14th About the End of this Semester

It is almost the end of the semester. I am very happy and also kind of sad about this.
I am very happy because I learned a lot of thing during this semester's study, either in the ESL's writing class or in my other academic courses. I am very happy that I could get a approximately 3 weeks break after this whole semester's study. I am very happy that I could go back to China again in just one week, and I could see my families and many of my dear friends who did not choose study aboard like me.
However, every has two sides, I still have something not very happy at the end of this semester. Firstly, I think I didn't do my best in all my courses. I think I couldn't get a very good grade in my Plant Biology's class because I didn't really tried my best. I thought this class is so hard, and I kind of gave up at the very beginning. This is sooooo bad. Besides, I am also sad about that I may not going to see everyone in my writing class so often in the future. We have a very big campus here, and I know when we don't have a same schedule we can know see each other usually. I will miss all of my classmates.

13th About Procrastinate

Procrastinate, which means to put off intentionally and habitually -- from Merriam-Wabster online dictionary. The first time I heard this word was last year when I was taking the ESL level-3's courses. When the instructor presented and explanined this word to us, I immediately felt that this word is just describing me. I always like to do my homework at the very last minutes. This is really a problem bothering me. I sometimes couldn't finish my homework just because the procrastinating and although I finished my homework most times, they were not in a very high quality. I really need to change this bad habit especially in this important time, the final weeks.
Here is what I am gonna do for my nettlesome bad habit. First, I am going to make plan for the next every evening. I am gonna strictly following the plan I made. Secondly, I need to stop playing computer games immediately and stop watching TV shows every night. Lastly, I need to fellow all the above plans. I know this will really works.

12th The Final week is coming

How fast the time goes!!! It is already the last regular week of this whole semester! Just back from the Thanksgiving break, we need to get back to study immediately, cause the Final Week is coming!
Next week we have our last new stuff leaning week, than it is the time to test how good we have learned so far. I need to review all my courses in the next week in order to get a good grade in the finals. I have got three finals in the final week and a writing placement test. I have a lot stuff need to review in the next week!
Although the final week is kind of a bad thing, what make it not that bad is right after final week is the winter break which means I can finally go back to China to meet my family and my friends! This is so exciting! Fight for the Finals!

11th About the Thanksgiving

Finally the Thanksgiving is ended. We got back to school and return to study again. I had a really grate thanksgiving. I went to Washington and met several old friends. We went to many famous places like "The White House", "The Pentagon Building", Georgetown, and many other places in the day time. When the evening comes we went back to our hotel and play some card games. We had a really good time there. I already missed my friends even that I just came back from Washington. I miss the days we visited many museums, I miss the days that we play games together, I miss the days that we tried many different type of restaurants and "enjoy" many special foods. I really miss the days in DC, and I hope we can meet each other soon again, although I know that is really impossible.

10

Thanksgiving is coming!! This is a really good news for me. lol
I planed to go to Washington DC during this thanksgiving holiday. I have plenty of friends will go there meet together just one week later! I will meet my good friends soon. I am really excited about that. Some of them I haven't met since last year. I missed them so much. We already made a nice plan about what we are gonna do at DC. We even decided to go to a French restaurant to have a thanksgiving dinner there. We planed to have a traditional turkey dinner plus some amazing French dishes. I am really expect to have a grate dinner with them. Hoping the Thanksgiving comes sooner!!

9

Last week, we had our first essay dued already, and we begun our second one. I think the second one is pretty had. It is about that if a person could become a hero through sport. When I first saw the topic I thought it was easy. Because I like sports and I know a lot of sports stars. However, when I started wrote about it. I felt that I did not even really know what a hero is. I could hardly get any heroes in my mind when I just started. I felt MLK is one, but I thought a real hero in my mind must be someone who is perfect, and don't make any mistakes. But actually I knew that MLK had some kind of scandals when he became famous. I noticed that really, no one could be perfect. Everyone could make mistakes. A hero in a real world is a real person. He/she is not superman/superwoman or something else. People make mistakes. Than I suddenly noticed that a hero is just some who is really grate and did something that no one else could ever done, of course in a positive side.
This is basically what I felt when I got my second essay's topic.

About a famous chinese rapper

He is a great Chinese rapper. He is an ABC. He won a lots of rap battles in The U.S, even many black rappers could not beat him.

He is respected by even some professional American rappers. He is a legend. I think the most famous thing he did is he write the song, "Open Letter to Obama," to support Obama in the election, he wrote it he sang it and he put it on internet. The song become very famous, and one day he got an E-mail from Obama’s staff.They said tanks to MC Jin and than few months later, one week before the Obama’s New York speech, they connected him again. They asked him if he wanted to rap for Obama and introduce Obama before his speech.Of course he said yes, and than thousands and millions people saw him on TV and on internet. He became much more famous than before.

I heard him from my friend’s chat very long time ago. But I just listen to his song from a few weeks ago.I loved him just when I first heard his song. It was great. Than I watched a lot of his battle and concern videos.They are amazing. Especially the battle videos, when he beat the other rappers, I am so proud of him. I think he is the first Chinese who can do this, and may be even the first Asian who did this.He won lots of rap battles and even many Americans becoming his fans. They might do not know a lot of thins about China, but they know MC Jin.

He is the greatest Chinese rapper at least in my opinion!

