The importance of Making Smart Decisions

Senior year of high school , I was taking an Advanced Placement Statistics course so that I would get prepared for college mathematics. I had to wake up at 6 every morning , from Monday to Friday, to get to class on time at 7:30 am. Many of my friends were also taking this course. I had a very close relationship with my Statistics teacher because I would always do my work and I would do well on exams. Everything was going perfectly fine, until one day I decide to do something I had never done before.  Cheating for one of my AP Statistics exams made me discover a part of me that I  didn’t know existed.

It was the month of November, a cold and dark Monday morning. An annoying alarm clock woke me up at 6 am. I opened my eyes slowly and got up to look outside the window. There was no movement , my neighborhood was covered by darkness . The outside view discouraged from getting up , but I had no other choice . I had to get up. That day I had to take an important AP Statistics exam. I got up, washed my face and brushed my teeth. I got dressed up under ten minutes because I wanted to go early to school to review for the exam. Walking to school all I was thinking about was getting a good grade on the exam. When I was halfway there, I get a call from my best friend Martena . She asked me to meet her at the school cafeteria so that I would help her with a question she had for the exam. We met and I showed her what formulas to use for T and Z tests. In statistics , different tests are used to determine if the means of two or more datasets differ from each other . It’s important to know which formulas to use when doing the different tests in order to get a correct response. After I helped her , I used the time left to review for the exam. I was feeling smart ,and ready to ace the exam.

The bell rang, it was time to go to class. Martena and me decided to run up the stairs so we wouldn’t waste any time. We sat down , patiently waiting for the tests to be administered. Our teacher handed out the exams and suggested that we start as soon we got them. The exam consisted of 20 multiple choice and 3 short response problems. The first thing I did when I got the exam , was looking at all parts to make sure I knew the content. I thought I was going to do very well because it first seemed like the exam had problems that I knew how to do. I did the multiple choice in twenty minutes because they were easy for me. I had twenty-five minutes left to answer the short response questions. The short response questions were challenging and although I was trying to solve them , I wasn’t able to. My confidence started to fade. All of a sudden I got frustrated , my heart rate increased and my brain went blank. Without even noticing , I had ten minutes left to finish the exam. I didn’t give up and continued to work on the problems but still failed to solve them. When time was up, many students asked the teacher for more time because they hadn’t finished . Our teacher was generous enough to tell us to come back at any time that day to finish up .

I had economics next but my mind was on the exam. All I was thinking about was how to solve the three short response questions. Many of my friends looked up the problems online and found the answers. Martena decided to put the answers in the calculator so when she would go to finish the exam , it would be easier for her to cheat. She suggested that I do the same thing. She told me that she had done that many times and that the teacher had never noticed. Without giving it a second thought, I decided to cheat also. I wanted to get a good grade for myself but also for my teacher. Certain students are always expected to do well on exams and I was one of them. We went together to finish the exam. When my teacher was giving me the exam, I wasn’t able to look at him in the eyes and my face was very red because I had never cheated for an exam before. I finished copying the answers from the calculator and left.

It was time to go home but something wasn’t feeling right. Instead of having a feeling of relief , I started feeling worse. There I was , an eighteen year old girl, heading to college soon , doing something a childish teenager would do. I was going to get credit for something I hadn’t done , just to get a good grade and to please my teacher. In my mind, I was calling myself all sorts of names; a failure , a liar ..everything I would think of at the moment. I was in the hallway at school,  trying to figure out what to do. After an hour of thinking , I decided to go and tell my teacher that I cheated on the exam. I knocked on the door , feeling afraid about what he would tell me. He greeted me and asked why I had come. I told him what  had done with tears in my eyes because I felt ashamed of myself. He tried to comfort me and told me that he had noticed that many students had looked up the answers because they hadn’t shown any work. My teacher explained to me that he was  going to give zeros to all students who had cheated but because I was honest with him, he was going to consider my multiple choice section .I thanked him and happily left to go home.

I had thought that cheating for my AP Statistics exam wouldn’t have any effect on me. Others were doing it so in a way it didn’t feel wrong at first. What I discovered  about myself that day was that under pressure, I tend to make quick decisions that will give me unwanted results. I have learned that it’s better to be honest with yourself and others so that afterwards you don’t get  a feeling of guilt. The best thing anyone can do before making decisions is to think about the long term effects that decision can have. When making a decision it’s important to listen to yourself because others may mislead you.

