Throughout the year, there has been a focus on our community for a majority of the year. In the beginning, I honestly didn’t ever consider reflecting on my community and its impact on my life, but this class has changed that a lot. Through writing projects I have been able to reflect on my community more and more, and have better realized how much of an impact my community actually has on my life. I feel like my skills of analyzing have greatly improved as I have had to work to analyze how certain things impact my community differently. I think it has helped me appreciate my community more than I did before entering this class.
One piece that I wrote this year that I believe greatly helped me grow in my skills of considering the impact of the community on my life was the community response paper we wrote. La Paz Mexican Restaurant, A Lincoln Staple was a piece I constructed as a reflection of the impact of a local restaurant within the community. This piece, in my opinion, was a wonderful example of developing a celebratory and critical perspective of my community. My reasoning for this opinion is because this piece was constructed in a format of a restaurant critic review. The purpose of the piece was to critic and celebrate the location and its impact on the community as a whole. I feel that this piece did an excellent job of this in both critiquing La Paz’s impact on the community, and also celebrating its positive impact on the community of Lincoln and the people within it.
Along with celebrating and critiquing the community through a piece of writing, I have also worked to consider how a place influences a person. This idea is something that I often don’t think about, but I have to say, going through the writing process of “A Day on the Water” helped me consider even more how a place can influence a person. In this piece of writing, I worked to reflect on how a pond and an experience within a small community helped to influence me. The experience helped me appreciate nature and the beauty within the community I live in. Writing this piece in particular really opened my eyes to how much a single place and event can really influence my opinion and perspective of my community.
One area of the “community” reflection that I had little to no experience in before English 4 was “Learn how to address issues as you learn about them in your community.” Before this year, I have had little to no experience in coming up with solutions to problems within my community on my own. But through our Social Action Research Paper I have grown in many ways. This research paper helped me realize what problems are evident within my community and it has taught me that anyone can do something to help. It was important for me to realize that just doing something to help an effort to improve the community is better than none. And through researching a problem like a lack in blood donations and how to solve it locally greatly benefited my skills in addressing issues within my community. Another point I would like to make is that this paper helped me in one main area. It taught me that the topic I was researching, blood donation, is in fact a problem within the community. Without doing proper research as a part of this paper, I would have never learned that a lack of blood donations was even a problem for our community.
Through my restaurant critic’s review on La Paz Mexican Restaurant, my poem entitled “A Day on the Water”, and my social action research paper, I have grown in many ways. I have learned to look at my community in many different ways. And learning to look at my community in these ways has definitely helped me appreciate my community much more.
Elijah's English 4 Blog 