hani_backup | Got two papers (one Psych, one English) back today!

One was a draft for a psych class, that wasn't graded. I got a mixture of good and bad comments on it (bad meaning I wasn't clear or I had done something incorrectly). I should see the professor Tuesday morning in order to talk more about interpreting the results from SPSS. I thought we were going to look only at results of .05 level, instead of also 0.01, but I think that's incorrect. I may also have written the results for correlations wrongly, in APA format.

Then, switching to MLA format, I got back my first paper for my Science Fiction: Past and Present class back! :-D The only English/writing courses I've taken was English 190 (Borders & Bridging) Fall 2007 - ENG 190 is the lowest level English course and a prerequisite for other courses, just like Intro to Psych or Intro to Philosophy is for Psych and Philo courses - and Writing 100 (Our Animal Selves) Fall 2009. Science Fiction: Past and Present is a 271 Theory-Designated Topics course and when we first introduced ourselves and our majors and why we wanted to take the course, I was quite intimidated by other people. A lot of them are seniors or juniors who are creative writing majors or English majors (or double majors for some of them), or Journalism minor, etc. As the semester went on, I grew further intimidated because a lot of them had really insightful stuff to say, using the several theories of science fiction genre we've read and applying it to the short stories/books we've read, or just the more abstract and conceptual aspects of the books. I feel like my few points in class are more specific plot-oriented or characterization, and I'm still having a hard time looking "beneath" that surface, and seeing the book as a whole and connecting incidents, themes, motifs (that are not knock-on-your-head obvious) from various parts of the book together.

We finally got our papers back in the mailbox today. (We handed them in October 1 and we expected to get them back on Monday, after Fall Break.) I was pretty anxious about getting them back and checked my mailbox 3 times today before it was finally there! My professor wrote her comments on the last page, folded our papers in half, stapled it shut and wrote our names and box numbers on the outside. Man, I had a hard time resisting ripping the paper trying to get the staples off! (This was a 6 page page.) Anyway, I made several errors (wrong words, using past instead of present tense for fiction works, some mistakes in grammar -- grammar is the hardest part of any language for me), but most of her comments were encouraging, or rhetorical questions about some points, usually about a possible alternative interpretation, or taking it further. I wish she could have seen the full outline I had, because I had a lot more to write, but 6-7 pages didn't fit it all! I had to cut the third beauty that, ironically, would have answered a question my professor posed in her end comments.

I got an A!!! A full-blown A!!! Not an A-! I had this professor previously for my Writing 100 class, and I got an A- for that class and both essays and the presentation, so it really feels good to take a high-level English course and get an A on the first paper. It definitely helped to have written out an outline and a quarter-fleshed out essay to bring to the Writing Center beforehand. (And this kind of takes the sting outta getting a bad grade for the exam the same day the paper was due, since I put forth more time writing the paper than studying for the exam...)

Wheeeee!!!!