The first day of class and I arrived at four, being the first one in the room. I sat there thinking I wonder if this teacher is going to be hard? I wonder how many assignments we could really get being that it is only an eight-week class. Would he teach us new steps on how to write, give input on our essays or just hand them back with a huge red letter on the paper? I was wondering is he going to be an old mean grouch like some professors. By this point people were walking in, Nick, Jennifer, Pierre Amanda and a few of the other students. Then in walks a red haired guy, who I thought was a student until he started taking every thing out of his bag on the desk up front. Once he had everything organized and was passing out our first syllabus, our first class started, “Hello, I’m Mr. Gasparo, this is English 111, hope everyone is in the right spot, and I’m your teacher for the next eight weeks.”
The syllabus showed that over the next eight weeks we were going to be writing a novel, or so it seemed like that, by the time this class was over. It was going to be essay after essay after essay. As I was looking it over I was thinking what have I got myself into? Can I handle this class and all of my other schoolwork? Right after thinking all that and getting a little stressed out for a minute, Mr. Gasparo told us he was an understanding guy and knows this seems like a lot of work and he can help out if we just make sure to let him know what was going. That was a nice sigh and relief after that comment from half of the class.
We jumped right into learning how to put an essay together. We learned how to format, how to begin your introduction and how to blend that introduction with your conclusion. We went over things step by step, reviewed it a few times, read other essays that we discussed about how the writer wrote the paper and then we got into the real challenge, we had to start writing on our own.
In the beginning the writing seemed to be a breeze. The topics were enjoyable they weren’t mind bending; they were topics we could all get a good story out of. We worked diligently on them and did a few peer reviews, which were great. It was nice being able to have someone look over your paper make corrections and give their input about what they think should be added or what should not be in your essay. Once we made our corrections, it was time to send our essays in.
Emailing our essays in was so much easier then having to hand them. It’s less paper, which some say saved the trees, but really it was less for us to carry around or sometimes forget to bring them to class because you left the essay on the kitchen table. And it’s easier to argue when you say you never got it and we did send it by proving to you we did send it by going to our sent mail. It may have been a little difficult in the beginning to figure out how you wanted us to title the subject line of the email but we all eventually figured it out, only took us half of the quarter.
In the end this eight-week class was well worth it. Mr. Gasparo ended up not being a mean grouchy old professor; he ended up being a teacher that would encourage you to write more. He could give you the criticism you needed so that you could improve. He made himself as much as he could available to his students, which is uncommon in some professors. I really could not have asked for a somewhat easier eight-week English 111 class then I expected.
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