Hey all!
So, this week in English class we had a seminar about “travel quotes”. Before I continue, I’m pretty sure most of you don’t know what our “Seminar’s” are about, so I’ll quickly explain.
Basically, our english seminars are kind of like a meeting for students. During these meetings, we discuss and analyze parts of literature, for this seminar, it would be travel quotes. Then, our teacher ranks our replies based on relevance and depth, and gives us a score. For this seminar, I got a 6 and 8, which I’m not completely satisfied with, and in this blog post, I will explain why and how I got this score.
Our seminar started with the simple open-ended question “What are your thoughts on the literary quotes”. Due to the slightly vague wording of the question, I think many of us were talking about different unrelated points, so we weren’t able to create connections between ideas and get “high’s”. For example, most of the time, when I talked, I would just say a totally new point, that was not completely relevant or evidence based, and get a “low”.
This trend of low quality responses started to change after the first time Dr. Terret showed us our scores. I noticed that I had 6 lows and 0 middles or highs, showing that my responses were irrelevant and non-evidence based.
After this, I started trying to about more relevant points, and started making more connections between quotes and texts. For example, we had a fruitful discussion on the meaning of life, if our life is limited. During this discussion, I felt like I was better making connections between texts and quotes, it might have been a change a mindset, but I feel like the main reason was my preparations for the background of the quotes. Something I didn’t do during our first class discussion.
Overall, I think I could have achieved more in this seminar than I did if I prepared for the seminar at the start, and payed more attention to the question and what other people are saying. For my next seminar, my goal is to have at least 3 highs and less than 4 lows to ensure my response’s relevance.