Reflection

After completing all three of my major assignments I have discovered that my number one problem is connecting the topics of leadership and community service. Severl times, I make the point of how leadership is derived from service learning, but then I don’t really go on to discuss the connection. Its sort of like there is a sudden disconnect within the essay. When I think about it it makes sense in my own mind, but I fail to realize that the audience doesnt even know what I'm talking about. I have realized that I need to logically walk my audience throughout my entire argument in order for it to make sense. Because I already know what I'm talking about I don't need to explain anything; however, for an outside spectator it is much different. I have realized that I must always assume they know nothing about the topic to begin with, and go on from there

Research Genre

After researching my genra online and seeing all the various community service groups that have been created I have come to the conclusion that anyone can perform community service. Anyone can write about it and anyone can have an opinion on it.

I found all types of ways which people have performed community service groups. Some of these include...

• Individually- where there are community service oppurtunities offered and students can sign up for them or just show up whenever they please. These are very flexible for those with a busy schedule. I found a list of these on the VT engage website. They range from helping out at animal shelters to tutoring other students.
• Groups with a common cause- I found the alumni association on the Virginia Tech website. Their mission is to "promote welfare of the university by cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship between Virginia Tech and its growing worldwide community of alumni". Evidently, they have a single purpose which their service is geared toward, and everyone has something in common, they are all Hokie alumni
• General Community service groups- These groups are made for the sole purpose of helping others. They help anyone in need of all age groups. These groups are usually more flexible in who they let in and are also larger.

Clearly, there are many types of different ways someone can perform community service, and it something that everyone can do.

INITIATING ACTION revised

I emailed the head of my prior community, Exploring Leadership at Tech Program, and requested whether or not I could advertise the projects we were work on in that specific program to the entire campus. She replied that I could; however, students needed to find their own form of transportation. As another aspect to my intiating action project, I have decided to put up flyers advertising the projects were perform in this group and other community service groups I am in order for other students to get a chance to become involved. I will advertise that any student can join, and I will even attempt to make a group out of those students that decided to become involved. Essentially, my job is going to be to organize community service projects and advertise them on campus through flyers or emails. Hopefully it will work.

My specific audience include those students on campus who want to get involved but don't know how. And my genre is community service for all students, not just those that are present in groups.

My Initiating Action

One consistant problem that I see with my community is the ability and outlet of getting involved. Although community service is a major part of Virginia Tech, many students find it hard to find things to get involved with. Usually they have to go through many websites and flyers until they can find oppurtunies to perform community service. The origin of this problem comes from two issues....

1) Many students want to perform community service, but in order to do so they usually must apply to a certain group. Additionally, most of these groups are closed and only accept a limited amount of people (not a majority of the students). This discourages people from joining.
2) As an individual it is hard to find big projects going on, unless you are involved with some sort of group.

My solution is to contact several different community service groups, as well as the listserv that sends out e-mails to all the students across campus, and ask them to advertise their community service projects that they perform and allow other students to join. I am also going to contact the coordinators of social groups across campus and suggest they publish a manual of some sort at the beginning of the year, which they hand out to all the students, to inform everyone of how to join clubs and become more involved. Hopefully, with more contact more students will want to get involved.

INITIATING ACTION

1) First I found the VT engage website, which encompassed all the major community service groups on campus. It provided information on them, how to join them, and what projects they were working on currently. It was very informative, and was more logos than anything else. It did not really appeal to the emotion of the audience, and was simply a list of links so it didn't really have an author's persona. It was very organzied and was very easy to maneuver. Ultimately it encouraged students to get involved in community service and provided outlets for that. Even if they wanted to do it individually, there were individual log in hours on the website as well.

2) The second thing i found was an excerpt from a magazine called techdirections. The article was titled "Linking Service to Learning". It provided a background of what service learning was and why students should get involved. It provided logo with statistics of undergraduates getting involved, and pathos through pictures.

Response to Final Draft Comments

The comments that Ms. Scott provided were very helpful. First of all they assured me that I was on the right track, which was a relief. They also brought to light some things that I hadn't thought of and that my peers have not commented on yet. They include....

1) The connotation of the word service-learning. When I referred to service-learning I meant to refer to service as a whole, not just in the classroom. Ms. Scott told me to use a broader term known as "servant leadership". I also have to work on actually defining and specifically stating my definition of service for this particular essay.

