Apocalipto

Jemimah Moreno
Professor Mills
English111-17
25 February 2010
Reflection
The readings:
Yes, I did do my reading journals as assigned on a weekly basis. By doing the journals on a weekly basis prepared me for my first essay. The Journals helped me get more practice on the free write. From writing the essay I learned to be very specific while writing my summary. The purpose of writing thesummary is for another person to understand what the essay is all about before reading the actual essay. I worked hard on getting the summary done and well explained. From the essays we read I liked Gibbs essay the most “The Magic of the Family Meal.” This essay was my favorite one because it talks about how having a meal with your family means more than just a meal. Being able to have a familymeal can keep a close relationship between every individual in the family. Gathering the family around the table is happiness because that when you get to share your memories. Also, for teenagers being able to talk and be open about what is going on in their life can be very beneficial to their future. Having talks often can keep them in the right directions. Teenagers who have a close relationshipwith their families tend to be more successful in school. There has also been studies made in the past and showed that the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders, consider suicide and delay having sex. In order to have some of the family meals together we must give up some of our other hobbies such as televisionor the cell phone. I relate myself to this essay because my family and I tend to have a very close relationship between each other. My parents have always thoughts us to value what we have before it is too late. To take advantage of sharing the most time as possible with the family because that will not last forever. For example, I can say that having a family meal is very important because Ilook at my family and here we stand together as one. My parents have put the example for us to always stick together as a family in the good or in the bad times. Whereas other family who barely share any meals together their lives are pretty much destroyed. In some cases the life of teenager is destroyed due to divorce of their parents and no advices. I think that the readings are a big part of the awriting course because you read and then you have to summarize what you read, and in order to summarize what you read you must comprehend. Even though I did do my journals on a weekly basis, I can say for the others that it will hurt them because they did not get enough practice as if they would have at least tried. You can never get better at something if you never plan to start.

The ReadingJournals
Some of the new abilities I learned from doing the reading journals is the structure of a reading journal, how to cite it and when summarizing you must be very specific so the reader who has not read the essay can know what is about to go on. These skills are very important to a college student because they have to learn how to come out the shell and prepare themselves to the realworld where every little thing matters. For example citing it is very important because if you do not cite you could get caught for plagiarism. Citation is important because it is the basis of academics, that is, the pursuit of knowledge. Taking what is already known, established, or thought, they use their reasoning power to create new knowledge is called plagiarism if not cited so therefore we mustcite all our work to get full credit of what we have done. Summarizing is another major factor I learned while doing the reading journals. Summarizing is a key skill for reading and thinking. It is a way to measure reading comprehension, but can also help a reader to come to a new understanding of a text. Learners who know how to summarize can learn more efficiently. Summarizing does not include...