Megan Monteith
EH 102
Professor Whitener
April 28, 2021
Final Reflection Essay
The past year at college has not exactly been how I had expected to be, but I had an amazing
time even with the issues of COVID-19 aside. I have learned so much and have made so many new
friends. I was happy that this course was hybrid, and I had the option of going to class, but I think online
learning has affected a lot of people, including me, mentally and physically. I am from Toronto, Canada
and came to UAB to be on the beach volleyball team, although right before I came here there was a
coach switch and I decided to opt-out of this semester for volleyball at the end of the first semester. This
was a big change for me as I had been planning to come here for a while to play volleyball, but I think it
worked out for the better. I do think my time this semester would have been slightly more eventful if I
did have the opportunity to engage in in class learning, and I hope this is something we can go forward
with in the future. I think this has been one of my favorite classes this semester and hope to participate
in more English classes in the future.
I found all the writing assignments this semester to be very engaging and enjoyable to write, as
my first semester English class was not to my liking. I think the submission of a rough draft with the
addition of peer review was very beneficial for my work. In my last semester English class, we just had to
submit a final draft of each paper and nothing else. I found this more difficult because I like to
procrastinate my work and the submission of a rough draft helped me to not complete the whole paper
in the last two days before the submission deadline. I also found the peer review to be very beneficial,
as it helped me to improve all my papers overall as I could hear some improvements from a different
source, rather than just myself. I also found it nice because without in person classes it is hard to engage
with my classmates and I found it helped to engage with them this way. For my final website I found it
was essential to incorporate the presence of multimodal elements, as it made the website more
Megan Monteith
EH 102
Professor Whitener
April 28, 2021
interesting and helped for people to understand the website better. On the website I used a variety of
different elements such as pictures, words, and hard copies of all my papers. I also made sure the
website was neat and easy to navigate, as I didn’t want it to be too overcrowded.
From the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester I have seen myself improve as a
writer in many ways as I explored new areas of writing that I had not tried before, or never really did
that often. I think the paper that had the most growth for me was the Opposing Viewpoint paper, as I
had never written something like this before. To be honest I thought it would be a lot more difficult than
it actually was because I really disagreed with the topic my group had chosen, and didn’t really want to
write it, but with more research on the topic my opinion did change slightly but I can't say my opinion on
standardized tests has changed completely. I think the rhetorical analysis was also a step in my learning
because I have only written of few of these essays before and with the help of Professor Whitener and
my classmates, my knowledge on this essay has improved a lot. I think from the beginning to the end of
the semester, I have improved in both these areas of writing greatly. I think in the coming semesters I
would like to improve on my knowledge of grammar in particularly my knowledge of commons and
things like run on sentences, as I feel I had this covered in high school, but I have not perfected it. I
would also like to improve my skills on citations, more specifically in text citations, as I think I could
possibly improve on this.
Overall, I think this year of learning has benefited me greatly, but this semester of learning has
helped me immensely. I have always been a fan of English and never liked things like math and science,
and my like for this course has grown even more after this semester.
