What I've Learned

I have learned quite a bit while working on this documentary summary paper.  One of the major things that I have learned is that writing a paper is about more than just getting a good grade.  I have never dealt with the "holistic" grading system before.  I think this system is better than just having a set rubric that is the same for everyone.  Grading this way gives credit for the effort put forth from the very beginning stages of the paper all the way to the final draft.  It will show your professor how much effort you have put forth to improve yourself as a writer from where your first draft started.  It grades you on more than just being able to write the way teachers tell you to.  It also grades you in your ability to understand why and how these processes are important and how you use them in your essays.

I have a few things I need to do to improve my summary project.  I know there are parts in there that are too long and can be left out.  I have a really bad habit of going on and on when writing summaries as I have mentioned in a prior blog post.  I also have a lot of past and present tense issues in my paper right now.  I was using past tense way too often, and now I need to change those past tense words to present tense.  I also think I might have analyzed the documentary in some areas where I should not be doing that at all in this paper.  I know for sure from quickly reading through some areas that I have run on sentences that can be shortened and or made into separate sentences.  There are also a few gray areas from the film that I might need to explain some more as well.  Overall I think it is a strong summary, but it isn't perfect yet.

Lewis' Parking Problem

Its no secret that Lewis has a HUGE parking problem.  My first class is at 8am MWF so I pretty much always get a spot.  I get to campus on those days around 7:40 just to make sure I get a parking spot in the lot I want to park in.  If I arrive any later than 7:50, there are literally no spaces left.  There is really only one good way to solve this problem, which is to build parking lots up.  What I mean by that is build multi level parking garages.  There really isn't a whole lot of room to build outwards for most of the parking lots on campus that I typically use.  The only logical thing to do is to go up instead.  I know they would be able to afford it with how much they charge for a parking permit, and how many students have to buy one.  So I say building up is the answer to all of our parking problems.

Documentary Summary Project

This weekend I typed a rough draft of our documentary summary project.  It was honestly harder than I expected it to be.  I chose the documentary film titled Who Killed the Electric Car?.  This decision was pretty much a no brainer for me because I am a huge car guy.  The documentary was super interesting, I didn't even know electric cars existed before the ones I have seen for the last ten years or so.  The documentary was about a hour and a half long and contained a ton of information, facts, and stories from a lot of people who were involved in the electric car field during the late 90's and early 2000's.  The hardest thing for me was trying to be concise when summarizing the documentary, because I tend to have a bad habit of rambling on when I write, especially in summaries, and with that being said I'll stop here.

Something that has really been bothering me lately is the ongoing disrespect and war on police officers in the United States.  Police officers make the ultimate sacrifice every single day to keep us safe.  They say goodbye to their families every day not knowing if that would be the last time they will ever see them again.  For people to be just killing random innocent police officers because they are upset about an incident that happened with another police officer is absolutely insane.  Taking that police officer's life when he had nothing to do with what you are upset about is the most cowardly act.  It actually disgusts me.  Now, I am not trying to sit here and say there is no such thing as a bad police officer, because there absolutely is and those officers should be punished appropriately, but the vast majority of police officers in this country are great at their job and their number one focus is to serve and protect the community in which they work.  I constantly try to find ways to thank police officers I see for their service, and I recommend you do the same, because they deserve to be recognized, not shunned.

The "This is Water" video really stuck with me after we watched it in class the other day.  It is a semi comedic approach to a real issue that everyone fights with on the inside from time to time.  The images and words spoken together really made the video interesting to watch and although it is a generally short video I found myself watching and listening attentively for every second it was on.  This video makes you understand the importance of just taking a step back from everything serious and think of things differently for a change.