December 8th, 2010

Today in class, we first turned our final essays in (as well as our rough drafts) to Ms. Flournoy. Second, we spent a while on our course evaluations. After completing the course evaluations, Ms. Flournoy asked us to pull up the review for the midterm on our computers. We spent about 20 minutes talking through all the topics on the midterm. The class asked a lot of questions and it was really helpful because I sometimes don't think about certain things, and when my classmates bring them up, I'm so grateful because I could have missed them on the exam! Finally, for the last part of class, we got a list of famous writers (Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, J.K. Rowling, Ben Franklin, and Nathaniel Hawthorne) and our job was to research the thoughts and themes seen in their writings. We made a timeline on a piece of notebook paper and spread the authors out according to the time periods in which they lived. The purpose of this exercise was to prepare us for our midterm, for it is important that we understand how these authors thought and what their writings centered on. I really enjoyed today's class simply because I felt it was a great way to organize my thoughts about the midterm. Admist the craziness of the holidays, we can get really caught up in the unsettling idea of midterms. However, this class period helped me to put my exams into perspective and feel less intimidated by how much information they cover. A quote from Lauren Graham, "Perspective is the most important thing to have in life." This is so true, for we need to put our studies in perspective. We tend to make them seem much more scary than they really are, and if we buckle down and focus on organizing all the information we've learned, we realize that it really isn't that hard. We have learned everything that will show up on the test and should be confident in that fact. A new vocab word that I feel connects with today's events is the word "daunt." Used in a sentence, it reads like this: Although midterms may seem daunting at first, when we look at things from a confident viewpoint, we realize that we are more than capable of surviving them.