Reflection About First Year Writing

-“First-Year Writing” the easy four credit class of the lot.

Those are the first thoughts that come to my mind as I read through my brand new schedule for the fall semester. How hard could it get? Just writing words decorated with elegant syntax that manages to make coherent arguments. Using “Aurora” to say that dawn had fell, or “supine” to explain we are lying on the coach, academic writing has become a competition between elaborated pieces that has made reading and writing a quirky, long and peculiar journey that could never be used in real life unless you pursued academic writing as your life long occupation. But that is what the system has required, what can we do? We embrace it, and write based on the blueprints that are handed down

In my case, I definitely would have though about the dreading (in my opinion) Theory of Knowledge class in high school. After coming to college, I though that I could finally, or maybe just temporarily, tuck away the depressing idea of comparing my whole life to a cave under the piles of TOK books back home till I took another philosophy class in college.

No luck with my original plan.

I revisited the Allegory of the cave far earlier than expected. Not only did I miscalculate the timing, but also the subject where I would visualize the cave again. The class where I discuss about contemplating ‘the shadows casted by the fire’ was definitely not in the philosophy class but rather the writing class. Yeah, the writing class where I had thought gaudy wordings would save me from the looming first C of college.

This was new; there were no blueprints, no rubrics, and no ‘Five paragraph essays”. There was no easy nor definite answer, no right or wrong; just the hope that you had grasped what Laurie had mentioned in class correctly and managed to scrutinized every movement or color, in the video or photograph to ‘come to terms’ with it without overlapping with the thesis model or the five paragraph essay (never do it). As reluctant as I was, I had to accept it; I had been staring at the shadows of the cave all the