2) The generalization of my essay. After reading the comments I realized that my arguments were based on broad concepts and not on specific examples from the community. I think I need to work on taking specific instances to make my arguments stronger.

3) That my introduction and conclusions were sort of contradictory. I did not mean to establish a point of community and continue on to discuss the importance of one leader. I meant to describe the derivation of many leaders out of one community. I need to further explain this, again, with more examples.

Ultimately, I think I need to work on taking specific issues to support my arguments instead of basing them on broad generalizations.

Peer Revisions

The revisions for my essay really helped when working toward a final piece. They made me realize that I didn't have a clear point in my essay. I was jumping around between three different topics and I never really related them together. I just assumed that people could see the connection. I can fix this by working on my transitions between paragraphs. I need to explain myself more and how I get from one topic to the next.

Before I discussed that the risk I was taking was that the beginning of my essay was completely different from the end. I failed to correctly do this on final draft, but I now think I know what I have to do. I need to add cohesion to my essay by explaining the relationship of each and every one of my topics. Additionally, I also need to work on some grammitcal errors and specific structural issues in my sentences. I saw the some of them seemed completely illogical, but made sense while I was writing them.

Over all the advice was really helpful and I am using all of it!

Group Work

I have been assured by my group that the constant evolving in my essay is actually good. The essay starts out really broad then ends at a very specific point. I was worried about this before but now I can see how it will work.

Revisions

I am currently revising my "shitty first draft", and i've decided that the part that i need to work most on are my transitions. I have my ideas out there, I just need to sort them out. Right now it's just a bunch of jumbled thoughts on my paper, and I'm attempting to make it a little more organized so it makes sense to the audience.

I think the biggest risk I am taking now is that my essay constantly evolves from begining to end. The idea I present in the introduction completely shifts and changes in the conclusion. Not only are the arguments different but the topic shift a little as well. Hopefully it'll work out! Also my community isn't brought up as much in my essay

Essay Reread

After reading the two pieces on blackboard about essays, I think I may have grasped what an essay actually is. However, as described in Encountering the Essay there is "no satisfactory definition can be arrived at" on account of an essay. An essay is simply a reflection of ones ideas. It is comprised from a motivated author to convey their point. There is not an actual structure that someone must follow to ensure they have written an essay, but rather a reflection of ones own persona. The structure of each essay is unique and it is the authors job to create their own structue, formal or informal, to convey their ideas. An essay is created solely for the purpose of the author to express their opinions, and the reader must follow along. There are so many categories that an essay can cover so long as it is "personal, reflective, and leisurely.

Additionally, according to "Essayists on the Essay" the essay is simply nothing but opinion and observation. If you think about it this statement actually has a lot of truth in it. The writer goes out and observes something then thinks about a topic that relates to it that he/she can write about. They then develop an opinion on it and create a discussion. Essays are not judged on how well they are written, but rather how much passion about the subject the author has. With great passion comes great writing as an ideal essay is written by a person who "cares about what he or she's writing about".

After reading these two articles and going back and reading the blog a wrote about essays last week, I can say that my definition and outlook of an essay has completely changed. Before I wrote about the structure of an essay and its frivilous descriptions. However, now I realize that an actual essay doesn't need structure. It just needs a purpose, opinion, audience, and a truly passionate author.

Audience and Purpose

Audience: Students interested in Service learning, students who are leaders and involved in leadership activities on campus, and heads of leadership groups.

Purpose: Discussion of whether people are born leaders or if they have to practice leadership through service learning to become leaders.

I think my essay needs to be pretty formal because I am attempting to discuss an argument. I will start with an intro to my community and where it is derived from, as well as discuss service learning and how it is related to leadership as a whole at Virginia Tech. I will then go in to discuss both sides of the argument and sort of come to a conclusion.

RESEARCH PROPOSAL

I just got back my research proposal response and it was really really helpful. There were things that she pointed out that I didn't even realize or think to realize. Because I already knew so much about the topic I just assumed that others would as well. I think I need to make some more clarifications when I talk about linking service learning to leadership. I also need to explain myself without jumping to conclusion. Ms. Scott also brought up a good point about my organization, after rereading it I realized rearranging some stuff my make things more clear for the reader. Lastly, grammer. I am horrible at grammer and need to look at that once again.

