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Ellen Cohn

Self Evaluation

12/20/2013

Play in the City

End of the Seminar Self Evaluating Essay

            I talk a lot. I am just a talkative person, and a lot of the time, this means that I end up dominating a conversation. I know this about myself, and so throughout this seminar, I tried to not participate quite as much as I normally would have. I still believe that my class participation was above average, but by taking some extra seconds to think about what I wanted to say, and sometimes vetoing the idea of saying anything at all, I felt as though I contributed even more to the class discussion. In most group dynamics, I tried again to fight my instinct and let someone else take charge. I am generally the person who assumes a leadership position and organizes things, but here I really tried to listen to others and share ideas when needed or inspired.

            By listening more and talking less, I was able to be more influenced by my classmates. One fellow student who I felt really helped me was Tomahawk. There were a few times throughout the course when the two different sections of “play in the city” met up, and we were placed in writing groups with students from the other section. When we were working on our second essays about Zadie Smith’s NW, I was in a group with Tomahawk, and she really helped me as I tried to figure out what I was going to write, and how I was going to structure it. I really appreciated her ideas. She helped me get out of the writers block (or as I put it, the “existentialist crisis of my essay”) and find a new plan for my essay.

            This course helped me become more comfortable writing three page essays. I used to get a shiver down my spine whenever I was assigned an essay longer than a page or two, but now I feel very good about my ability to write a three page essay (even with a short amount of time, as sometimes I would have to write about an event that happened on Saturday, and the writing would be due on Sunday). I would also consider this to be an edge of my learning, though. This course had us write more essays than any of my friends’ Emily Balch Seminars. But all of the essays we wrote were similar. I feel like if we were assigned one slightly longer research paper, rather than just the immense amount of three page lens papers, it would have helped to smooth out the learning edge, and it would have made me feel more comfortable with the term papers and such that are still to come in my college career.

            This course also required a lot of reading. Sometimes I grew very frustrated because juggling the Bryn Mawr course load is difficult, and the reading was just sometimes too much. This forced me to prioritize and skim (or a few times, not even read) specific pieces. When I did this, I found myself less prepared for the class, and I did not like how that felt. But, this is a valuable skill for college; being able to prioritize which work you have to do, and which readings you can simply skim is, so I’ve heard, going to be a repeating theme for the next four years, so I guess it’s good that I’ve been exposed to it.