SELF REFLECTION

When I was assigned the identity narrative , my mind was constantly thinking of what experience would fit the assignment. When I knew what I wanted to write about , I made an outline discussing  the main points that would be included in my essay. In my introduction I wanted to give the audience the purpose of the essay , without revealing too much information about the story . For my body paragraphs I was thinking to introduce some background information about myself and then getting to the main event that had an impact on my identity. In my conclusion I was planning to sum up all the information that I had written about throughout the essay. The outline helped me organize my thoughts and expand my ideas. From there I was able to write my first draft. When revising my first draft, I saw many flaws such as grammatical and punctuation errors. I also noticed that I didn’t have good transition sentences when going from paragraph to paragraph. I fixed most of the mistakes and I wrote another paper. I read my second draft and decided to remove some unnecessary words that would confuse the readers . I thought of simpler words that would make the readers understand what I was trying to say. I thought I was done with my essay but when doing peer review in class , my group members noticed that I had many run on sentences and that my thesis wasn’t’ clear. When reading my essay I wasn’t able to see these mistakes but their input helped me recognize these flaws.

In every essay there’s a rhetorical situation to be addressed . Rhetorical situation refers to the writing’s genre, exigence, purpose audience and context. Identity narrative essay was the genre of the assignment. It’s exigence was to portray one experience that has had an impact on my identity. The purpose of the essay was to help me recognize how  a certain situation can shape my personality and for the readers to visualize and understand the event. All writing pieces tend to appeal to an audience. Although bullied people would feel more connected with my essay , I wanted to target a general audience. The context illustrated one important situation that helped me grow as a person. I tried to address every element in the rhetorical situation but doing so was difficult. I had to discuss one experience in my essay but I ended up writing about my whole schooling experience . Going from one thing to another came so naturally for me. Writing about my whole schooling experience made the readers think that the essay was about many experiences instead of one. Readers were left puzzled trying to connect the many experiences to understand their meaning as a whole. Instead of developing one experience throughout my essay, I mentioned many experiences which made the essay focus on many events.

The course learning outcomes are what I have learned writing this assignment and how I have developed skills that will help me in writing future assignments . Writing this essay was a challenging process but in this course we were assigned to read two readings that helped me know what a good essay consists of. One of the readings explained how to make a good thesis statement and the other reading discussed how I can revise an essay. I learned that a thesis answers a specific question , expresses the main idea of the essay and needs to be specific and insightful . When writing a thesis statement it’s important to avoid asking questions because they make the thesis weak. Vague thesis statements can have a negative effect on the essay because the reader won’t know what you will be arguing in your essay. Revising is another important step because our first writing will have many flaws and to have a good essay , you need to fix them. There’s many different strategies for revising such as ; distance/time, reading aloud and  getting feedback. You need to distance yourself from a writing project in order to come back and review it with fresh eyes. Trying to revise a paper the same time you are writing it won’t give you time to rethink what you are saying. Reading your paper out loud, will allow you to see mistakes you haven’t been able to see otherwise. Revising before editing , will allow you to use time wisely because if you fix small mistakes before revising you can end up deleting an entire paragraph and therefore wasting a lot of time. Getting feedback allows you to hear another person’s perspective on your writing.

We were assigned two readings for homework, a fiction and a nonfiction piece. These two readings helped me explore different genres and analyze writers at different time periods. In class we had a class discussion identifying the rhetorical situations in these readings .In  class we also did peer review . We exchanged essays with our group members to get their opinion on our writings. Some criticized  about what needed to be removed or added and others made comments about parts they liked. Peer review helped me see where my mistakes were and also helped me analyze what a paper need to have to keep the readers engaged . Peer review and class activities helped me become  a better writer. The readings about the process of writing helped me understand what needs to be included in an essay and how to use revision to fix flaws. Class discussion about the fiction and nonfiction readings allowed me to hear my classmates opinions relating to different parts of the reading. Last but not least , peer review helped me see many mistakes that I wasn’t able to see reading the paper in my own.

My first draft of the identity narrative  essay didn’t follow the assignments requirement. For this essay I wrote about a time was bullied in middle school. Instead of focusing in one experience and developing that experience throughout my essay, I ended up writing about my whole schooling experience. I decided to write about another experience for my final essay since I realized that I didn’t really remember the experience in detail. I was being vague and I was adding a lot of topics in one essay.