Thursday, October 4, 2012

Revision- My Life as a Student


          I have been a student when I was seven years old, and I have spent my life through elementary school, middle school and high school, all in China where I received Chinese style of education. When I was nineteen years old, I took the National College Entrance Examination in China which is called one of the hardest exams on earth. Soon after that, my life suddenly changed because I immigrated to the United States with my family. I then entered LaGuardia Community College, which is located in Queens, New York. Till now, I have spent more than two years in this college, and I love the days as a college student.
       The reason why I like LaGuardia is that it attracts students from different countries. They have different life styles and speak different mother languages. They study here for many reasons, and it is amazing for me to understand their cultures and to know their stories. I have changed a little bit than the one I was two years ago. When I was in the campus for the first day, everything looked new to me and the biggest barrier for me is language. English is so much different from Chinese, and I felt very nervous at the beginning when I started studying at LaGuardia College. I’m afraid to speak in public and I had a hard time to understand the course. I took ESL class first because only I passed the exam, I could take my major request classes. At that timeI met a very nice professor. She is an amazing lady with white curly hair. I really enjoyed her teaching style because she spoke very clearly, and encouraged us to ask questions in the class. I was embarrassed and nervous at first since I couldn’t even speak a whole complete sentence in English. Usually, I sat in the back of the classroom. My ESL professor noticed that so she put me in a small group in which all the group mates were from different countries. We were all new students and couldn’t speak fluent English. Every group mate worked and tried their best to explain their ideas, and so did I. For example, one day the professor let us discuss one of our favorite movies which was made by our mother country. We have four students in our group, from Korea, India, Mexico and China respectively. The Korean student’s favorite movie is about the family relationship in Korea, which is much more different than the most American family. The Indian student shared his loved movie which talks about the Education system in today’s India society. The Mexican student said that his favorite Mexican movie was all about singing and dancing, because most Mexican people like singing and dancing. As for me, I shared a movie which helps foreign people understand the Chinese history.  It was a great experience that all of us shared our favorite movies and I learned my group mates’ cultures from the movie that they described. As time went by, I knew more and more countries’ culture; moreover, my spoken English was getting better and better. At the end of the semester, we stood in the front of the class and began our final presentation with confidence. I couldn’t believe my English improved so fast in that class.
I feel much more confident now since I got a lot of “A”s in my classes, and I made a lot of friends in the college. Through course studies and daily communicating with teachers and classmates, I have improved my English skills a lot. This semester is my last semester to study in LaGuardia, because I will graduate and transfer to a four-year-college. Queens College is my dream college because it has a great campus and their education major is the best in the whole CUNY schools. I wish I will earn more knowledge in Queens College. Now I have confidence about my future and I’m sure I will have a better life in the four-year-college.

1 comment:

  1. Ok, it's good that you gave us more detail in this revision but then you must consider other parts of the writing process: Perl's concepts of retrospective and projective structuring. Your current middle paragraph is a HUGE chunk of unbroken text. That is a bad thing. It should be broken up into at least two paragraphs. You'd have to figure out how/where to do it. Essays are visual as much as anything. The reader needs some space. So where to break it?

    A good rule of thumb: whenever you have a major shift in topic or perspective, it's time for a paragraph break. Try to develop a deep internal sense--a felt sense--of when you are shifting, or, when you have a huge chunk of text, re-read it with your heart/gut looking for something that feels like a good emotional or intuitive place to create a break. And learn to hit that "enter" or "return" key when the feeling comes over you. A shift is a paragraph. It's a little bit lie the line break in poetry.

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