I also wanted to write it in Spanish because I never see many children’s books, let alone children’s Christmas books, in Spanish.

Here’s me on Christmas day when I was younger. I literally love Christmas my favorite day of the year.

My next page is about our reading responses. I like doing the reading response because it adds more to a class than just sitting in class and forgetting about everything you learned. I picked my two favorite responses put them on a word document and added it into the page. Next, was the feedback. We did feedback after almost every first draft of our projects it was a lot of fun and it helped so the students could get to know each other better. I wrote about my favorite one which was after the self-portrait draft. Everyone’s self-portrait was beautifully written and really emotional. The people in my group gave me great feedback and ask me to write more about the people I’ve met in college.

This is me and my lovely college friends at the Rockefeller tree lighting on 12-4-2019 

My last page is on Other Writings, this page is composed of a bunch of free writing responses we did in class. Freewriting in class was so much fun. The prompts were always interesting, and it was really cool to hear how everyone interprets different things. I didn’t add all my responses just a couple of my favorites.

I think that past Jamie who wrote the Language Statement saying she’d probably never like writing would be pleasantly surprised about this Jamie. I really think this composition class helped me change as a person and as a writer. The essays I’ve handed in this year for other classes have been some of my best and I credit this to everything I have learned in this class.