6th blog

We had our first muti-draft writing last week. It was about the Non-violence Social Change. The topic was pretty hard for me. I am not very familiar with the topic and actually I am not really interested in the political kind of things. However I can not choose the topic and I have to write whatever I got. So I read several articles about the topic either on the text book or online. It was really a lot of work to do. I had to read the outline about the article to check whether the article is talking about the thing I was looking for first. After that I still had to read the article carefully and clearly. I needed get some useful information from them and to create my own essay. It was had, but I finally finished my first draft.

On other classes, I got my second exam on plant biology last week. It was still very bad. I was so disappointed on myself. I really did hard this time, but I still got one important point forgot to review before the exam. It hurt really a lot. I got 7-9 problems wrong on that point. I was so sad. I know it makes the 4.0 more and more impossible now.

7th blog: Time writing

A Couple weeks ago we had our first time writing. It was really lucky that we got a prompt that was really similar to the one we got in our writing class. I chose the one similar to our practiced one without doubt. I didn't even thought about the question a lot and started writing. I noticed that was a really stupid mistake when I got my score last week.
The reason why I started writing the question very fast was that I felt the prompt was really similar to our practiced on and also I saw that when Chris saw that question and act made me felt that was I thought was right. I feel that is really stupid. I should not ever do that in a real test. I should read the question carefully and think about it deeply. I am sad about the score I got and I also feel that I really have a lot work to do in the future. I should definitely practice more and read more sample essays more in my spare time.
However, what so lucky is that the time writing is not the major part of our grade, and we still have one more chance to make the time writing grade up in the second time writing. Hope I could do better next time.

5th Blog

I went to Chicago this weekend. It was a lot fun. I went to Chicago to meet my girlfriend. It was her birthday this weekend.

About her birthday, we went to Chinatown to have a traditional Chinese Sichuan hotpot in a famous Sichuan restaurant at Chinatown. It was really delicious. It was just like we used to have in China. After the great dinner we went to the theater watched a newest movie named The social network. It's talking about the founding process of "Facebook". It was really interesting. It made me even thinking about what I should do in my college. I notice that my college life was not that interesting or diverse enough so far.

There was an interesting thing happened in Chicago. I saw my friend who is living in the same residence hall with me in Chicago. It was so surprise to me. I even saw her three times in Chicago. Really interesting. The world is so small.

That's mostly what going on last weekend.

The Forth Blog

We learned about the MLA style for the last couple weeks. It was so complex. I found out that do some research in America is extremely difficult. The most complex part of doing a research is to do the cited list using some kind of style like MLA style. We have to keep some kind of guide book in hand, such as our Hand Book, in order to do the style without any little mistake. There might be a serious problem exist if we did not do it correctly.
Beside of the Esl221's class, in other classes there are a few exams coming in within the couple weeks. I did not do well in the PLB's first exam and I really have to work hard and do much better in the second exam, and I am having Mth132's second exam this Friday. I think that won't be hard if I finish all the homework before the exam. Fight!!!

The third One

We have already started the new semester for a month. I think I still haven't get use to the new semester's study.
Most times when I sit at my desk I always don't want to study. I like to do everything at the last minutes. I think this is really a serious problem for me. Also, I always couldn't concentrate on my study for a long time. I like to chat with my friends at the same time as I am doing my homework. This is also very bad for me. Like last night, when I was do the research for the "Coffee's benefits" topic. I was search the articles at the same time I was surfing on the Facebook looking at my friends' most recent news. This made me really not efficiency. I used my whole night to finish just one body paragraph's research paper.
I know I really need to change ASAP.

Reflection of the Class

On Monday we learned about how to write the essays' theme and the topic sentences. We wrote about several topics for practice and I noticed that we thought the outline is easy to write, but actually it is not that easy. We need think about the topic very deeply to make up at least three points we should talk about for the topic. Also we need think about the examples or supports that support our points. It is not as easy as it looks like.

On Wednesday we learned about three important tools we need to use when we write the academic essays. They are "summary," "paraphrase" and "quotation". I heard all of them before, but I did not know them very well. I noticed that we need to use quotation a lot when we write essay in future, that what I heard about before, but I did not know that how serious that will be if we do not use them when we copying other's words or opinions. We also did some practices for the paraphrasing. It is also not as easy as I thought. We need to change most words in the original paragraph. It is actually hard to do so.

In conclusion, after these two lessons I found out that writing is a pretty hard, or complex, skill to learn. I need be ready for the even harder things coming for me.

1st blog

1^st blog

This is the end of the third weeks’ study of this semester. We just met our kindness instructor Chris Stokdyk, wired last name though. I have not seen last name like this before, since I got here just 1 year. However, I guess he is a kind guy. He looks kindness and hope he can give us a good grade at the end of this semester. Lol.

Last week we had our first class with our “final” instructor of ESL221. He makes this boring class kind of interesting. He gave us several strange topics in the class than let us wrote and talked about them. He asked us “what is a brick wall?” It was really a wired question, honestly I never thought about it before. I just knew that what all bricks make up is a brick wall. This simple question really baffled me. After the discussion of this topic I got many ideas from my classmates and really learned something from my classmates’ opinions.

In other classes I got 3 quizzes last week and I even have 2 big exams next week. It is horrible. Too many study need to be finished by the middle of next week. I have to finish at least 100pages reading before the exams. Soooooooo bad.

Hope I can go through this week not to difficult. Bless me…..