Week 08! - Journal

I felt like it is the beginning of a new chapter of my life after eight weeks' time with “Academic literacy”. Even though it was very much challenging, I am completely delighted with all of it. I learnt so many new things throughout this period of time. This helped me very much in my college life and to work more effectively with the subject. Firstly this helped me to find what kind of a learner I am. This helped to change the flaws and to correct my misapprehensions.

 I learnt many new things.I wrote many journals and many portfolios. This helped me to improve my style in writing for academic purposes. "TEEL" model was also very important. It leads us to the correct way of writing. When writing portfolios, I used many mind maps before writing. To make mind maps, we used the "Popplet" tool. It is a very user friendly tool, I would say. I can create many colourful mind maps as we like. www.vocabulary.com is my favorite site. I learnt many words from this. I can make lists and revise them. I can make sentences and make notes. Because of the quizzes they have I could check my knowledge in my vocabulary side. They give achievements according to my progress, so this makes it more interesting and makes us to take more quizzes. To annotate texts, I used www.diigo.com. It is some kind of a web highlighter. From this I could highlight any word and make notes in it. One of my favorite activities is commenting on discussion board.I could express ourselves what I feel about those threads. Listening to "TED" talks is also very much interesting. Some speeches motivated me and some gave me the courage. And from "ABC Radio national", I got to know many things. It gives many knowledge to me.

Eight week of time period changed my life style. I learnt many things about the language and improved my knowledge. This made academic literacy as my favorite subject.  I enjoy this subject. It is very much interesting. I think it is very good to have a subject like this with all the other engineering subjects.  It is mind-blowing.

                                         

All-American Biography

In this poem, “All-American Biography”, by Paige Buffington, she describes about a life of a young boy after his mother’s death. She describes how desperate the boy was after his mother exited the world. “The things he did when she left him. He arranged blackened bones of dead horses into mother shapes long song, gallons of gasoline outside the door. Flowers pushing themselves through snow” (buffinton,2015) These were the lines which touches my heart. It shows how much isolated he was. Those were the things he did when she exited the whole world. He orchestrated darkened bones of dead stallions into mother’s shapes. The writer states how much the kid misses his mom, and the amount his mother cherishes him. He even remembers how his mother taught him to stroll in his more youthful days. The writer shows about the affection between the mother and son and how powerful it is from this poem. 

Samaritan

The novel extract from “Samaritan” by David Corbett describes about a young girl who has been helped by a bandit.  This villain’s heart melted for this eight year old young girl and rescues her. He takes her to a diner and drops her to a woman to spend the night safely. Even though he is a villain he helps the girl. He was being a Good Samaritan in this situation. The Samaritans were people who lived in the northern kingdom of Israel. “Good Samaritan” is a parable told by Jesus and is mentioned in only one of the gospels of the New Testament. According to the Gospel of Luke (10:29–37) a traveler (who may or may not have been a Jew) is stripped of clothing, beaten, and left half dead along the road. First a priest and then a Levite come by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan comes by. Samaritans and Jews generally despised each other, but the Samaritan helps the injured man. Likewise in this novel this villain helps the girl. So according to this novel, I feel that there are good habits in a villain like him too.