To whom it may concern,
My name is Ethan Cunningham. I am an 18 year first year student in college. All my life I hated school, primarily English. It was the first challenging that in my life that I could not grasp and excel at. I have done taekwondo, soccer, football, and even made the rank Eagle Scout but i couldn’t write a simple essay. It was always very hard for me because i really could never express myself on paper or even out loud. The subject has never been graspable to me and the frustration did not help. I found out that with frustration came the overload and eventually the shutdown. I just couldn’t do it. I would shut down and eventually fail the assignment. However, this year in English definitely helped me open up and add emotion into my work. I did breakdown, but I said to myself “I can do this” and picked myself up by the bootstraps and completed the assignments. Creating this portfolio angered me, frustrated me, made me hate myself, and eventually broke me. However, it also made me realize all the errors i was making and once i picked myself up, I managed to correct my mistakes on my essays and made them into works that i am very proud of. I am confident that I have excelled in English, and in school in general, after this semester.
My first essay that i chose to add into the portfolio was my “Place Proposal” essay. This assignment I feel was the best essay i have written this year. In this essay, I talk about adding solar panel walkways as a better means for my community to create electricity which would reduce the money being used. This saved money could then be used to repair roads and public buildings. I strongly feel positive about this idea and actually plan to bring this up to the town. Growing up in my hometown really makes me appreciate nature and I see the destruction that these businesses in my town are doing which makes me want to do anything i can to help.
My second essay i chose was my “Memoir” essay. This essay talks about my family and what i go through basically every day. I talk in this piece about the hardships i face in my household. I tell about my “solution” to fighting these problems. I tell about my daily routine to avoid the problem and i go into great detail which makes the reader picture the scene and picture themselves in that scenario causing them to feel the pain i felt. This piece is a very personal and emotional essay and when I was revamping this essay for the portfolio, I found the pain, the suffering, the emotions, and the questions and put it all into this essay. I chose this piece second because in formality, it is definitely not the best. But, I feel, it scores high numbers in emotion and in making the reader feel the pain i felt during the stories i told.
My final essay i chose to add was my “Shopping Ethnography” because i actually found this to be a very confusing and more of an “odd ball” essay. The goal was to observe and collect data of a business and their customers to report their behavior. I could not wrap my head around the objective. Regardless, I still feel that with the graspable parts of the objective I created a rather good essay and discovered the relations of people patterns and their personality.
English is probably one of the hardest subjects in school for me especially the essay aspect of it. There is no changing that for me. However, this semester has taught me a couple tricks here and there that can help benefit me in English and when writing an essay. One of those tricks is that you cant make an essay without adding passion. This class taught me how to channel my emotions and passions, and put in on paper. I will always be grateful for this class and will use what i learned this semester in all my other writing later in my life.
Thank you, Ethan Cunningham