I finally got an e-mail back from the person I interviewed with my second round of questions. I found out how much money the program needed exactly, and what specifically the money will go towards. I am going to incorporate this information into my research proposal soon!

ESSAYS

The Stunt Pilot by Annie Dillard is considered an essay wholely due to its ability to grasp the audience's attention and successfully keep it throughout the entire essay through minuet details that cater to different senses. It covers the natural anticipation of a human by setting a stage before the planes take off. She states that after the announcer had been "squawking all day", "now he quit", "the crowd stilled", and "children watched dumbstruck". As each line builds to create a picture of anticipation in everyone's minds in the scene, the reader becomes entranced as well. The author also combines words that unconventionally speak the truth in order to adhere to the reader's passionate side, as the scene was surrounded by "pure energy and naked spirit". As the writer describes these wonderful, adrenaline-filling emotions the reader can't help but to relate to these ideas. Lastly, the author surfaces such small details as if the audience were a passenger in the plane. She says that their "faces and internal organs trailed pressingly behind on the curves.
Gay Talese's Ali in Havana is an "essay" because of its incredible characterization. It is not simply characterization of each figure but rather a description of their relationship in proximity to the main character, Muhammad Ali, encompassed within the characterization. In addition, to justly decribing their looks, the author also chooses to include their mannerisms as Ali had shaky hands from "Parkinson's syndrome", and thus moved "quite slow". Talese then goes on to describe Yolanda, his wife, as a "large" and "pretty woman", but also slips in the fact that she "converted to Islam from Catholicism when she married Ali". Describing her in terms of Ali puts a bigger specturm on the story, as well as interconnects everything to the main idea for the audience. Gay does this again when describing Ali's first wife, Fraymari, as "barely higher than the midsection of his (Ali's) embroidered guayabera".

More Information

While I was writing my research proposal and such, I found that I needed much more material from what I gathered from my interview. I actually found that my interview was the most useful piece of information I had compared to the research I gathered from the library. It was based more on community service at Tech rather than nation-wide, which was very helpful. But after writing the proposal I found that I needed more information about how the program was funded and other stuff I didn't think of including in the interview. I e-mailed the person I interviewed about 3 days ago with questions I had, and hopefully she will respond soon.

Literature Review

Service Learning involves learning a variety of skills through the act of service, and allows students to learn by doing. It has recently become one of the most necessary and inspiring way of educating students through enriching their minds in a totally new perspective. In contrast to past years it has grown in abundance in high school and college, and traces of it have also been discovered in elementary school classrooms. Currently, 82 percent of all colleges across the United States offer over 7,000 undergraduate courses in service learning, further stressing its exponential growth in the learning environment.
Service learning projects have a wide scope that includes a variety of projects and acts that students can perform in order to gain an enhanced self-awareness and connection with the community. Some of these can go so far as to travel overseas to restore a village that has been torn down by disasters, or so little as to tutoring a neighboring or assisting the elderly. Service learning projects can also root out of a symbol such as recycling. Simply, take the idea and expand within a community; for example, starting a recycling program at a local elementary school.
Essentially, service learning provides students with meaningful, life-changing experiences that force critical thinking. However, the physical process of community service may almost fall short of the importance of the simple reflection after a student has performed the duty. Through reflection students are compelled to address the challenges and benefits of what they have done, as well decide what they have constructed of themselves after they have performed the service. Additionally, they have a chance to discuss and connect with others who have completed the same or similar projects.
Through implementing service learning within schools, leadership qualities will soon follow along. By getting students more involved with those around them and encouraging them to take initiative they will feel empowered; thus, promoting and surfacing their leadership qualities. Generally, this aspect of learning will benefit the students both academically, by leading them to see things in a whole new perspective, and socially, by practicing their social skills.
Evidently, service learning directly correlates to the development of leadership skills. Thus, it could be argued that if a student does not possess natural leadership qualities, service learning can aid in developing those skills. This can then further assert that through the law of syllogism the willingness of a student to become involved can indirectly build their leadership aspects.


Work Cited

Community Service Learning Makes Strides At California State University. Sacromento:
Hindustan

Times, 2005.
Moser, Jeffrey M. and George E. Rogers. "The Power of Linking Service to Learning." Techdirections
(2005): 18-21.

