Reflection Letter

                I am a mother of two girls, one in High School and one in Middle School.  I currently work as a Nursing Assistant.  I worked in the Construction industry since 1996, my ex-husband and I owned an Underground Utilities Company till the economy and a divorce forced us to sell.  Now with needing to find a new direction for my life to go, I decided to go back to school to pursue becoming a RN.  Fall 2010 I started my first quarter, and I took the CNA course and became a Certified Nursing Assistant and now I am taking my prerequisites for the Nursing Program.  I will admit I had no idea how difficult college was going to be.  I knew working and trying to schedule around classes was going to be challenging and also being away from home at night if I had evening classes, but the real challenge I soon found out was in the school work.  I have done a lot of things and worn a lot of different hats in my life and had always excelled at whatever I really put the effort into, but school work was putting this to the challenge.  Going back to school has really made me have to look deeper within myself and find that last little bit of something at the end of the day.  I have truly seen this challenge as one of the best decisions I have made in awhile, as well as one of the most rewarding both academically and spiritually.  I have learned to see the hidden messages in the challenges, and in the overall adventure.

     My thinking in regards to how I view identity, community and tradition has absolutely been broadened.  I thought the exercise in writing what was in our wallets was a valuable one. This exercise reinforced my own beliefs that we are so much more than what is on the surface.  The one theme I learned the most on was community.  I have to say I really looked at community as where one lived; I never really looked outside the box on this topic.  In reading other classmates papers and postings in the discussion boards it was amazing how many different communities there are.  Previously I would have never looked at facebook, or other online chat rooms or even college as a community.  Tradition’s was a theme in which I enjoyed the most; one of the main reasons is that it is interesting to see what others consider a tradition.  I love to read about traditions that are not just the standard traditions we associate with the holidays. Traditions that have developed around spending family time together are the most valuable to learn from.

                In my collection of writing pieces this quarter I have chosen to include in my e-portfolio; are discussion board posting #1 in Identity titled “Just being who you are in High School, that is no easy task”, which shows my critical thinking skills, my Community paper titled “Communities Are No Longer Just Where We Live”, this is the paper that I submitted that in the end needed the most revision. For a writing that illustrated my awareness of audience and voice I have chosen Identity discussion board #2’s posting titled “How We Identify Ourselves”, and as my last piece to this collection I have chosen my Tradition’s paper titled “What Is For Dinner”, I believe this paper shows my progression into understanding the fundamentals of writing a college paper.

                I found this class to be quite the adventure in that I mean, in one assignment you feel you are headed in the right direction, and down a smooth road, and then with another assignment you are in rough and rocky terrain.  This class for me has been a great learning experience, and I have found that not only have I taken away the skills which I believe are necessary for writing different types of papers, but I now find myself checking and rechecking my emails for proper use of terms, and punctuation, and analyzing the content to make sure that what I wanted to say is what is being conveyed.