Pragman, Claudia and Brenda Flannery. "Assessment of Service-Learning Outcome: Examing the Effects
of Class Size, Major, Service-Learning Experience, ad Sex." The International Journal of
Learning. Minnesota: Common Ground, 2008.

Community Idea

On Monday I went to a seminar held on behalf of my community. The seminar consisted of panal of various leaders throughout the Virginia Tech campus, who performed very different things in order to become reknown leaders. Students could ask them questions about different community service and leadership oppurtunities across campus, as well as tips on getting involved. While the panel discussed their answers there was an interesting point that someone brought up: Whether or not people are born with leadership qualities or do they had to develop them through experience and practice? I thought this was interesting topic I could bring up in my essay and research.

Site Visit

I went to my site visit on Saturday afternoon with Alison Dunn, the head of Exploring Leadership at Tech Program. It was very casual and friendly as I began asking her questions in the Old Dominion ballroom in Squires. It was surprisingly really easy to talk to her as she gave me anecdotes about her life and job. I am also a part of the program so it was nice hearing feedback about it from her. It probably went on for about 30 to 45 minutes. I found myself coming up with a lot of questions on the spot that went with the flow of the conversation. I had no problem writing down everything she said because she spoke pretty slowly to accomodate me. I copied down a lot of good qoutes and received tons of useful information.

Interview Questions

1) How does this specific leadership/community service group differ from every other community service group on campus?
2) What do you expect students to gain out of joining this club?
3) What is the most impacting project this group has done?
4) How do you get students entusiastic about the program?
5) Do you know a specific instance where a student has grown out of joining this program? Explain.
6) What is the number one moto of this program?
7) Do students ever complain about the tasks they have to perfom? If so, why?
8) How has the program evolved since you first started working here?
9) If you could change the program in any way what would you do?
10) Did you come up with the idea for this program? If so, how? What were your inspirations?
11) How long have you been working for this program?
12) What is a typical day for you?
13) What is the toughest part of your job?

Course Goals

1) Be able to describe and focus on things specifically but also concisely.
2) Unload vague concepts that I bring up in my writing.
3) Have better, eye-catching introductions.

Football Madness

After checking weather.com everyone assumed that there was going to be a blistering storm of rain while our very own Hokies took on the team in purple. All the girls around me were wearing blue jeans with white t-shirts and techno-colored rain boots pulled up over their pants. Everyone was prepared for the big storm. Except, nothing came. There was no wet clothes or complaints of cold, but rather sun-burnt noses and rolled up sleeves. But once the maroon and orange team, dressed in white because they were home, scored the first field goal nothing else mattered.

Chants of "Let's go Hokies!" filled the stadium. Stomping feet and clapping hands overpowered any other feeling at the time. An obvious alumni dressed in all white screamed a string of derogatory terms that nobody could understand. Little children who were dragged along with their parents wore little football jerseys and cheerleading outfits, probably not even knowing what was going on. A man with a huge turkey hat would jump up and dance in front of the crowd each time we made a good play. Groups of guys would throw up girls in means of celebration.

While everything seemed to be driven by chaos and mayhem, everyone was there for one reason only, to support their team. It was the most organized pandemonium I had ever seen.

So many people had different ways of showing their spirit, from screaming at the top of their lungs and painting themselves maroon and orange to concentrating diligently on each play in silence. Regardless of how they expressed it, everyone in the entire stand had one thing in common-they were a part of the hokie nation.

"how do you know"

After discussing the questions in class (with able and thomas) we all generally concluded that everyone had the same answers.

We defined "fact" as a widely accepted opinion with enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

We also discussed that people can interpret the truth differently based on what point of view they are looking at and how they were raised. Many things can be seen in different lights.

Clarification

Hickory Vale Farm is the name of the neighborhood i live in. It use to be a farm, but over the years it turned into a neighborhood. The people who use to own the farm still live there, and everyone in the community knows about it.

Communities

• Redskins Fans
• Sprinters
• Soccer
• Hickory Vale Farm Resident
• Hokie
• Snowboarder (Whistler, Blackcomb)
• Langley Class of 08 graduate

Welcome

Hey it's Skye! Welcome to my blog. Feel free to comment whenever.